Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja

Every year, the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York travels to a city somewhere in the world that is experiencing a revelatory form of stress. In January of 2006 the destination of the group was the small town of Nueva Loja in the Ecuadorean Amazon basin. At the time, a population of around 100000 was expanding exponentially. Nueva Loja was the fastest growing municipality in the country.