After the articulation between the SurLAB Research project, the LlactaLAB research group of the University of Cuenca for the research related to informal public spaces and the link with Minka SUR, an urban practitioner team. The project aims to join principal actors of the community, public and private sector to rethink and redesign a public park. Thus, funds are allocated for a pilot intervention, which allows influencing local public policy for the collective and participatory construction of (in)formal neighborhood parks. Baños was chosen as the first neighborhood where this collective intervention will take place. It consists of a social fabric that is dulled and weakened by the lack of quality public works. However, designs made by the inhabitants can be identified for the improvement of collective assets. At first, the pandemic has meant a distancing from relationships and activities in public space. Currently, it has served as a stimulus for the sum of community and political wills for the collaborative design and construction of a neighborhood park which allows generating community and recovering trust in the common space.

Baños, within its 327.3 km² of surface, doesn't have a recreational park to serve its almost 12,271 inhabitants. For this reason, neighboring communities and the parish government consider it urgent to build collectively public spaces that recover the sense of intergenerational community.

The participatory design process and active decision-making by the community, as well as the technical support, will allow the inhabitants of the Baños neighborhood to be empowered not only by the new spaces developed, but also by the learning and adoption process of capacity building implementation of several methodologies, tools and urban activations, achieving the scale and replication of these interventions in other places in the neighborhood. This participatory process allows people in their territory to be aware of their capacities in decision-making, as well as in the build back better processes.
A social process of participatory design fosters the consolidation of local leadership and stimulates the creation of new diverse intergenerational groups, integrating gender mainstream and intersectional approaches. This, in turn, allows to refresh the historical memory of the neighborhood and recover community rituals that value coexistence and respect among inhabitants, promoting safety, solidarity and diversity.
A participatory design process articulated to a public and academic institution, allows generating the necessary evidence of spatial physical and public management data that validates the relevance of the process and consolidates the necessary arguments for the formulation of public policies that prioritize participation and collaboration in the construction of public space and city. 

SurLab, LlactaLAB and Minka SUR, join together to pass the research results from theory to spatial practice. To meet the community we had a first reunion with the main assembly from the community, which was a good start to vision the project together. 
Minka SUR is an urban practitioner team which is related to the work in urban, rural and remote territories in Ecuador from the transdisciplinarity. The focus of the projects are based on the co-construction, development and strengthening of local capacities from the Social Production of Sustainable Habitats, through Action Research and the active participation of individual and community wills that are linked in our processes.
LlactaLAB Is a Research Group of the University of Cuenca, part of the Interdisciplinary Department of Space and Population. LlactaLab understands the city as a complex system of interactions between people and the environment they inhabit, with patterns and emergent properties that are strongly influenced by shape, structure and spatial distribution. They approach its study from a multidisciplinary approach, through deepening the study of various urban components such as built space, urban form, urban life, urban systems and, laterally, urban ecology, heritage and governance.
SURLab is a VLIR-UOS South Initiative Project 2020-2022 which tackles the challenge of triggering sustainable and resilient development through the co-production of inclusive public spaces in low-income, consolidated informal neighborhoods in Guayaquil (Ecuador).