Peace Promotion through Restorative Community Design: Five Case Studies in Latin America

Abstract

Representative democracy is in crisis worldwide, notably in Latin America, where governments struggle to meet public expectations, exacerbating frustrations due to socioeconomic instability, poverty, violence, inequality, and a perceived inability to address these issues. Disenchantment often leads to the rise of authoritarian regimes, where a minority dictates decisions, initially appearing effective but ultimately favoring those in power and neglecting the majority. Such regimes frequently disregard civil liberties and the rule of law, fostering criminal violence and societal upheaval. In response, we propose the Restorative Community Design (RCD) framework, which fosters participatory democracy values by empowering communities to design their spaces in which they live. This chapter explores RCD concepts and case studies from Buenos Aires, Celaya, La Paz, Lima, and Pichincha. The framework systematically integrates urban design, community psychology, sociology, and restorative justice to foster community engagement and peace promotion strategies. Ten lessons learned from these examples conclude the discussion.

Algo debemos hacer | We must do something

en nuestra comunidad | within our community

para que reine la paz, | so that reigns peace,

la dicha y la prosperidad | happiness and prosperity

Betsayda Machado y La Parranda del Clavo.

Tiny Desk, NPR, 02.16.2018

1. Introduction: there is no community peace without democracy

A central assumption underlying our work is that democracy cannot prosper without peace. To understand this statement, we clarify what we mean by democracy and peace. Democracy is a political system in which the voices and interests of the different individuals that constitute a society—that can range from a community to a federation of countries—are represented in the decision-making process. However, it is often the case that a multiplicity of diverse and even opposing interests are sought by distinct individuals/groups and dialogue is required to reach social agreements that are beneficial to most. Without dialogue, social agreements are impossible. However, dialogue can only occur in contexts of peace, within safe spaces. Unfortunately, literature has neglected to explore peaceful spaces, particularly in Latin America. This chapter understands peace at a community level considering the voice and action of community members. We argue that the development of peaceful spaces allows citizens to connect and share information, and ultimately it empowers them to develop possibilities to improve their communities [1].

It has been demonstrated that the democratic system in Latin America is in recession [2, 3]. In the next segment of this chapter, we discuss that representative democracy in Latin America has not generated peaceful environments that allow people to thrive. In representative democracies, the government institutions are responsible for creating an atmosphere in which the rule of law and transparency in the decision-making process leads to peaceful societies [4]. The essence of these institutions is to create and execute social agreements. However, it is often the case that the groups in power impose their interests and neglect the voices and interests of other groups that are marginalized.

A lack of consideration to the needs of marginalized culturally diverse groups in many Latin American countries has further prolonged these sociopolitical crises. Psychologically, these entrenched social crises often produce learned helplessness, which is an individual’s belief that they are unable to control and change adverse situations [5]. Learned helplessness is a response to adversity, powerlessness, and/or chronic trauma. In Latin American countries learned helplessness could translate into four general responses: emigrate, paralyze (e.g., depression or stress), street protest and riots, or seek messianic solutions in authoritarian governments. These responses are similar to the psychological reactions to traumatic situations: flight, freeze, fight, and fawn that are built-in defense mechanisms meant to help people respond to attacks, life threats, or stressful and traumatic situations [6]. However, most of these responses are only survival mechanisms; none of them work to restore trust, peaceful coexistence, and/or to empower them to gain control over their lives.

Given these problems, we have developed democratic decision making within peaceful environments in which dialogue can occur. Strengthening trust in democratic processes through community decision making is essential to conflict resolution. This chapter illustrates the Restorative Community Design (RCD) framework as a strategy to build local peace through the creation of community agreements based on engagement, participation, and negotiation while considering the needs and resources of different community members. After years of engagement with communities and local governments in 7 Latin American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru—the projects we have developed seek to overcome learned helplessness and mobilize community resources to build spaces for meetings, dialogue, and agreements that empowers them to reduce conflicts and increase human development in that specific community [1, 7]. For Guerra Pallqui [8], the restoration of communal organization, social sharing, and communal coping are essential for the return and reconstruction of communities that have experienced or are experiencing conflict and adversity.

This chapter explores the ongoing process of promoting community peace. We do not intend for RCD to be a silver bullet to address the multiple problems of a continent whose democracy is in crisis, but rather a strategy to build a sense of belonging and hope for communities that reside there.

2. Democracy recession in Latin American

Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean is in a critical state. According to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)—which has developed a democracy index that scores electoral process and pluralism, political participation, and civil liberties such as freedom of expression and association—there are only two full democracies in the region: Costa Rica and Uruguay—where only 1% of the Latin American population resides—while four countries are under authoritarian regimes: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The EIU Democracy Index scales from 0 to 10, ranging from authoritarian regimes to full democracies and has shown that democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean has fallen for the eighth consecutive year—from 5.79 to 5.68 [3]. The evidence shows that the democratic recession in Latin America is becoming structural.

According to Latinobarómetro Corporation [2], a non-profit organization responsible for surveying annual public opinion in 18 Latin American countries, this democratic recession can be expressed both in psychosocial dynamics, such as the preferences of Latin American citizens in favor of authoritarianism, and the factor of urban governance, such as the poor performance of the region’s governments. The evidence shows that the democratic recession in Latin America is becoming increasingly widespread, and authoritarian regimes are expanding. The Latinobarómetro team of social scientists explains that democracy is born on a community scale through the interaction between different stakeholders rather than at larger scales of civil society [2]. This interaction occurs in the urban realm to generate collective efficacy, allowing citizens to anticipate and plan what happens [9, 10]. Community agreements end up being a key element in creating democratic environments.

In his book Design for the Pluriverse, the Latin American theorist Arturo Escobar [11] demands the construction of an “alternative West,” which addresses the psychosocial, ecological, and spiritual particularities of those territories, such as Latin America, where the model of Western democracy seems to have failed. In this sense, we propose a “middle road” framework called Restorative Community Design as a competent cultural model that may have much greater potential to connect with contextual/ecological and psychosocial meanings [7, 12, 13, 14].

In the Journal of Democracy, Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán [15] delaminate the reasons for this democracy recession in Latin America. After a comprehensive analysis working with the V-Dem indexes for liberal democracy [16], they concluded three factors that explain why democracy is stuck in the region: the existence of organized criminal networks in Latin American governments, the threats to human rights in hybrid states, and the poor government results in most Latin American countries. After working directly with local governments in 7 Latin American countries for over 15 years, we argue that the last factor contributes significantly to strengthening the first two.

Certainly, the crisis of contemporary Latin American States is closely related to the existence of organized criminal states [17]. These networks have eroded global diplomatic practices [18] but have also permeated local governance [19, 20]. Likewise, there are criminal schemes that connect global businesses with community-level participation, as is the case of Cajas Clap (Boxes Clap, an acronym in Spanish for Local Supply and Production Committee) [21, 22], a mechanism for the distribution of subsidized food coordinated by the Venezuelan government. The affordable supply of products and services to underprivileged communities is one of the strategies of the Latin American hybrid states. States create pockets of efficiency that allow alliances with sectors of the population to consolidate authoritarian regimes [15]. In hybrid states, this authoritarianism generates social environments with a weak rule of law and a strong military presence [23], which ends up threatening peace at the community level.

However, despite these pockets of efficiency, the Latin American governments show poor government results. Latin America has almost three decades of high and persistent levels of income inequality [24, 25]. The United Nations report Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023 Unstacking Global Poverty: data for High Impact Action [26] explains that more than 30 million people experience poverty. These data encompass socioeconomic poverty, but if we consider the helplessness experienced by Latin Americans with little access to the opportunities that representative democracy should offer to thrive, surely the numbers could be much higher.

Poor government results contribute to the growth of criminal violence that jeopardizes community peace. In his work State and Criminal Violence in Latin America, José Miguel Cruz [27] analyzes how state agents contribute to the escalation of criminal violence in the region by tolerating and supporting the use of extralegal approaches to combat crime and disorder and by partnering with groups, criminals, and militias to achieve this objective. This phenomenon has been called by some researchers the Paradox of Violence when some states use violence as a mechanism to eradicate it [28].

The decline of democracy that has produced socioeconomic inequality and lack of representation in Latin America has also generated social and political instability, including several street protests. Peru has experienced recurring episodes of social unrest since 2016 [29]. In 2019, the Octubre Chileno happened in Chile, a country that was once the model of representative democracy and economic progress in the region [30]. Bolivia has experienced violent street protests due to possible irregularities of a non-legitimate and illegal occupation of the presidency, first and later due to the arrest of departmental authorities [31, 32]. In Colombia, streets have recently been the scenario of social protests against the tax reforms offered by the democratically elected government [33]. Social and political instability has already become a pattern in Latin America, which undermines peace at multiple levels,

Social and political instability also tends to generate learned helplessness in the Latin American population. Recently, one of the Chilean activists who attended one of the participatory design workshops (PDWs), which will be addressed later in this chapter, told us: “Chile was once a model of representative democracy and economic progress, today it seems that the way out of this crisis lies in Arturo Merino Benítez, the international airport.” In our experience, Latin America is a continent whose people use the sense of humor as a source to address their social conflicts psychologically, but the sense of humor can be a mechanism that freezes individuals in the face of what they cannot attend to. This joke, heard in Chile, that the way out of the crisis is in international airports, that is, in emigrating outside the continent, has been recurrent in several PDWs in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. As a defense mechanism, flight has also become a pattern in Latin America.

Certainly, the Latin American socioeconomic and political crises are also jeopardizing global peace as millions flee their home countries and emigrate into richer ones. Community displacement is a global issue; by 2022, 108.4 million persons worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or events that seriously disrupt public order [34]. In Latin America, the most dramatic case occurs in Venezuela where more than 7.71 million people—or about 26% of the national population—have migrated out of the country [35]. But the crisis of one country systemically contributes to the crisis of others within the same region; of those 7.71 million Venezuelan migrants, almost 85% have moved to other Latin American countries that are on the brink of collapse.

2.1 The vicious cycle of stuck democracy

An attempt has been made to demonstrate the three reasons emphasized that contribute to the democratic decline in Latin America: organized criminal government, hybrid states, and poor government results. Although these three factors are fundamental, not much research has been conducted between them and their psychosocial outcomes. It is argued that the poor results of the government can motivate people to feel disenchantment with democratic governments and experience learned helplessness, which can then translate into support for authoritarian populism, organized criminal networks in governments, and hybrid states.

In Latin America, authoritarian regimes are becoming increasingly popular, creating a phenomenon that may seem paradoxical: elected dictatorships. The recession of democracy generates a crisis in its institutions, and Latin Americans have stopped believing that agencies such as multinational organizations, local governments, or political parties can address their problems. It seems that a growing number of people are increasingly convinced that the only mechanism to improve their lives is through authoritarian regimes that present themselves as messianic to solve it all solutions. Often this belief is reinforced, the cases of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are examples of elected governments whose practices are close to autocratic regimes [2]. In the case of the latter, global figures seem to show signs of good governance [36]. Nevertheless, several scholars doubt that these autocratic decision-making methods that disregard human rights and community dialogue will be effective in the long run and fear that they could further erode democracy [37, 38]. Consequently, many societies seem stuck in a vicious cycle in which elected governments fail to accomplish sufficient socioeconomic progress which ends up exacerbating disenchantment and learned helplessness in the population that then moves to elect authoritarian regimes. Alarmingly, many of these authoritarian governments need the support of criminal networks to survive. It is not rare that drug cartels are often linked to government agencies. Furthermore, many authoritarian governments tend to become hybrid states as means to gain popular support from different communities. Unfortunately, often they end up supporting the groups in power and further marginalizing disenfranchised communities that are excluded from any political decision making. Authoritarian governments often amplify the breakdown in the trust that citizens have in governments which often exacerbates their learn helplessness which is reinforced by the lack of control they have to address daily conflicts. The proposal advanced here seeks to generate alternatives of hope, empowerment, and community mobilization through spaces for participation.

3. Restorative community design

In search of strategies to strengthen community participation within Latin American countries, the Restorative Community Design (RCD) framework was developed, which seeks to foster community dialogue in peaceful contexts through a multidisciplinary approach [7, 39]. RCD is a peace promotion strategy based on citizen dialogue and empowerment at different socioecological scales.

Through community participation they are encouraged to design their own spaces (e.g., buildings and parks) and create a plan to improve their spatial opportunities. As people voice their needs a sense of togetherness often develops. Furthermore, as more diverse voices participate in this dialogue more complex social conflicts can be addressed. Participatory design workshops (PDW) is a methodology that seeks to bring together different groups in conflict to achieve common objectives. The tool itself aims to generate social agreements that contribute to the promotion of peaceful democratic spaces at the community level.

Evidence to support the efficacy of RCD stems from a series of studies conducted between 2004 and 2014. Through the creation of multidisciplinary groups that included architects, urban designers, and clinical psychologists, a series of participatory projects were developed in the barrio of Petare in the city of Caracas, Venezuela. Petare is the densest populated neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere [40] with a proud tradition of self-governance. This tradition was epitomized in the construction of the Sports Park Mesuca which was designed by the community using RCDs tools. As the community more intensely participated in the design of their sports center there was a significant reduction in rates of violence in the community. The replicable methodology of the participatory design workshops (PDW) in the case of Mesuca was fully explained in the chapter From a Junkyard to a Peace Promotion Sports Park: A Transdisciplinary Approach [7], published by Springer in the book The Psychology of Peace Promotion: Global Perspectives on Personal Peace, Children and Adolescents, and Social Justice.

Subsequently, the PDW experience was adopted by the Petare Latam Foundation, an organization dedicated to the training of local administrations in Latin America, to build different agreements between community and local government groups in seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Some results of this experience will be described later in this chapter. In short, RCD integrates three approaches: participatory design, spatial opportunities, and restorative justice [41]. Each will be explained.

The first approach, participatory design, advocates for integrating people’s voices in decision making. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary that researchers have developed a trusting relationship with the community that is often only possible with long-term engagement that truly leads to work in participatory projects. From PDWs’ experience, we confirmed that open dialogues strengthen communities and increase the sense of ownership since a community’s specific voices and needs can be recognized and transformed into concrete and viable projects, giving them an active role in solving their conflicts and adversities [14]. For La Roche [42], one of the most effective ways to reduce violence in a community is to promote dialogue and collaboration between different groups with a common goal. In this case, the common goal is the physical transformation of public space as a tool for conflict resolution. The experience of working together with community members also demonstrated that daily stressors of violence, poverty, and inequality have their expression in the configuration of the space [43, 44, 45]. This chapter proposes that the structural transformation of physical space will positively impact urban ecologies, reducing the stressors that translate into trauma and social conflicts. Consequently, RCD requires a second conceptual framework: spatial opportunities, understood as the access to resources such as public spaces, educational centers, healthcare facilities, public transportation, and other resources that facilitate citizens’ integration into the urban exchange of economies, knowledge, and passions [40]. Urban ecologies are systems that offer—or limit—opportunities for its citizens to develop their capabilities as human beings and members of society [46, 47].

Spatial opportunities play a role in advancing the right to the city. According to Henri Lefebre, the right to the city is essentially about the right to an urban existence that is evolving and revitalized [48]. This perspective has greatly influenced researchers who advocate for enhancing the right to the city by ensuring fair access to urban spatial resources and fostering their connectivity throughout the city [40, 49, 50, 51]. While the participatory design workshops seek conflict resolution as a strategy to promote community peace, spatial opportunities envisions addressing this strategy at the spatial level.

Finally, restorative justice is the third conceptual framework of restorative community design, which is more of an aspiration than a methodology. Restorative justice is a branch of criminal righteousness that seeks to bring together different stakeholders affected by wrongdoing [52, 53, 54]. The reunification of these actors opens a discussion of responsibilities and opportunities to seek common solutions to repair social damage. To improve the psychological well-being of a community that has experienced or is experiencing a conflict situation, the mobilization of resources within the same community in agreement with other stakeholders is more effective than interventions from outside [14]. RCD focuses on promoting a sense of togetherness through participatory design workshops to improve the absence of spatial opportunities that have contributed to collective trauma and social conflicts. The aspiration is that the culturally competent perspective of the RCD will allow for the collaborative construction of the hope of an inclusive and participatory democratic model that contributes to the resolution of conflicts and the construction of community peace.

3.1 Application of restorative community design in Latin America

Between 2020 and 2023, Petare Latam Foundation coordinated the Programa de Innovación y Capacitación para Gestiones Locales en América Latina (Innovation and Training Program for Local Management in Latin America), funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The program aimed to create participatory environments with local leaders to promote democratic values. The experience included the participation of 543 local leaders from 41 Latin American municipalities in 7 countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. The goal of this chapter is not to describe the full scope of each program but to summarize their development from five selected cases in which the RCD framework was employed.

3.1.1 Project 20_PE07, Lima (Peru)

In 2020, the project the Municipality of Lima (Peru) developed a popular market called “Tierra Prometida” (Promised Land), to relocate street vendors that overcrowded the street during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Tierra Prometida” focuses on some of the sanitary and health-related challenges and economic concerns that afflicted merchants. The project focuses on their temporal relocation and registration of the merchants to ensure the continuity of their commercial activities under safe, sanitary conditions. Tierra Prometida intervenes in the socioeconomic fabric of the community from the individual up to the collective scale of the market and its distribution of goods around the urban context. The project addresses an immediate crisis through this broad scope and reconfigures business practices toward resilient and adaptive models for possible future contingencies. It represents a feasible example of improving spatial opportunities of local vendors by redesigning a public law. The project was implemented to tackle health and economic sustainability challenges simultaneously.

The project’s impact due to its dual focus promotes a crisis management model through participatory design workshops, business census, and the adaptability of business infrastructures to improve access of this infrastructure to the broad community. Collectively, these measures underline the significance of scalable approaches for resolving conflicts incited by global health crises, thus providing useful lessons on the necessity of planning and flexibility in urban development and emergency management policies.

3.1.2 Project 21_BO06, La Paz (Bolivia)

“Espacios en Movimiento” in La Paz (Bolivia) is a project developed by the “Secretaría de Planificación” of the Municipal Autonomous Government of La Paz in 2021, focuses on the revitalization of public spaces after the COVID-19 pandemic through urban interventions involving local social agents, citizens, and cross-sector partnerships through participatory design workshop. The community redesigned abandoned urban spaces, reclaiming them physically and symbolically. The community was able to create public spaces in which they could engage in civic activities and conflict resolution.

The project applied the inclusive and sustainable management model of the spatial opportunity framework in eight main phases of development: (1) Physical and spatial analysis of the abandoned space, (2) on-site data collection with the local community, (3) institutional approval, (4) establishment of on-site and recurrent participatory design workshops for constant iterations with the local community, (5) creation and implementation of a sensible communication strategy of the planned intervention and its expected impact, (6) development of the project pilot, and (7) impact evaluation. In addition to resolving tensions and potentially violent conflicts between the use and abuse of urban spaces, the model acknowledges and strengthens access to public space as a fundamental strategy for the promotion of citizenship and human rights.

3.1.3 Project 21_AR02, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

The “Centro Comunitario, Social, Cultural y Deportivo” (Social, Cultural and Sports Community Center), developed in 2021 members of the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), provides a regeneration plan for an abandoned plot of land in Barrio San Francisco. As explained above, spatial opportunities is a design framework to improve equitable access to physical urban infrastructures. This project is at the core of this framework through the redesign of an abandoned lot into an educational, sports, and community hub for the nearby residents. Through the revitalization of this urban sector, the project seeks to promote citizen participation, provide parental educational support, and foster a strong sense of identity and local belonging.

The participatory design workshops permit the development of the distinctive feature of the project, which is the convergence of diverse needs at individual and collective levels. The plan also seeks to expand community participation by offering a volunteer fire brigade, a civil registration office, a municipal delegation, and spaces to allocate a technical school. Through these activities, the project envisions to drive social, cultural, and economic growth as it provides sensible, locally-driven, and culturally competent solutions while paving the way of a people-centered urban development model.

3.1.4 Project 22_EC06, Pichincha (Ecuador)

In 2022, the Main Advisor to the Mayor of the Municipality of the Metropolitan District of Quito (Ecuador) proposed an alternative to the economic inequality and vulnerability of young children (1–3 years old) in Pichincha through the reuse and reconditioning of an abandoned child development center. The plan addresses immediate childcare needs, as well as long-term structural problems such as malnutrition and economic stagnation of affected families. The improvement of access to childcare permitted the improvement of spatial opportunities for the community of Pichincha, whose strategy is planned to be replicated in Guayaquil, another municipality in Ecuador.

By providing a safe and stimulating environment where children can develop their cognitive and motor skills under the supervision of professionals, the project seeks to free up time for parents to generate income so they may indirectly contribute to the domestic economy and, by extension, the local economy. This comprehensive approach works around resolving social conflicts by simultaneously addressing individual, family, and community needs. The project also stands out for its ability to define long-term personal and social development through a specific intervention, positively impacting family and community dynamics.

3.1.5 Project 22_MX04, Celaya (Mexico)

The “Strategic Plan to Combat Poverty,” developed in 2022 by the Municipality of Celaya (Mexico), has the improvement of spatial opportunities as the main goal. The project is based on the premise that a critical lack of access to health and social security services is one of the central components of poverty. In an effort to overcome the fact that the 19 medical units in Celaya cannot meet the medical demand of the population, the plan focuses on the creation of a comprehensive public policy that supports the construction of a third-level hospital and two first-level hospitals, complemented by a linkage program between Mobile Medical Units (MMU) and Primary Health Care Medical Units (UMAPS). The magnitude of this project made it impossible to build on the scale of the participatory design workshops without support from multiple levels of government, which also made exposed the limitations of community participation. One of the advantages of this approach is its ability to operate and generate solutions at different levels simultaneously: from individualized care through advanced medical technology and specialists to the redesign of the public health system at the level of a municipality, the articulation of programs lead to a holistic problem resolution, which not only seeks to resolve the direct manifestations of poverty but also to address its suffering one of its origins.

3.2 Final thoughts

RCD uses participatory design workshops as a tool to improve spatial opportunities in Latin American communities which in turn foster psychological well-being and social conflict resolution. RCD aims to empower communities to design their own spaces. At the center of this model is the idea of restorative justice toward historically disenfranchised communities. The application of RCD in five Latin American countries has allowed us to understand the breadth of possibilities. We discovered that although the development of local projects contributes significantly to providing alternatives for peaceful community environments, the country’s complex socioeconomic conditions show its limitations. Working solely at the community level is insufficient for representative democratic systems to flourish, but it is certainly a condition for progress. Working with local leaders in Latin America, it was frequently found that addressing them at the community level is necessary but insufficient. The complexity of the conflicts the region experiences requires attention from national and international socioeconomic and political forces. Nevertheless, the improvement of public spaces and facilities is meaningful for local communities, even when ecological threats exist that are impossible to solve on a local scale.

Paradoxically, working with these five cases in Latin America and trying to improve democratic values highlighted the spatial inequalities of the region, revealing a complex socioecology whose survey was beyond the scope of the Program, and this applied research. Each community has significant absences of basic goods such as public spaces, schools, sports centers, and other facilities, and each community also struggles to produce agreements to address the shortcomings of representative democracy.

4. Conclusions

RCD is a framework to improve public spaces and facilities through community participation. Applying this framework to five Latin American case studies helped taught some valuable working lessons:

1. Applying the RCD framework teaches the importance of exploring local alternatives for peacemaking. RCD places special emphasis on building democracy through community participation and dialogue for the design of urban projects closely linked to socioeconomic and human development while increasing a community’s sense of ownership. In this sense, this chapter concurs with Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck [55], who propose that a countries peacebuilding starts at the community level.

2. It is important to manage expectations about the real capacities of the RCD. Certainly, addressing the needs of a community is a fundamental step to address the learned hopelessness that has been linked with authoritarian regimes in Latin America. However, one must be aware of the limitations of community work in addressing conflicts that are exacerbated by national and even international socioeconomic and political interests.

3. The process of promoting peace with Latin American communities requires a decolonizing perspective in which the voice of communities takes precedence over the ideas and interests of other groups. By decolonization, we refer to the importance of people developing their own spaces in accordance with their culture and resources.

4. Communities are embedded in local and even international contexts, and their perspective is not always addressed in multidisciplinary projects. The lack of connection between communities and government exacerbates disenchantment with its institutions and learned helplessness which are often connected with election of authoritarian regimes and violence.

5. A growing awareness of the complex, diverse, and intersectional characteristics of each community requires the development of multidisciplinary models [12, 14] that will more specifically link the contextual and psychological characteristics as well as the community and spatial ecologies that can lead to more effective peace promotion strategies.

6. Participatory design techniques are useful tools to educate community members about the importance of agreements for peacemaking. But more importantly it is a tool for the technical team to learn from the community, from their assets and needs.

7. Developing flexible, participatory design methods is important when designing in highly conflictive environments. Project 20_PE07 in Lima (Peru) happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Addressing the need of street vendors during this crisis was only possible with an adaptive planning framework that was modified as conditions changed.

8. A single participatory design meeting cannot achieve community peace but can do so with recurring and sustained community engagement. In the case of Project 21_BO06 in La Paz (Bolivia), the on-site PDWs installation occurred periodically to address the recurrent and changeable needs of conflict communities in the design of public spaces.

9. PDWs are useful tools for anticipating conflicts. During community meetings in Project 21_BO06 in La Paz (Bolivia) and Project 20_PE07in Lima (Peru), community members discussed possible abuses in the use of public space. Periodic engagements with community members can reveal conflicts and achieve a system of agreements before the conflict appears in the public space.

10. Unfortunately, while writing this chapter there was a realization that there is not much literature in English on the inclusion of community voice and participatory design, especially when trying to include diverse communities as a strategy for conflict resolution. We recommend expanding the literature on community-based peacemaking, including diverse cultural perspectives, including the Latin Americans.

Acknowledgments

The initiatives mentioned in this paper constitute the references for the conceptualization of the ideas that are defined hereafter, as they had all been developed with the conceptual framework presented, detailed, and implemented aiming at the objectives of the Programa de Innovación y Capacitación para Gestiones Locales en América Latina (Innovation and Training Program for Local Management in Latin America). The program, developed by the Petare Latam Foundation between 2020–2024, had financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

• Juan Pablo de la Guerra, as a Representation of Municipality of Lima, was behind the strategic development of the provisional local market “Tierra Prometida” in Lima, Perú, which served as a temporary retail space to foster local vendors and economic stimulation of the zone by the due date of 2020–2021.

• Vladimir Amellera, who worked at the “Secretaría de Planificación” under the municipal government of La Paz, in La Paz, Bolivia, launched the “Espacios en Movimiento” (Spaces in Movement) between 2021 and 2022 with the core purpose to revitalize urban spaces and promote public engagement.

• Graciela N. Bordón and Osvaldo Torres, members of the Legislative Branch of Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, planned the “Centro Comunitario, Social, Cultural y Deportivo” (Social, Cultural and Sports Community Center) in the Barrio San Francisco of Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 2021–2022. The project is built at the time of this writing, but it envisions to be a multidisciplinary community hub for the nearby residents.

• Karina Tello, an Advisor to the Mayor of the Municipality of the Metropolitan District of Quito, in Ecuador, developed in 2022–2023 a project focusing on the reuse and reconditioning of a child development centre to provide parental and educational support.

• Francisco Arreguin, of the Social Development Directorate of Celaya, in Celaya, Mexico, developed a Strategic Plan to Beat Poverty all through 2022–2023 which proposed the construction of three large-scale healthcare facilities based on the premise that a critical lack of access to health and social security services is one of the central components of poverty.