by Tina Randolph and Kevin Wright

¡HOLA! Today we began day 5 in Peru, and we already have been engulfed in a vast array of cultural perspectives. Today we focus on a variety of colonial and modern political views in the city hall of Lima.

Arriving in downtown Lima at City Hall, we were surrounded by a whole new version of the city than we have yet been exposed to.  Once we entered the building, we were approached by guards to verify our presence. Each of us had to provide proper identification that was left at the front counter. Then we were escorted upstairs to a library facility with conference tables. The room was filled with oversized legal books of which were carefully handled. The legal personnel wore gloves while acquiring data from these books.

After an introduction, city officials began with a PowerPoint presentation over reconstruction and renovations of the city. He began with an overview of the current issues into the expansions of the informal city. With the self-help housing districts there have been much needed improvement on the infrastructures of buildings and transportation. A development of highways and byways were proposed to connect these divisions and decrease congestion. Currently viewing the outline of Lima, many areas that were expanded tend to look like finger-like projections from the city. Each of these areas has a limited amount of connectivity to main functioning roads. With the proposal they would have a more continuity of flow.

In the next section he presented the projects for the Costa Verde, that is, the coast of Lima. The city hall proposes to focus on a greener environment involving the reconstruction of beaches, roads and walkways. In short, the project will focus on implementing a more attractive and entertaining environment. By allowing a $180 million budget, the projection of a $2 billion revenue from the tourism and increased traffic to the beach will help the cities funding. Baja de Av Brasil was a main road for the focus of the project. Lots of greenery, landscaping and a variety of floral aesthetics will be incorporated into the scenery. Stairways down to the beach will be improved to provide a beautiful walkway down the hillside.

It was brought to our attention a project to increase security in shanty towns, dangerous areas, and new developments such as the New Costa Verde without decreasing the security that is already in place in secure sectors. The money coming in from the costal renovations would help create more job opportunities in the security industry. With this discussion in the air we decided to touch base on the public transportation situations in regards to the city’s taxis services. We were informed that there were nearly 300,000 unregistered taxi drivers and 60,000 registered and licensed drivers. They city is attempting to establish two type of taxi systems. The first system would be similar to a dispatch style of taxi that can be called and they will pick up at a location and be able to cross into separate districts while the second type will allow taxis for shorter distances that can drive around and look for customers but are limited to the district that they are in. They are hoping that this will help increase traffic flow and reduce pollution.

In our own experience, we met a taxi cab driver and had an opportunity to converse with him on a roundtrip to and from the airport. When we returned to the hostel, he insisted on taking registered taxis for any of our future journeys and showed us what a properly licensed taxi driver badge looked like. He gave us his card in case we needed a taxi again, and after getting to know Angel a little better, we know that we would have no problem calling him for future rides.

Finally, he discussed the project of San Lorenzo Island and its future connection to La Punta Callao with a newly constructed bridge. This will allow for San Lorenzo Island to transition from a private-public to a public-capital and become a more valuable asset to the city of Lima. We will be able to emphasize more on this area in the upcoming week as we pay a visit to La Punta Callao. ¡Hasta la proxima!