21st Century (2000–present)

Quito Plan de Uso y Gestión del Suelo (PUGS)

2020 · Ecuador · Latin America · National modernization and capital-city building · Planned by Municipio de Quito
Panoramic view of Quito from El Panecillo, showing the city stretched along the Andean valley.
Panoramic view of Quito from El Panecillo, showing the city stretched along the Andean valley. · CC BY-SA 4.0

Core idea

Land-use reform + valley constraints

Why it matters

Andean capital retools development rules

Description

The Plan de Uso y Gestión del Suelo (PUGS), adopted by the Metropolitan District of Quito in 2020–21, is the statutory land-use and land-management plan required under Ecuador's LOOTUGS territorial planning law. It resets development rules across the Andean capital, calibrating densities and building rights to the constraints of Quito's narrow valley setting, seismic and volcanic risk, and its UNESCO-listed historic centre, while introducing land-management instruments such as value capture and directing intensification towards areas served by public transport, including the then-new Metro line.

Significance

The PUGS matters as a leading Latin American application of a new generation of national land legislation that couples land-use zoning with instruments for capturing land-value gains, in the lineage of Colombian and Brazilian urban-reform law. It is studied as an attempt to retool development regulation in a geographically constrained capital, and features in regional debates on informality, risk-sensitive planning and the gap between sophisticated regulation and delivery capacity.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.