Barrio Mercado Cuidador: New System Of Elevated Walkways And Equipment For The Community Of The North Lima Producers’ Market | Architecture Thesis on Urban Regeneration

Site Context

The Mercado de Productores de Lima Norte represents a fragment of the self-built city, facing challenges of accessibility, overcrowding, and limited habitability within a highly seismic urban context. It is a self-built neighborhood that has emerged within the interior of a market, generating a mix of uses driven by necessity—an increasingly common condition in the city and a new way of inhabiting it.

This market-neighborhood accommodates 583 residents, and when including the daily commercial population, it reaches approximately 2,000 people. Of this population, 83% are women and children, who are particularly vulnerable due to precarious safety conditions and the lack of adequate spaces for care. These mixed and informal characteristics position the area as an ideal urban laboratory to explore new collective ways of inhabiting and building.

Design Process

The proposal is grounded in a participatory process involving key actors in the daily life of this “market-neighborhood”—mothers, children, market authorities, local hardware workers, and builders. This process is essential to identify areas with the highest convergence of activities such as commerce, residence, play, and care, which paradoxically are also the areas of greatest risk, threatening the physical safety of their users. Based on this analysis, design guidelines and project strategies are developed.

Mitigate And Optimize: A modular system of independent frames that transforms strategic corridors into safe axes, organizes commercial activity, and introduces elevated streets with new residential access points. The system also functions as an evacuation network while strengthening local self-managed construction practices.

Horizontal And Vertical Articulation: A network of safe and care-oriented elevated streets that connects domestic and commercial dynamics, creating urban continuity through new access points, intermediate spaces, and active corners linked to care-centered hubs.

Integration: A modular exoskeleton that reinforces structurally vulnerable housing while incorporating care facilities. This is integrated with a system of public spaces that activates underused areas, consolidating a market-neighborhood model based on networks of care and collective resilience.

Final Outcome

The project articulates analysis, participation, and design as a continuous process, incorporating gradual development and self-management as key project variables. By understanding the market as a constitutive part of the self-built neighborhood, the notion of care is established as an organizing principle that enables the reordering of space based on everyday safety, proximity, and continuous use.

Applied to the Mercado de Productores de Lima, this approach guides the reconfiguration of the market-neighborhood through strategies of incremental improvement, supported by the construction of replicable modular structures. These structures generate a new system of safe streets for both vendors and residents, enabling spatial articulation and strengthening existing community networks through the consolidation of this new urban fabric.

In this way, commerce, housing, and care are integrated without displacing the population or interrupting the economic activities that sustain it. Within this framework, the “Caring Market-Neighborhood” is conceived not as a fixed model, but as an adaptable methodology for intervening in popular markets—one that values what already exists and makes visible an emerging way of inhabiting the city. This approach is grounded in an inclusive and resilient logic, recognizing the social, economic, and territorial value of everyday practices, particularly those sustained by women, which make its daily functioning possible.

Conclusion: Ultimately, this project reimagines the self-built market-neighborhood as a resilient, care-centered system, integrating living, working, and safety through adaptable design strategies that strengthen community networks without displacement.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]