2019
This student-driven 2019 studio was a response to the widespread devastation left by two powerful hurricanes, Hurricane María and Hurricane Irma, that impacted Puerto Rico in 2017. Students with close ties to the island proposed a joint studio with the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Planning (EGP). Faculty at SCaRP and EGP ran parallel courses and an exchange program, which was awarded support from the APA Foundation Disaster Grant. The Studio addressed the capacity-building needs of ENLACE, a well-known grassroots organization that operates in San Juan’s Caño Martín Peña.
2020
The 2020 Studio focused on the United States Decennial Census efforts. Puerto Rico’s status as an underrepresented territory within the United States motivated this project. The studio worked in Cataño, a small municipality just across the bay from the capital, San Juan. Cataño faces disproportionate levels of hard-to-count and underrepresented populations within the greater metropolitan area. In collaboration with the Puerto Rico Planning Board and the Cataño municipal government, the Studio devised strategies to encourage community participation in the Census.
2022
Based on a philosophy of community-based planning, the 2022 studio leveraged students’ planning skillset to bolster the organizational capacity of partner organization Impacto Juventud. A central assumption was that global studios can be mutually beneficial for students, who broaden their perspectives, and partners or clients, who increase access to resources. In the context of this studio, this was best accomplished by building the capacity of community organizations to support their outreach and activism. The studio’s sub-areas of focus included community asset mapping, renewable energy, and non-profit communications.
2023
The 2023 Studio engaged in a collaborative project with the Center for the New Economy (CNE), a San Juan-based think tank. Through this collaboration, the Studio engaged in a detailed examination of Puerto Rico’s construction permitting process. The Studio also cleaned and manipulated a dataset made publicly available by Puerto Rico’s Permitting Office (OGPe), and extracted descriptive statistics to better ascertain the patterns of private construction permitting in Puerto Rico.
2024
In 2024, the Puerto Rico Studio incorporated two major innovations: (1) it created teams of not only graduate, but also undergraduate students; and (2) it pursued two parallel projects with different clients. The first, which focused on post-disaster damage, as well as public and private-sector reconstruction initiatives, continued the 2023 collaboration with the Center for the New Economy (CNE). The second, which addressed energy resilience in the San Juan neighborhood of Condado, supported the efforts of community leader Amaury Rivera.
2025
This 2025 Puerto Rico Studio involved three parallel projects with different clients. In the first project we once again collaborated with community leader Amaury Rivera to produce a Resilience Plan for the neighborhood of Condado. The second project offered an opportunity to work with HORNE Puerto Rico on a project assessing vacant housing in Puerto Rico. In the last project, students prepared an assessment of San Juan’s public transportation system for the Integrated Transit Authority (ATI) of Puerto Rico.
Read the 2025 Resilience Plan for Condado here
Read the 2025 Vacant Housing Assessment here
Read the 2025 Public Transportation economic impact report here