VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

What does livability mean when the ground itself moves? Belén, the riverine neighborhood of Iquitos in the Amazon basin of Peru, is constituted through everyday living practices. Its residents rise with the river, build with it, trade along it, and organize daily life around its seasonal rhythms. The flood cycle is not a problem to be managed; it is the epistemological ground on which a different understanding of urban life becomes possible. Water here is not infrastructure—it is the place itself. House and city are not separate scales but one continuous inhabited surface, rising and falling with the Itaya River. This paper proposes this condition as an amphibian urban form: not adaptive to water but ontologically embedded in it. Belén operates as a modern urban society that is spatially intelligent, culturally continuous, and architecturally inventive across generations. Dominant planning discourse, heritage frameworks, and regeneration models fail to account for this condition, as they are built on assumptions of stability, fixity, and monumental heritage that this place does not require. Drawing on architectural analysis, territorial fieldwork, and decolonial urban theory, this paper reframes livability as a condition of adaptation, relationality, and temporal occupation. Belén does not sit at the margins of livable cities discourse; it exposes its limits and demands its redefinition, with implications for cities where planning frameworks misread living cultures as problems to be solved.