Urban expansion and infrastructure in the city of Puyo, Ecuador: an analysis of territorial growth and its impact on mobility and urban services

Abstract

Unplanned urban expansion in the Ecuadorian Amazon has become a phenomenon with serious consequences for access to basic services and communication networks. This occurs beyond natural and geographic barriers, favoring a linear expansion concomitant with connectivity corridors, which in turn causes spatial segregation, deterioration of older infrastructure, and significant exposure to anthropogenic and environmental risks on the peripheries.

This dynamic reflects the centralization of facilities and basic services in the central urban area, where the pull of internal migration exceeds the territory's own carrying capacity. This gives rise to spontaneous belt-type settlements that tend to press against the city's administrative boundaries while also tending to merge into conurbation with neighboring rural parishes. This outward expansion occurs paradoxically alongside abundant vacant land within the city, which reveals poor internal urban consolidation and weak management of developable land.

Added to this is the disarticulation of the road network, since heavy, regional, and private traffic converges on the main state highway, where network problems and inconsistencies arise from the lack of municipal planning to prioritize traffic toward secondary roads that, like the rest of the network, also suffer deterioration from the region's frequent rainfall.

Given this situation, there is an urgent need for territorial planning instruments that regulate land subdivision, preserve hydrological and ecological buffer strips against informal occupation, and achieve an adequate distribution of public facilities and infrastructure to restore socio-spatial cohesion.