Living Roads
(Shade, Security, Micromobility)
Start: 2025
Status: Active
End: 2028
1. Our Goal
A pilot project transforms the town’s main streets into shaded, walkable, safe, and ecologically connected corridors. We are addressing current challenges of mobility, loss of shade, erosion, vehicular pressure, and fragmentation of the tree canopy through an innovative road design that integrates infrastructure, biodiversity, and climate adaptation within the narrow rights-of-way typical of coastal towns. Working in partnership with the Municipality of Cóbano and the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), making it a national model of collaboration between public institutions and organized communities.
2. Project actions include:
Design and engineering of climate-adapted corridors.
Canopy restoration and ecological connectivity. This includes planting native trees along the road network.
Eliminating critical wildlife electrocution points by burying cables and installing safe lighting.
Green infrastructure and water management to reduce erosion and improve resilience to storms and heavy rains through implementing permeable pavement, drains covered with grates that also function as walkways, infiltration systems that protect the aquifer and reduce runoff to the beach.
Road planning, safe mobility, and improving the public space with shaded sidewalks, connected pedestrian routes, parking areas, and speed signs.