Historic Preservation and Trading Air Rights: Lima, Peru

The historic district of Barranco in Lima, Peru possesses the country’s best examples of historic residential architecture. Some of these homes have been turned into boutique hotels and high-end restaurants yet most of them remain dilapidated and undervalued. The city cannot afford to restore them and the local market for luxury conversions is not big enough to attract the necessary investment. SURBA created a municipal incentive program that could spur sustainable redevelopment. We devised a plan for the city to trade air rights in the historic core for development rights on the periphery, thereby, allowing the preservation of historic structures with the intensification of underutilized areas that lay along industrial corridors or that afford vistas of The Pacific.