When the Urban Retrofit concept entered the picture, it sparked both curiosity and a sense of uncertainty, raising as many questions as it did possibilities. In recent years, sustainability concepts have travelled quickly across the globe—net-zero, resilience, bioeconomy, nature-based solutions, regenerative cities. Many hold potential, but they don’t always translate seamlessly to Latin American contexts. Some feel disconnected from local social realities; others are used inconsistently or lose meaning once they hit the ground.

However, Latin America urgently needs approaches that speak to both global climate agendas and local urban conditions. Around 80% of our population lives in cities (UNDP, 2024) shaped by rapid and uneven growth. In Bogotá alone, more than one-third of the urban area has been built through informal or self-constructed processes, home to over two million residents (López-Borbón, 2018). These neighbourhoods emerged as a popular solution to widespread housing problems, featuring adaptable progressively built homes, collective organisation, and community networks that hold daily life together. Yet they also face precarious services, insecure tenure, and overlapping climate risks such as floods, landslides, and environmental degradation.

The self-built city as an existing retrofit system

When you look closely at Latin America’s self-built neighbourhoods, one thing becomes clear: retrofit is not new here. At least, not in practice. People have been repairing, restoring, adapting, and improving their environments for decades. When you walk around these places, you can find plenty of examples of ingenuity and collaborative work. Neighbours and families collaborate to stabilise slopes and restore streams. Communities build and maintain their own water supply systems. Vacant or risky plots become gardens, gathering spaces, or small productive areas.

These practices are incremental, low-tech, and rooted in connection. They rely on social networks and local ecological knowledge far more than on engineering packages or formal plans. And in many respects, they embody the same principles that retrofit promotes: work with what exists, repair before replacing, adapt to future risks, and strengthen environmental systems.

This brings up a key issue: maybe retrofit in Latin America is less about introducing a new concept, and more about recognising and supporting what communities already do. But what does this look like on the ground? Existing initiatives in Bogotá suggest that retrofit can start small and subtle, quietly unfolding in everyday life.

The Delivery Gap: Why these practices remain fragile

Still, the picture isn’t entirely hopeful. Despite the value of these practices, their progress in terms of continuity, technical improvement and scaling is severely impaired by persistent barriers:

• Insecure tenure, which discourages long-term investment and complicates formal support.
• Fragmented governance, with overlapping mandates and short-lived programmes.
• Regulatory misalignment, where effective community practices can be technically “illegal”, with hard-won interventions being demolished or replaced.
• Precarious funding, relying on volunteers, or temporary grants. Commonly, the people behind such small initiatives are unpaid and overworked besides having little to no support.
• Climate pressures, from landslides to water pollution that outpace local capacity.

This is the paradox: communities are already retrofitting, but the wider planning system often treats their neighbourhoods as segregated places waiting for external intervention to replace or rebuild existing systems. This approach not only ignores local contributions and assets but also limits community participation to passive roles. Without addressing these structural issues, retrofit risks becoming merely a trendy term without real meaning or relevance for local implementation.

Rethinking retrofit for Latin America

All things considered, we should rethink both the concept of retrofit and the city so as to ensure it can be meaningful in our region, emphasising the following shifts:

• From Technical Upgrades to Social–Ecological Repair

Retrofit must include stewardship, ecological restoration, water governance, and collective care—not only energy efficiency or building performance.

• From Formal Projects to Hybrid Governance

Recognising community organisations, informal institutions, and citizen systems as legitimate urban actors is essential.

• From Standardised Models to Contextual Processes

Retrofit here must adapt to fragmented land rights, incomplete infrastructure, and diverse socio-political histories.

• From Scaling Projects to Scaling Relationships

What needs scaling is the support system: secure land rights, long-term funding, flexible regulations, and partnerships between communities and the state.

In other words, Latin American retrofit should be relational, not just architectural or technical.

Retrofit in Latin America is not a new agenda, it is an ongoing practice carried out by communities who repair, restore, adapt, and regenerate their neighbourhoods every day. The challenge ahead is not inventing retrofit from scratch but legitimising and supporting it.

If reinterpreted carefully, retrofit can become a bridge: between global sustainability goals and local realities, between ecological restoration and urban justice, between what communities already know and do, and what institutions aim to achieve.

These reflections are a work in progress, but ultimately, we believe that to retrofit the self-built city is to value relationships, between people, place, and nature, and to imagine urban futures built not by erasing what exists, but by caring for it.