The understanding of linkages between disaster risk and urban development has seen important advances in recent decades. However, it falls short in addressing the production and reproduction of so-called urban "risk traps", which are accumulation cycles of everyday risks and small-scale disasters with highly localized impacts, particularly on impoverished urban dwellers. Drawing on the action-research project cLIMA sin Riesgo, this paper examines risk-mitigating investment actions of state agencies, residents and communities in Barrios Altos, in the historic centre of Lima, Peru, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the periphery. The analysis shows that residents tend to be caught in risk traps not necessarily due to lacking investments, but paradoxically despite them and their unintended effects. Furthermore, accumulated fragmented investments erode the capacity to act of those at risk and perpetuate risk accumulation cycles. The paper argues for a re-assessment of riskmitigation investments and their intended and unintended consequences, and suggests routes to address current shortcomings in order to disrupt "risk traps". KEYWORDS capacity to act / everyday risk / just and resilient cities / Lima / risk-mitigation investments / urban risk traps

This chapter shares the experience of two action research projects ReMap Lima and cLIMA sin Riego, where mapping has been used with three main objectives: to make visible what is otherwise 'invisible'; to open up dialogue between different stakeholders in the city and to arrive at concrete actions, collectively negotiated between citizens and policy makers. Two case study sites were chosen in Lima, Peru: Barrios Altos (BA) in the historic centre and José Carlos Mariátegui (JCM) at the edge of the city. The approach adopted applies a participatory action methodology based on grounded applications and advanced technologies for community-led mapping and visualisation. The chapter reflects upon three interrelated sites of the mapping process: the reading, writing and audiencing of maps and explores how these can provide opportunities to break away from the polar positions often established between Claimant/ marginalised group and the state, thus aiming to contribute to a process of spatial co-learning across typically confronted actors. The two case studies show different possibilities for interrogating the city to provide a spatially and socially grounded way of co-producing knowledge for action that can contribute to the planning of just urban futures.

Land trafficking, responsible for the unprecedented rate of urbanization in many Latin American cities, is often conceptualized through corruption as ‘abuses of public office for private gain’. While those involved in the practice rely at times on violence and illegality, their repertoire is sophisticated, allowing them to move in and out of legality as part of their cost–benefit calculations. In this article I argue that land trafficking is based on legalized corruption. I use an ethnographic approach to observe the strategic conduits that are technically embedded in, and opportunistically related to, different municipal processes to legalize illegality. I demonstrate how land traffickers use morphing possibilities between land tenure types (communal, private and government) and mimic development typologies that have gained legitimacy over time. I also show how conflicting, competing and humanitarian rationalities that characterize the state play a crucial role in promoting land trafficking, by grafting illegality and violations onto ‘formal’ practices.

Within the wider ongoing debate of Participatory Action Research, this paper interrogates the capacity of participatory mapping not just as a means to tap into plural knowledges over and emanating from specific geographies but rather to disrupt exclusionary constructions of space and place and the reproduction of the governing relationships that cause inequality. Focusing on a participatory mapping experience undertaken by the authors in collaboration with local residents in the steep slopes of Bogotá's eastern hills -an area threatened by forced evictions in the name of ecological preservation and risk protection arguments -we explore why and under what conditions participatory mapping might have the potential to disrupt conflicting interpretations of place and space held both by local residents and state agencies, which in turn can open the room to rework what types of interventions are actually needed and why.We hypothesise that this depends on the extent to which mapping can abridge the different scales at which the state and marginalised communities make sense of a site historically underpinned by different forms of spatial myopia and territorial stigma. This is in our view not just a consequence of the application of participatory mapping techniques per se, but depends on the way in which mapping is used to expand the political space in which different conceptions of a territory can effectively talk to each other.

En las últimas décadas hemos asistido a una profunda reformulación de cómo entender las condiciones de riesgo en el contexto urbano. Sin embargo, aún enfrentamos significativos desafíos para capturar conceptual, metodológica y empíricamente los círculos viciosos de reproducción de riesgos que configuran ‘trampas de riesgo urbano’ frecuentemente invisibilizadas. Entendemos a las trampas de riesgo como el resultado de la reproducción de riesgos cotidianos y de desastres repetitivos y frecuentes de pequeña escala, que afectan en forma desproporcional a los sectores empobrecidos en forma altamente localizada. A partir de cLIMA sin Riesgo - un proyecto de investigación-acción desarrollado por los autores en el contexto de Lima - este artículo explora las condiciones que producen y reproducen estas trampas, cómo y dónde se materializan, quiénes son afectados y con qué consecuencias para aquellos que viven en barrios tugurizados y/o asentamientos informales y marginalizados. La discusión examina cómo el conocimiento espacial de la urbanización en riesgo y la evaluación critica de las inversiones y los esfuerzos de mitigación realizados por parte de pobladores y agencias estatales permiten avanzar hacia una apreciación más precisa del impacto de dichas trampas a lo largo del tiempo, así como hacia estrategias de acción para su interrupción.