In Ecuador, UW-Green Bay interns help plan future

Tena, Ecuador — an attractive, developing city of about 40,000 located at the gateway to the Amazon rainforest — is a fairly popular destination for eco-tourism.

For four UW-Green Bay students and the two faculty members who accompanied them, however, a recent one-month stay in beautiful Tena was not a vacation.

Urban and Regional Studies students Ryan Cuene, Trevor Martin, Matthew Peter and Emma Reiser worked as consultants to the Department of Regional Planning on the housing and urban design elements of a comprehensive city plan.

The students summarized their month of field work in a presentation to Tena city officials on July 29.

The students worked side-by-side with Profs. Marcelo Cruz and Adam Parrillo. The UW-Green Bay contingent was joined on the international consulting team by scholar Francisco Cebrián, whose research at Spain’s University of Castilla-LaMancha has involved tourism, economics and geography, and graduate student Gloria Juarez.

The UW-Green Bay students who traveled to South America in July had been preparing for their time in Ecuador for months, Cruz says, beginning conceptual work on the project during spring semester.

Urban and Regional Studies has a formal agreement with the city of Tena to continue the collaboration on a yearly basis. Cruz says an international internship arrangement of this sort is relatively uncommon at even much larger American universities, which speaks to the strength of UW-Green Bay’s program. The next project will begin during the spring semester followed by the month-long field experience in July of 2012.

To enter a photo gallery submitted by Reiser, illustrating examples of the UW-Green Bay group working with Tena officials, click on a thumbnail below.