Studio Moments
Studio Moments
Place
What is at stake is not whether Puerto Rican culture will survive tourism, but how culture is spatially organized and supported across the island. Tourism concentrates visibility, investment, and institutional infrastructure in coastal hotspots like Old San Juan, where culture is amplified, performed, and consumed. Meanwhile, municipalities such as Ponce reveal culture embedded in everyday life - in agricultural practices, informal economies, music, craft, and civic exchange - but these conditions remain less visible and less supported. The maps do not show absence; they reveal uneven hosting. Culture is not disappearing, but its infrastructures of amplification and its infrastructures of production are spatially misaligned. What is therefore at stake is whether Puerto Rico continues to privilege concentrated zones of cultural consumption, or begins to support the quieter, distributed conditions through which culture is actually produced, sustained, and lived.
How might civic infrastructure in Ponce be used as a tool to help strengthen community-based food production and informal exchange while supporting everyday cultural life and climate resilience?