David Mamani

Article

The map is crooked: Latin America in AEC research

When you review recent construction-automation literature, there is a pattern nobody mentions in the abstracts: geography. In the sample I evaluated, author affiliations broke down like this:

Europe 6 of 15 papers with a primary European affiliation 6 Asia 5 of 15 with a primary Asian affiliation 5 North America 3 of 15 with a primary North American affiliation 3 Latin America 1 of 15 — and that single paper came from Peru 1

One in fifteen. And it is not that there is nothing here worth researching — it is exactly the opposite.

The problems the map cannot see

The research agenda is set by the countries that publish. That is why papers abound on office towers instrumented with expensive sensors, and are scarce on what actually dominates the built landscape of our cities:

Three giant problems the first world barely researches
  1. Informal self-construction: in Lima, an enormous share of housing was built without an engineer. Assessing its seismic vulnerability at neighborhood scale is a perfect data problem — massive, urgent, with photos as the only cheap source.
  2. Jobsites with precarious data: most regional construction has neither BIM nor sensors. Useful research here is not “the perfect digital twin” — it is how much intelligence you can extract from a PDF file and phone photos.
  3. Local codes without tools: automated checkers exist for Eurocodes; for Peru’s RNE, practically nothing. Whoever digitizes those rules first defines the standard.

The exception that proves the capability

The best part of my review was finding the exception: an internationally peer-reviewed paper, made from Peru, applying computer vision to seismic assessment of a real Lima district. It can be done. When a local problem is taken seriously with international-grade methods, the result competes in any journal in the world — and it solves something we actually care about.

That, I think, is the opportunity for those of us doing data and construction from here: not to imitate the agenda of other maps, but to publish our own with the same rigor. The map is crooked — and it straightens out by publishing.