Vernacular Housing as an Indicator of Rural–Peri-Urban Landscape Transformation in the Andean Region: Evidence from Loja, Ecuador

Rural territories on the periphery of Andean intermediate cities are undergoing accelerating peri-urban transformation that threatens agricultural land and the cultural landscapes embedded in vernacular housing traditions. Although vernacular architecture has been studied extensively in heritage conservation and bioclimatic research, its potential as a spatial indicator of territorial change remains underexplored. This study proposes the Vernacular Housing–Landscape Transformation Framework (VH–LTF), an interpretive and methodological framework that reads vernacular housing typologies as indicators of rural–peri-urban landscape transformation, and applies it preliminarily through a composite measure, the Rural–Peri-Urban Landscape Transformation Index (RPLTI). The framework is developed and tested as a settlement-scale proof-of-concept on a documented corpus of 25 vernacular dwellings in Barrio Cera, Taquil parish, Loja, Ecuador, an Andean peri-urban settlement at 2238 m a.s.l. located approximately 20 km from the city of Loja. Three morphological typologies (I, L, and C forms), built with adobe, eucalyptus timber, reedwork, stone, and clay tile, were classified and assessed across five analytical dimensions: territorial, typological, material, socio-spatial, and landscape transformation. Preliminary evidence indicates that typological progression, patterns of material substitution, patio function, and predial vegetation loss vary together along the settlement’s road-accessibility gradient and may serve as observable markers of land-use change and cultural-landscape erosion. The findings are exploratory and context-specific rather than statistically generalizable. The framework may provide planners and researchers with a low-cost diagnostic for characterizing peri-urban Andean settlements; further validation in larger, multi-settlement corpora is required before transfer to other contexts.