Cocreación y corresponsabilidad local
La historia de cómo se transformó la participación (2023)
Book chapter, in Cartografía histórica y futura de Bogotá. Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial “Bogotá Reverdece 2022-2035”. Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2023. Co-written with María del Pilar Barreto.
Citizen participation has been a contentious subject in recent debates about urban planning and public interventions on cities across the world. Achieving transparency and inclusion in public decisions goes far beyond scheduling community meetings. Building trust requires an explicit commitment from public administrations – and, critically, from the people who have their feet in the ground talking to people – to ensure that divergent voices are considered when thinking about a city’s future.
This chapter, included in a collection of books that collect stories about the transformation of planning processes in Bogotá, explains the efforts to connect to communities that have long been excluded from public decisions, and how a mixture of technology and interpersonal skills was required to make this change a reality.
There are rivers of (digital) ink dedicated to explaining why gaps in access to reliable, fast and affordable broadband follow the trends of other forms of inequities in New York City. Along with my colleagues Mia Winther-Tamaki and Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, we started by mapping these disparities in access and explaining the difficulties in addressing them from an urban policy perspective.
At the same time, we chronicled the efforts of NYC Mesh, a decentralized group that has been filling these gaps with radically different approach from your regular Internet Service Provider. NYC Mesh understands that a network of antennas across the city is more than just infrastructure – people are critical nodes of these networks too.
MESH TOGETHER (2023)
Published in Urban Omnibus
PATIO (2021)
Patio was both a provocation and a reclamation: along with other Latin American students with whom I coincided at GSAPP, we considered that the built environment of Latin America and the Caribbean was not only worth of study but that it could also erase many of the artificial lines that separate architectural and planning debates in the global north. We strived to create a multi-format magazine, combining essays, photography, collage, and digital design to fully evoke the textures and feelings of our neighborhoods and patios back home.
We received the 2021 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals by the American Institute of Architects.
Catholicism and Working-Class Housing in Early 20th Century Colombia
SICK SPACE | Harvard Urban Review, Spring 2021
GSD | Harvard University
Morality as a Cure:
This article aims to compare two housing projects for workers, built by the Catholic Church in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, at the beginning of the 20th century. Both cities, at different paces, were becoming more urban and industrial. However, the strategies put in place by the Church to construct the new neighborhoods were different in each one – a neighborhood in Bogotá and a type of cloister (or patronato) in Medellín.