Urban Design Otherwise: Catalina Ortiz

This talk reflects on lessons from three consecutive co-creation projects in Medellín, Colombia—COiNVITE, Living Heritage, and Living Archive— and the community plan for Wards Corner London developed through a learning alliance with local campaigns, international students, cultural organisations, grassroots groups, state agents, and built environment practitioners. The work recognised everyday spatial practices in informal and formal neighbourhoods as living heritage and highlighted the agency of Integral Neighbourhood Upgrading as a path for progressive urban planning and design. Catalina argues that planning and design must innovate by incorporating visual, digital, and performative storytelling to advance epistemic justice. The talk considers how reframing self-built neighbourhoods and Public Common Partnerships can help overcome stigma and inform alternative upgrading interventions.

Professor Catalina Ortiz is a Colombian urbanist and educator who is passionate about spatial justice. She is committed to an ethics of care and an engaged scholarship to trigger radical spatial imagination for a negotiated co-production of space. She uses decolonial and critical urban theory through creative methodologies to study the politics of space production to foster more just cities and the recognition of multiple urban knowledges. Her work revolves around critical urban pedagogies, planning for equality, and southern urbanisms. She is Director of the UCL Urban Lab at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London (UCL).

Image: Collage, Catalina Ortiz

This event will take place in person in the AA Lecture Hall and will also be live-streamed here.

You can also watch the Landscape Urbanism Jury from 2pm online here.