XClose

The Bartlett Development Planning Unit

Home
Menu

DPU staff receive UCL Global Engagement Fund

14 December 2016

Decaying commercial building, Habana

The DPU is delighted to announce that two staff members, Barbara Lipietz and Catalina Ortiz, have been awarded the Global Engagement Fund for their project proposals at an event at UCL in November.

More than 120 UCL academics and staff gathered to celebrate the range of international collaborations supported by the inaugural year of the Global Engagement Funds. The Funds are a stream of seed funding (usually up to £2k) for academics to stimulate, facilitate and accelerate activity with global partners.

Reimagining La Habana

Catalina Ortiz submitted a proposal whose main activity is a workshop in Havana in March 2017 entitled Reimagining La Habana: mapping participatory platforms and citizens' urban visions. It will bring together UCL and CUJAE staff members with CUJAE undergraduate and postgraduate students, representatives of local government and planning institutions and civil society organisation representatives to examine potential strategies to articulate citizens' platforms for public debate on the future of Havana. Its aim is to reveal the 'social infrastructure' for local participation to shape the future of the city by focusing on the use of vacant space for urban transformations. 

Towards community-led housing at the city scale : lessons from the ACHR network

The DPU has been partnering with the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights (ACHR) through teaching and the DPU/ACHR/CAN Young Professionals Internship Programme (coordinated by Barbara Lipietz and Catalina Ortiz). The Sea and Currents grant (UCL Global Engagement) has supported the convening of a workshop in August 2016 in Bangkok, to extend this working relationship to the realm of research. The proposed research submitted by Barbara Lipietz, Towards community-led housing at the city scale : lessons from the ACHR network, seeks to unpack the conditions for housing policy that engages actively with, and is driven by, urban poor communities. It will seek to derive a number of policy recommendations, related to the fields of housing finance, land, community mobilisation and transformations at the city scale.

More can be read about the Global Engagement Funds here.