Ethel Segura Durán

Thesis:
Collaborative strategies to guide sustainable urban growth in metropolitan areas: An integrated adaptive planning approach for souths’ metro scale.

Key Topics:

Collaborative planning, technology, participatory process, metropolitan governance, sustainable development.

Profile:
My background has been a focus on the relation of institutions and people, mainly on bottom-up strategies for planning and citizen engagement. Other experiences with multidisciplinary groups had me allowed to reflect around interdisciplinary approaches and scope of problems to formulate alternatives to solves related to urban and regional planning.

Formed as an Architect, with a Master degree in Government, and studies in Urban and Regional Planning from los Andes University in Bogotá, D.C, Colombia, I have been involved in teaching seminars in planning issues, lectures and conferences of future of cities, modelling and spatial analysis using GIS. Other works have been related to public space, urban regulation and projects with interdisciplinary groups, as academic and as a practitioner as well.

My research focuses on communities linked with the METRO scale and megacities in the global south, particularly with those approaches related to technologies as a catalyst for the decision-making process, framed in sustainable development. This approach involves inclusion perspectives and the linkage between with local scale, considering restrictions and limits that technology implied on.

Some successful strategies were implemented and integrated as best practices in associative schemes such as metropolitan areas, which have included strategies in order to generate innovations, particularly around their community dialogues. There are some promising examples in Colombia which have developed in recent decades. Part of the interest of this research is to understand the context and variables that make possible to create a metro identity, or otherwise, the factors, which impede these kinds of processes, related to the participatory decision-making and collaborative planning.

Primary supervisor: Catalina Ortiz

Secondary Supervisor: Barbara Lipietz

Other:

/ Co-founder of the interdisciplinary group MetGob at los Andes University in Bogotá – Colombia, for the discussion and debate about governance in metropolitan areas, founded in 2017.  

/Co-researcher of the group EPIANDES. Faculty of Medicine – Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, D.C. Colombia.