Caring Cities: Learning from Latin American initiatives

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that cities need to be reframed from a perspective of care. While care is not a new concept in academic debates and the struggles of social movement, it has gained importance in urban planning and policy. In this online event we will be discussing the contribution of feminist movements to shape governance and influence urban policy to centre care as an essential part of collective life and wellbeing. Initiatives in Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and Chile are leading the way to test the role of urban governments on the recognition, reduction and redistribution of care, the role of urban space in fostering caring cities, and the possibilities of the feminisation of politics. 

This event is part of a series of activities celebrating 20 years of UCL Urban Lab.

Speakers

Paola Jiron is the President of the National Council for Territorial Development in Chile and Professor of the Housing Institute of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Chile. She is also Director of the Millennium Nucleus on Mobilities and Territories (MOVYT) and Associate Researcher at COES (Center for Conflict and Social Cohesion). Her main areas of research are related to urban and territorial studies from a perspective of the everyday experience of inhabiting, including mobility practices, intersectionality and feminist theories as well as research methodologies. She studies the impact of territorial accumulation processes in the daily life of the inhabitants from the understanding of relational territories, intersectionality and various forms of care.

Lorena Zarate is the co-coordinator of the Global Platform of the Right to the City and former president of the Habitat International Coalition. She also collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing and with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the elaboration of thematic reports and recommendations for national and local governments regarding measures to guarantee the rights to land and housing and the right to the city on a global scale. She works around the feminisation of politics and its intersection with the New Municipalist movement. 

Gabriella Gomez-Mont is the founder of Experimentalista and is currently a visiting professor at IIPP, UCL. She was also the Chief Creative Officer of Mexico City, and the founder of Laboratorio para la Ciudad (2013–18), the award-winning experimental arm and creative think tank of the Mexico City government, reporting to the mayor. In her recent projects, Gabriella's work explores urban biodiversity and its relationship with topics such as housing or food security, evaluating the respective potentials and tensions in several cities worldwide. She has served as advisor to the National Policy on Care in Colombia.

Chair

Catalina Ortiz is Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy and Director of UCL Urban Laboratory. She is an urbanist who is passionate about spatial justice. Her research uses decolonial and critical urban theory through knowledge co-production methodologies mainly in Latin American cities. Her work revolves around urban pedagogies, planning for equality and southern urbanisms. Her articles have been published in several journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Environment and Urbanization, Urban Studies and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She is one of the editors of Urban Studies and a trustee of the charity, Latin Elephant. 

More information

• Urban Lab 20

Image: Illustration by Dubian Monsalve for the Archivo Vivo project