New Urban Imperatives Symposium: Reparative and Decolonial Praxis

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).

Natalia Villamizar Duarte is a Lecturer in Urban Design and the Degree Programme Director for the MA Urban Design at Newcastle University. With over two decades of experience spanning urban design, planning, and policymaking, she brings a rich blend of academic insight and professional practice to her work. Her research explores how social practices, urban planning and design, and policymaking intersect to shape—and often perpetuate—spatial and social inequities. Grounded in the ethics of collaboration, her work prioritises building equitable partnerships through engaged scholarship and co-creation with a focus on community-led spatial practices, urban mobility, and public space. 

Joaquín Lopez-Huertas (Am’aj Q’in) is a Mayan K'iche' scholar from Xelajuj No'j located in the place known as Guatemala. He is a Ph.D. candidate in City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. With more than ten years of working with Indigenous communities in regions of Guatemala, Chile, and the US, Joaquin’s research focuses on Indigenous planning and the intersections with climate change, urban design, and land use policy through decolonial practices. Particularly, Joaquin delves into the ways Indigenous Peoples restore relationships with place, foster community organizing, respond to environmental injustices and reimagine Indigenous cities. Joaquin received the Fulbright LASPAU scholarship and the GCSC fellowship for his doctoral studies. Before coming to Utah, Joaquin was a lecturer at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and an OAS fellow at the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. 

Jocelyn Poe, Ph.D., AICP is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Her research centers on communal trauma, spatial justice, and the development of reparative planning practices that aim to foster more equitable futures. As an educator, Dr. Poe is passionate about teaching reparative methodologies and cultivating future generations of planners who are equipped to engage in transformative, justice-oriented work. Dr. Poe is the Director of the Reparative Praxis Lab and the founder and principal of SaHA Planning Studio, LLC, where she integrates theory and practice to advance healing-centered planning strategies. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the University of Southern California, a Master of Community Planning from Auburn University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Her work has been recognized through fellowships such as the Health Policy Research Scholar Fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Spatial Futures Fellowship from PolicyLink. 

Angela Franco is a professor at the School of Architecture of the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia where she leads the Observatory of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism and the Research Group and the Laboratory of Popular Neighbourhhods, PopuLab. She is an Architect, specialist in Urban Planning, MSc in Sociology and PhD in Architecture from University of Cambridge. She has extensive knowledge in urban planning, social housing policies, and community participation. She has published books, chapters and articles on these topics. Among his most recent books are Conceal Marginality. Free Housing Policies in Colombia (2020), Waterfronts. City Culture and Landscape (2022). Informal Settlement Upgrading with an Intersectional Approach (2023) co-authored with Danny Ramírez. 

Dr Sahera Bleibleh is an architect, urban planner and researcher specialising in post-war reconstruction, urban resilience and spatial justice. Her work explores the intersection of community resilience, memory and urban form in contexts of displacement and recovery. She has contributed to several international publications and conferences addressing sustainable urbanism, participatory design and heritage preservation in the MENA region and the Global South.

Catalina Mejía Moreno is a sea swimmer, spatial practitioner, writer, educator and researcher. She is interested in practices of resistance, environmental, racial and spatial justice, as well as ecofeminist practice and thought. Through creative practice, activism and critique, she imagines tangible pathways for social and ecological restorations and imaginations. Catalina is the Climate Studies Lead across Spatial Practices. Since joining CSM she has been working in developing the Climate Forum (climate-forum.com), a research, curriculum and exchange platform that brings the urgent focus of the climate and ecological emergency to the core of the Spatial Practices Programme. Originally from Colombia, now based in the UK, her research and practice are predominantly focused on the global majority, intercultural dialogues and forms of situated practice.

Dr. Diana Salazar is a lecturer for the MA/MLA programmes in Landscape Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research examines environmental history through the lens of the struggles faced by those affected by mining in La Guajira, exploring its connections to international solidarity networks. Her research explores decoloniality as a methodology. Diana is also the Latin American coordinator at London Mining Network.

Muzna Al Masri is an anthropologist specialising in energy justice and participatory democracy, with a regional focus on Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). Her research explores citizen perspectives on energy transitions through innovative participatory methods, including Citizen Assemblies.  Alongside academic work, she brings over two decades of consultancy experience with local, international, and UN agencies in the fields of development, human rights, and peacebuilding. She is a Ford Foundation Global Fellow (2020–2023) and held postdoctoral fellowships from ACSS and the Orient-Institut Beirut. She co-founded the Ebla Research Collective and the Ethnography as Knowledge in the Arab World Working Group, and serves on the board of Public Works Studio in Lebanon.

Dr Ala’a Shehabi is an Associate Professor for Teaching in Middle East Politics at EISPS. Previously, she was the deputy director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL, Senior Research at the University of Lancaster's Work Foundation, and Analyst at the RAND Corporation. Trained in economics, she is now a transdisciplinary and mixed methods researcher focusing on infrastructure politics and development in Lebanon and Bahrain; energy justice; participatory action methods and citizen-scholarship through citizen science and citizen assemblies.