Dr Catalina Ortiz is a Colombian urbanist with several years of experience building spaces for co-creation of knowledge with communities and community partners. Catalina seeks to unravel the relationship between informality, living heritage, and urban learning, which is key to shaping the potentials of a negotiated co-production of urban space. She is currently Associate Professor and Programme Leader of the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at University College London. In this role she has developed learning alliances with community partners across the Global South and more recently in the UK. While working in Colombia, she led collaborative initiatives of transnational design studios on spatial strategies for informality. Catalina’s has developed long term alliances with diverse community organisations in Medellin. These collaborations seek to recalibrate knowledge production from the Global South and to explore the possibilities for shaping a plural urban design that questions how to decolonise our scholarship and practice while fostering spatial, epistemic and racial justice.
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