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Category Archives: Press

Mexican Cities Initiative Scholars Discuss Mexico City’s Vecindades


Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Jose Castillo, former GSD instructor, is a practicing architect & urban planner living and working in Mexico City.  Dr. Diane Davis, Director of the Mexican Cities Initiative (MCI), and long-time MCI collaborator José Castillo, were interviewed for Bloomberg CityLab’s article How Mexico City’s Vecindades Became Homes for the Working Class. In it, they discuss CDMX’s urban history, focusing on changes to the city’s lived and built geographies. The article can be accessed here  

Del Temblor al Arte


Del Temblor al Arte Artists’ responses to the earthquake in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are a perfect example of how art can contribute, in an extreme situation like the one triggered in 2017, to expand community awareness by leveraging the potential of local culture. Antonio Moya-Latorre PhD Candidate in City and Regional Planning / Cornell University Architecture & Music / www.amaseme.net Photo credits: Sandra Fernández & Marco Antonio Peralta Velasco. That night, when the earth shook, thousands of stories where buried under the rubble of what had once been the homes and spaces of entire communities. The setting of their lives […]

Oaxaca – Beyond Reconstruction


Last year Harvard GSD faculty and students published a report based on two years of research and studio practice focused on Oaxaca, Mexico after its devastating 2017 earthquake. Based on work with partners at MIT and elsewhere, and through comparative reflection on Chile’s disastrous earthquake a few years prior, the contributors to this publication analyzed what went wrong in the initial disaster recovery in Oaxaca and proposed alternative frameworks for moving forward. They include a series of proposals, projects, and concrete policy suggestions intended to help vulnerable citizens and public officials prepare for the next disaster. In light of the […]

Mexico City Urban Dictionary – Podcast available on iTunes Now


The Mexico City Urban Dictionary released its first 10 episodes on iTunes last November 7th, 2019.  Project Website  Mexico City Urban Dictionary – iTunes This collaborative project aims to identify and organize the terms we use as frameworks for contemporary urban work. It makes use of the podcast as a space for mapping, discussing and defining the urban and architectural concepts that make this city a disputed territory. Each episode is a conversation between architects, urban planners, engineers, activists, logisticians, among many others. Through these conversations, the project aims to contextualize terms in their spatial, social and temporal dimension by […]

Hermosillo: New Innovation Models in Emerging Cities


“City Design, Planning and Policy Innovations: The Case of Hermosillo” is an upcoming book by the IDB and Harvard that, thanks to the support of more than 40 experts, presents a relevant collection of public policy recommendations, programs and projects with the potential of transforming the future of this emerging city. Available for download free of cost at :  https://publications.iadb.org/en/city-design-planning-policy-innovations-case-Hermosillo    In an increasingly urbanized world, cities have become platforms for innovation and change, particularly in developing countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, emerging cities have taken center stage. While megacities face great challenges to distribute goods and services […]

Panel—Staying a Step Ahead: Institutional Flexibility in the Rehabilitation of Social Housing in Oaxaca


Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2016 – 6:30pm Location: Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Room 112 Officials from Fundación Hogares and the Mexican National Workers’ Housing Fund Institute (Infonavit) will join UPD faculty and students in a discussion of planning and design strategies deployed to address the growing problems of housing abandonment in Mexico. Focusing on a social housing development in Oaxaca, the panel will address the conditions that made it possible for national government officials, urban designers, community development professionals, and housing policy advocates to push forward an experiment in policy innovation via on-the-ground implementation. Panel: Paulina Campos, CEO, Fundación Hogares […]