Architect specialized in urban health

I started by asking the most basic question an architect can ask: what are the minimum conditions for housing to be dignified? It was Peru, it was the start of my career, and the answer I found took me much further than I expected. Because behind that question was another — and behind that one, another still. It didn't take long to realize that the quality of space wasn't only a technical matter. It was a human one.

The following years took me to work in very different territories — El Salvador, the Netherlands, Peru, Bolivia — and at very different scales: from housing to planning, from international cooperation projects to territorial development strategies. In every context I found the same tension: good spaces could be designed, good interventions could be carried out, but if there wasn't something more structural behind them — something that touched people's real living conditions — the impact would dilute. I was looking for a path that was both deeper and more sustainable.

Health was that path. Not health understood merely as the absence of disease, but as the WHO has pointed out for decades: a state of physical, emotional and social wellbeing deeply shaped by the environment we live in. Discovering that the built environment is a direct determinant of health — that a street, a park, a neighborhood can literally make the people who inhabit them sick or well — completely changed how I understood my work. Architecture and urbanism stopped being technical disciplines and became public-health tools. And that opened up a new responsibility — and an enormous possibility.

But there was something more. Over time I came to understand that environment transforms — it's well established that people with access to quality public spaces are more active, healthier and enjoy greater wellbeing. But I also began to see that this impact has a limit when it isn't accompanied by something deeper: the habit, attention and awareness needed to inhabit those spaces differently. A city can have all the infrastructure to foster healthy lifestyles — bike lanes, parks, gathering spaces — and its potential multiplies considerably when people develop the capacity to attend, to perceive, to regulate themselves, to contemplate. The environment and the awareness of the person inhabiting it need each other.

That understanding led me to a broader territory — that of human capacities. And from there Habitarse was born: a transdisciplinary platform researching how space and the experience of inhabiting it can contribute to cultivating fundamental human capacities — attention, perception, emotional regulation, contemplation and reflection — opening up possibilities for a more conscious and fuller way of being in the world.