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 habitable? 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 understood merely as the absence of disease, but as a physical, mental and social dimension shaped by the conditions in which we live. Understanding that the built environment is part of those determinants —and that it can alter exposures, behaviours and opportunities— changed the way I understand architecture and urbanism. During my master's thesis at the University of Freiburg, reviewing the scientific evidence, I also confirmed that even the most rigorous knowledge loses part of its usefulness when it fails to become comprehensible. So I began translating complex relationships into cartographies, symbols and representations capable of informing decisions.

Over time a complementary question emerged. The conditions of an environment can make certain behaviours and experiences easier or harder, but their effects are neither automatic nor the same for everyone. They depend on the spatial, social and environmental context, and also on there being real opportunities to recognise those conditions, understand how they affect us, make use of them and choose how we relate to the place.

This question led me to develop Habitarse, an independent research, representation and design project-platform. Habitarse begins by researching how public space can widen everyday opportunities to pay attention, perceive consciously, contemplate and reflect. In its first stage it creates and evaluates small situated interventions —questions, signs, routes or sensory invitations— and documents clearly what it observes, what it interprets and what it still needs to verify.