About

In the current political context, the first thing I would like to say about myself is that I believe climate change is real, that we are in the midst of multiple environmental crises, and that all of these crises —environmental and climatic—are the result of our careless relationship with our planet and with each other. Not only am I concerned about how these crises will affect the future of my little kid but how they are already affecting the lives of many children around the world today. Addressing these challenges mobilises my work, my thinking, my dreams, my life, though I am aware that I am not doing nearly enough.

Research

Originally from Mexico, I currently reside in Finland, where I am a teacher and (doctoral) researcher, both at the School of Architecture at Tampere University. My research lies at the intersection of architecture, planning, and critical urban studies. I deal with issues of spatial justice and the production of (urban) space, particularly focusing on grassroots, radical, and insurgent spatial and planning practices. Both in teaching and research, my aim is to locate, investigate, and visualise these practices and elucidate the way they produce space decoupled from capitalism’s modes and relations of spatial production offering alternative paths towards more sustainable and democratic living futures. I investigate these practices as they unfold in the interstices of vacancy and abandonment of Latin American cities, centering on the main actors, the spaces, and the processes involved. In 2021, I co-founded the research collective Insurgent Spatial Practices, with whom I have co-organized workshops, developed the course of Urban Activism, and written diverse publications to further investigate these practices in different contexts. In addition, I am embarking on a new research project titled T-Winning Spaces 2035 as part of the ASUTUT research group at Tampere University. This research focuses on the spatialization of Working from/at Home, which I aim to investigate through feminist, decolonial, and spatial justice lenses.

More recently, I have become increasingly interested in the production of knowledge, methodologies, methods, and creative and more rebellious research practices. I engage with feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial epistemological perspectives to understand the relationship between power and knowledge and the machinations at play that have led to epistemic silences and injustices — machinations that are still alive and well in academic institutions and communities around the world. I explored these issues in an article I wrote for the journal of Qualitative Research, titled Challenging methodologies: Deploying liberatory epistemologies to unlock creative research practices. As a way to challenge epistemic silences and injustices, I engage with diverse methods of narrative inquiry, which take people’s experiences and stories as well as the everyday and the ordinary seriously as legitimate sources of knowledge. I continue to explore with narratives and narrative approaches as core member of the COST Action CA18126 – Writing Urban Places, in which I have co-led Working Group 3 responsible of locating, gathering, and sharing methods to unearth, understand, and construct new urban narratives. Within this context, I co-edited a book titled Repository: 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Places, which gathered a set of methods and assignments from diverse fields of knowledge to engage with the material and immaterial dimensions of urban places via narratives.

Teaching

All these research interests and practices build the foundation of my teaching which in turn inform my research and my thinking. My teaching vocation began in 2012 in Mexico, where I became part of the teaching corps of the School of Architecture at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. I have developed the curricula and taught about eight courses since. Currently, I teach the courses of Sustainable Architecture with Sofie Pelsmakers and Urban Planning and Design Theory II with Panu Lehtovuori and Laura Uimonen at Tampere University. I have also supervised two master’s thesis, both of which deal with neoliberal planning, tactical and insurgent practices, and new roles for architects in the climate emergency. I believe that the purpose of teaching and learning today should be to make determined efforts to reveal and address the major societal challenges of our historical moment: the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, social and environmental inequities and injustices, and brittle democracies. However, these immense and overwhelming challenges cannot be dealt with individually nor in the abstract, within disciplinary silos, inside the comfort of the classroom, ignoring other people’s experiences, and without engaging with communities beyond our academic boundaries. Therefore, I strongly advocate engaged, situated, and activist scholarship, whereby the purpose of engagement, and therefore education, is to advance the democratic transformation of our societies to be able to deal with the aforementioned challenges.

Architecture

I started my studies in Architecture in Mexico at the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Querétaro and continued and concluded them at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. After working in different architectural offices in Germany for a couple of years, I returned to Mexico to become part of a small team of architects at the department of construction of the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro (UAQ). During this time, my work as an architect centred on designing public buildings and infrastructure as well as learning environments for the university. This work has been profoundly rewarding and worthwhile and one in which I learned about, worked on, and matured in most phases of architectural practice. While in praxis, I also started teaching in the School of Architecture at the same university. These worlds became intertwined building on each other —teaching raised my awareness about the politics of space in theory which I saw and experienced first hand in praxis which, in turn, advanced my critical thinking about architecture helping me develop the curricula of the different courses I taught and forming the foundations of my doctoral research. Moreover, in 2014, I received a small grant from the UAQ to undertake a research-by-design project to design a small minimum impact house powered only by the sun in order to generate knowledge and skills on sustainable architecture. Practising, teaching, and doing research in Mexico has underpinned not only my future work but also my (professional) identity.

Urban Explorations

Beside teaching and doing research, I enjoy exploring urban spaces in creative ways, documenting them, and writing about these experiences. One such explorations was published in the emerging architectural magazine called -ism, in which, together with Ville-Pekka Säkkinen, I examined the relationship between identity and the built environment. In 2020, together with former students of architecture in Mexico, I began to run the collective feminist blog Interrogativa, which invites women to write a response to the interrogative of the month or pose a question for others to respond to. In 2022, together with women colleagues at Tampere University, I co-founded WiBEN (Women in the Built Environment). The aim of our group is to co-create a positive plan for action to showcase and include a diversity of perspectives in fields related to the built environment, including architecture, civil engineering, urban planning, urban design, and urban studies more broadly. Within the framework of WiBEN, I have organized the WiBEN Public Lectures – People, Space and Gender, to showcase the work of women architects and planners as well as women researchers investigating women’s experiences of urban space who are engaging in and with feminist and decolonial theoretical debates and philosophical perspectives.