IAAC Lecture Series “Latin America in Transition” by Felipe Vera
Felipe Vera is a Chilean architect and urbanist working as Sector Specialist at the Housing and Urban Development Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). At IADB, he leads urban design and planning programs and regional technical cooperation, focusing on slum upgrading, resiliency, and ecological design. His knowledge work focuses on exploring the agency of temporality and the potential of design imagination for synthesizing more adaptable solutions made up of softer strategies, which are elastic, reversible, and capable to encompass a wide spectrum of unpredictable city pressures. In relation to this, Vera has written and lectured extensively on issues about urban design and planning, migration, and ecology in vulnerable contexts.
He is the author of several books and publications aimed at understanding and designing strategies for building resilience in vulnerable cities. Some of these include “Informing the Informal: Strategies for Generating Information in Vulnerable Settlements” (2021), which covers topics such as data collection for designing urban policies in precarious areas; the Inmigrando series, comprised by the books Strengthening Destination Cities (2020), Building Plural Cities (2020), and Understanding Cities in Transition (2021) —which seek to understand migration flux, its impact, and potentials on destination cities.
Latin America in Transition: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration
The world is facing a moment of growing climate and migratory uncertainty. The accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters is giving rise to new and more complex forms of vulnerability. Migration has acquired an unprecedented dimension, while the infrastructure that will respond to climate displacements remains unanswered. While current estimates account for 250 million international migrants, predictions indicate that by 2050 this number will increase to 350 million, of which 60% will have been displaced due to environmental factors. Rising sea levels, changes in rainfall distribution patterns and in ocean chemistry will strongly affect coastal cities, where 77% of the at- risk global population resides. The climate crises also accentuate inequalities, as the most vulnerable groups are the more exposed to the effects of environmental hazards. In the near future, the landscape of informality will be a direct reflection of the effects of climate change and its intensified migration.
IAAC Lecture Series – Felipe Vera
Date: Tuesday, 8th November, 2022
Time: 19.30h (CET)
Title: “Latin America in Transition: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration”
Location: In-house at IAAC Main hall, C/ Pujades 102 & Zoom
