Alejandro Echeverri on the Endless Journey for an Equitable City
On 05-April, Alejandro Echeverri joined in discussion by Lawrence Vale, gave the 2022 Charles Correa (1955) Annual Lecture on Housing and Urbanization, entitled the Endless Journey for an Equitable City. The Annual Charles Correa (1955) Lecture on Housing and Urbanization was established in honor of Charles Correa a visionary architect and urban planner who built a substantial legacy through a wide range of projects in India and around the world. The Annual Charles Correa lecture invites leading architects and urban planners working on urbanization in the Global South to share their work on housing and human settlements, and we are incredibly grateful for the ongoing support from the Correa family.
Alejandro Echeverri believes in the ethical responsibility of designers to contribute towards a better society. He is co-founder and Director of URBAM, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies at EAFIT University in Medellin Colombia. His experience combines architectural, urban, environmental projects and planning. He is a Loeb Fellow from Harvard GSD and was given the Obayashi Prize 2016. Between 2004 and 2008 as Director of EDU, the “Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano” of the Municipality of Medellin, and then as the city’s director of urban projects, he led the Social Urbanism strategy to improve the most impoverished neighborhoods, making Medellin a blueprint for the future for other distressed cities worldwide.
He is also active in design through his studio, AlejandroEcheverri + Valencia Architects, focusing on projects with low environmental impact for tropic regions. His work has earned the Colombian National Architectural Award in 1996, the Pan-American Biennale in Urban Design Award 2008, the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2009, the 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard GSD in 2013, among others.
Lawrence Vale, is the Associate Dean Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2002 until January 2009. He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988, and he is currently the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), a unit of the School’s Center for Advanced Urbanism. He was president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for 2011–2013. Vale holds degrees from Amherst College (B.A. in American Studies, summa cum laude), M.I.T. (S.M.Arch.S.), and the University of Oxford (D.Phil.), which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author or editor of eleven books examining urban design, housing and planning.
By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
