My research contributes to understand how we can and should connect history to social futures. My work has interrogated and explored processes of urbanisation in the past and today, including how to make change fair, just, and inclusive, whether through applied transformatiive collaborative research or through new kinds of historiography. I am interested in research that is place-based, comparative, combining disciplinary rigour with cross-disciplinary openness, and, where possible, enabling positive change.
I welcome proposals in any topic that speak to the broad areas of history, urban studies, and arts and heritage. I encourage proposals that are comparative, engage in a dialogue across disciplines, and have an international dimension. I particularly welcome projects that explore the relationship between history and the future.
Before coming to Lancaster (in 2015), I was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London where, among other things, I taught in the MA in Understanding and Securing Human Rights, led the AHRC-funded project Reconfiguring Ruins, and co-convened the Metropolitan History Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research.
My studies and academic career have taken me across disciplines (architecture, human geography and history) and continents, from Cali (Colombia), where I was born, to Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, and Shanghai.
I convene LICA340 Advanced Design Interacions, LICA431 Design Directions, and LICA480 Environmental Crises and Societal Change.
LICA480 invites MA students to the reflect on and engage with the dissonance of temporal scales, namely, the timescales of natural systems, of the built and social environment, and those inherent in how we, as humans, envision and understand worlds in crisis and worlds in change.
I am also coordinating with Professor Deborah Sutton the new MA in Sustainability and Global Environmental Futures.
My research looks at change in particular places at particular times in their history, and does so by interrogating three kinds of relationships:
The relationship between cities and infrastructure, which I have explored through a 'past futures' lens, namely, by considering what visions of the future of cities like London and Paris emerged in the nineteenth century and the role that new technologies played in their making (see, for example, the monograph Cities, Railways, Modernities, 2019). More recently, and as part of the UKRI-GCRF GREAT project (2020-24), I explored the off-grid city in Colombia and Cuba. Thanks to a highly successful international collaboration, we were able to identify the specific challenges which residents of the informal city face to enhance their access to basic infrastructure. This is a project that is very close to my heart and, while funding is finished, it continues to inspire my thinking for current and future projects. Further details are available from the project website: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/great/
The relationships across sustainability, agency and divergent temporal scales. This involves ‘unthinking the thinkable’, that is, relearning the process of what times and which timescales we should consider when imagining and helping shape better social futures. I have developed this approach through theoretical work (as per the Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, 2022) and through interdisciplinary collaboration seeking to Inspire Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility (INFUZE, funded by the UKRI-EPSRC 2024-29) in ways that engage creatively with citizens to envision alternative futures for transport and places.
Last and no less important is the relationship between ruins and utopias, which has involved research projects (Reconfiguring Ruins, AHRC, 2015-16; Mobile Utopias: 1851-2051, AHRC, 2016), publications (the article Beyond Ruinenlust in Geohumanities, 2017; the special issue of Mobilities, 2020) and collaborations with the Museum of London Archaeology and arts organisations such as the New Bridge Project in Newcastle, and Art Gene in Barrow in Furness.
