Dr Adriana Patricia LÓPEZ VALENCIA (Colombia)

Adriana has a keen interest in sustainability of informal settlements. She captures economic, ecological, and societal components of an area or urban space as a basis for land-use planning.

PhD in Environmental Sciences

Current position: Assistant Professor at Universidad del Valle, Colombia

Research focus: tactical urbanism for urban sustainability and vulnerability reduction strategies

Thanks to her Green Talents participation, she worked as a visiting researcher at the United Nations University in Bonn, studying urban vulnerability to climate change in informal settlements. Following this, she started joint research projects on community participation and participatory urban design to reduce vulnerability and adaptation to climate change from a local perspective by using approaches from tactical urbanism.

2010-2011 Emerging Leaders in the Americas programme winner, Canadian Government
2009            Academic Excellence Award – Colciencias Doctoral Programme

CV as submitted for the Green Talents award (2010):

Universidad del Valle, Colombia

Research focus: sustainability of human settlements

Adriana Patricia López Valencia earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture at the Universidad del Valle, followed by a Master’s Degree in Urbanism at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, both in her native Colombia.

Aside from teaching and academic research, Ms López Valencia worked as a consultant for the city of Yumbo in western Colombia and for Energy Rating Services, an energy and sustainable design consulting firm. Ms López Valencia is currently pursuing a PhD in Environmental Science at the Universidad del Valle in Colombia. As part of her doctoral work, she also spent several months conducting research at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada.

Ms López Valencia is interested in holistic approaches to capturing economic, ecological and societal components of an area or an urban space as a basis for land-use planning. The jury reserved special praise for how she makes innovative use of different tools like geographical information systems designed to develop spatial simulation models. The jury felt such an approach is ideally suited for climate-friendly, sustainable urban planning in the future.

The Green Talents Forum has intrigued Ms López Valencia because of the exchange of ideas it can provide. “We will be able to share our views with professionals who work on the same questions but from different perspectives. This will be a good way to open our minds and find answers to questions that arise in our research.”