Clara Irazábal

Born in Venezuela and trained as an architect in Caracas before a doctorate at Berkeley, Irazábal is professor of urban planning at the University of Maryland and previously directed the Latin American and Latinx studies programme at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and taught at Columbia. Her first book, City Making and Urban Governance in the Americas (2005), compared Curitiba and Portland to ask why two cities celebrated for their planning reached different results in participation and equity.

Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events (2008) gathered studies on how citizenship is exercised in Latin American public space, from marches to festivals, and Transbordering Latin Americas (2014) followed migrant communities living between two countries and two cities. Her work on participation, deliberation and exclusion in the Americas shows that formal consultation mechanisms usually leave out the poor, migrants and women, and that real participation often happens outside them.

She has also researched housing and evictions in Bogotá, Caracas and Los Angeles, and transnational planning between the United States and Mexico. Her contribution is to bring North-South comparison down to the ground, without either shore as the model, and to recall that urban governance is judged by who decides, not by the quality of the plan.