Fernando Carrión

The fragmented city, as Carrión defines it, is not the usual unequal city. It is a new configuration in which the parts stop needing each other: the gated development with its own security, school and shopping mall does not use the city's public space, and the working-class district has no access to the other's services. Each fragment works inwards, and what disappears is precisely what was shared.

His work on citizen security starts there and is his most influential contribution to public policy. Against the punitive approach, Carrión argues that urban violence concentrates in very specific places and hours, that it has to do with the abandonment of public space and the absence of facilities, and that the responses which work are urban ones: lighting, night transport, mixed uses, people on the street.

Carrión is an Ecuadorian architect and urbanist, professor and researcher at FLACSO in Quito, where he directs the city studies programme. He was a councillor of Quito and has advised local governments across the region. He has also written a weekly newspaper column for decades, which has given his ideas unusual reach for an academic.

His other line of work is historic centres, on which he holds a clear position: recovering them by turning them into a tourist stage set and pushing out their residents preserves them as a façade and kills them as a city. He has also studied border cities, a neglected object and a very pertinent one in the Andes.