Andrea Urbina

Andrea Urbina’s primary academic interests include urban planning, housing policy, and governance, focusing on the Global South, especially Latin America. Before joining the Ph.D. program, she worked on a government research project on the impact of intensive residential densification in the restructuring of the city, focusing on the urban morphology and urban regulation in Santiago, Chile. She has researched urban renewal, promoting new ways to regenerate plots given to families in a housing policy established in the 1960s in Chile. She has also worked as an urban planner in the Planning Unit of two municipalities in Santiago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in urban projects from the Catholic University of Chile (PUC). Her master’s thesis analyzed Santiago’s densification processes and their socio-political implications in the consequences of “unplanned” densification. Ultimately, she aims to analyze verticalization processes as a new renting trend in Latin American cities. In the Ph.D. program, she seeks to explain the emergence and implications of this new urban rental tendency and its effects on urban morphology, urban planning, and governance.