Atuesta wins the 2021 Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning

Maria Atuesta Ortiz, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the UPenn Center for latin American and Latinx Studies and PhD graduate of Harvard University, was awarded the 2021 Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation in International Planning, from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) and the Global Planning Educators Interest Group. Her dissertation was titled “Forced Migration and Neighborhood Formation: How Communities of Internally Displaced Persons Find Residential Stability in an Unstable World.”

Biography

Maria Atuesta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UPenn Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies. She graduated with a PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard University and a master’s in City and Regional Planning from University of California, Berkeley. With a background in economics and history, her research explores dynamic relations between space and communities. Specifically, in her dissertation, Maria studied how forced migrants accessed housing in Colombia and how this process shaped the creation of different neighborhood communities with different claims on the city. With expertise working in policy-oriented projects for multilateral organizations, public offices, and academic research centers, Maria’s research often includes policy analysis. She has studied how different policies have shaped our material and social environments with unintended consequences that have reproduced social inequality. She has been able to advance her research with support from the Fulbright program for Colombia, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the U.S. Institute of Peace.