Biography
My name is Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez. I am an architect (ETSAM, 2012) and anthropologist (UCM, 2014) by training with a focus on the contemporary urban field and urban experience. My twofold practice-led and ethnographic vocation matured through my experience in university exchange programmes in India (CEPT University, Ahmedabad), Germany (TUBerlin) and Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University of Architecture), as well as through my participation in projects of social housing in Nouakchott (Mauritania) and San Salvador (El Salvador).
After three years of practicing as an architect and editor in an architectural magazine, in 2014 I got the opportunity to return to academia, completing a MSc in City Design and Social Science at the London School of Economics. At present, I am doing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL).
The on-going multifaceted crisis in Southern Europe and the impacts of austerity on the structures and dynamics of social life, on the processes of urban development, and on the architectural praxis in my country and hometown, Madrid (Spain), have profoundly influenced my political awareness and practice. As the crisis unfolded I have become a feminist. This personal process, still developing, is providing me with new lens to look at my contemporary reality, as well as to re-look what I had learned. This feminist consciousness informs now my commitment to cross-disciplinary research and my participation in social movements. Both constitute my current particular means to imagine and push for a change of the political and urban paradigms in the places that I inhabit.
*Constituents of the personal statement that led me to undertake this project:
*Desire to re-learn architecture and urbanism from a feminist perspective
*Desire to practise a conscious and active citizenship
*Need to become part of cooperation and support networks as a way to live happy and thrive in the places that I inhabit
*Will to imagine, articulate, represent and rehearse strategies and actions under a new urban paradigm in my context, that of co-responsible caring and sustainability
*Determination to become agent of the political and urban change in which I believe
*Commitment to develop my professional career in the urban field in line with these principles
*Will to create a space to position myself, reflect and communicate this process of learning to others