Massachusetts Institute of Technology
latin american urban policy association
A space for Latin American cities to lead their own conversation
Territorio is a student-led association at MIT dedicated to building a space for the exchange of knowledge, experiences, and perspectives on urban policy and spatial production in Latin America.
The association brings together the region's diverse planning traditions under one roof, creating a platform where Latin American experiences can not only lead the conversation about their own cities, territories, and communities but also serve as references for other urban contexts around the world, whether Global South or North.
The name Territorio speaks to the core of what we care about: the neighborhoods, the public spaces, the communities, the downtowns, the peripheries, the native land, the traditional geographies and the people who shape and are shaped by them across the continent. In Spanish and Portuguese alike, territorio carries weight through politics, memory, struggle, and belonging.
80%
of Latin America's population lives in cities, making it one of the most urbanized regions in the world.
Its urban history is rich, contested, and distinct, shaped by colonial legacies, rapid industrialization, large-scale informality, social movements, innovative public policies, and an ongoing negotiation between all the stakeholders that shape and experience the territory.
Yet within global planning discourse, Latin American urban experiences are often treated as footnotes: case studies of problems to be solved, rather than laboratories of ingenuity and contested knowledge in their own right. The planning practices born in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Medellín, Mexico City, and dozens of other cities represent genuine contributions to how we think about housing, mobility, public space, land rights, and governance.
The MIT community as a whole benefits from a richer, more pluriversal understanding of how cities are made and contested.
At a moment when planning institutions around the world are reckoning with legacies of exclusion and searching for more just urban futures, Latin America has much to offer, not as a model to be copied, but as a living archive of struggle, innovation, and collective planning. Territorio is our way of bringing that archive into the rooms at MIT where the future of cities is being discussed.
Mission
To provide a consistent, community-driven space at MIT where Latin American urban practitioners, scholars, social movement representatives, community leaders, government officials, designers, and planners can share their experiences directly with the broader MIT community, on their own terms, in their own voice.
Vision
A planning community at MIT that recognizes Latin American geographies and spatial practices as vital sources of urban knowledge: a region that has confronted some of the most pressing challenges in housing, inequality, climate adaptation, informality, and democratic governance, and has done so with creativity, resilience, and decades of experience in urban policy.
What we talk about
Housing and land rights
Housing rights, markets, policies and production, self-built settlements, upgrading programs, rental markets, and ownership.
Urban infrastructure and mobility
Water, sanitation, energy, transport and public works: how they get built, financed and delivered.
Economic development
Local economies, employment, livelihoods and the institutional capacity cities need to grow more fairly.
Governance
How decisions about cities get made and who's involved in them.
Climate and environment
Adaptation, risk, and protecting land, water, and people.
Open to all
Territorio is open to all MIT students, researchers, and affiliates who share an interest in Latin American urbanism.
The association is founded by students from Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, and aspires to grow into a truly pan-regional community that reflects the full diversity of Latin American urban experiences, from the Andean highlands to the Amazon basin, from the Southern Cone megacities to the mid-sized cities and secondary towns that rarely make it into planning curricula.
We actively seek to build bridges between departments across MIT, including the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the School of Architecture and Planning, as well as with other student organizations working on housing, climate, transportation, and spatial justice at MIT and beyond.