Victoria Chavez Barriga

Victoria is the Urban95 Expert in the Foundation’s Programme Support and Learning team. She is responsible for providing advice and technical assistance to partners implementing projects at scale in Urban95 cities, with a particular focus on sustainable mobility, public space, neighbourhood planning, air quality, climate change, social justice and monitoring and evaluation, through an early-years lens.

She holds an MSc in socio-spatial planning from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Cuenca, Ecuador.

Before joining the Foundation, she co-founded Huasipichanga, an organization focused on urban development with participatory and co-creation methodologies, where she developed concepts and strategies aligned to the principles of sustainability and child-friendliness for cities in Latin America, Europe and Africa.

Constantly driven by the idea that better cities are possible through citizen engagement and participatory planning, Victoria finds it important to be involved in current social discussions seeking citizen-centric approaches that focus on engagement and collaboration, where research and technology are the enablers in reaching governmental, economic and societal goals.

For the last five years, Victoria has been based in the Netherlands, experiencing the culturally diverse city of Utrecht. Lately her time is also filled with reading AI books, sketching new places and watching dystopian movies.