Luisa Sotomayor

My research investigates the politics of city planning, housing and urban infrastructure in the context of intensifying global urban inequalities and contested forms of state intervention. I focus on two interrelated areas of inquiry. First, I examine how socio-spatial inequalities are produced and governed in contemporary cities, focusing on disparities in access to housing and urban resources, the dynamics of urban violence and insecurity, homelessness, processes of peripheralization, and uneven infrastructure provision—including the coexistence of premium and deteriorating systems, and how these inequities are intensified by climate change. Second, I examine how planning, governance institutions and policy frameworks respond to these exclusions. Drawing on critical planning theory, human geography, and urban political analysis, I examine how planning agendas are mobilized, negotiated, and contested through participatory mechanisms, legal strategies, activism, and insurgent practices. I am particularly interested in the ways ordinary people advance alternative claims to urban belonging and rights through these processes. Geographically, my work is anchored in both Canada and Latin America, with field-based research in Colombian and Mexican cities.

For the past three years, I have served as Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded project Vertical Peripheries: Planning and Citizenship in Colombia’s Commodified Periurban Housing Towers. This research investigates the impacts of Colombia’s national privatized social housing policy on peripheral urbanization in Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Medellín. The project examines how commodified social housing shapes governance and municipal planning, while also influencing residents’ opportunities for agency, citizenship and socioeconomic well-being. Its central aim is to understand how large-scale, market-driven housing provision reconfigures peripheral urbanization, planning practices, and ultimately, residents’ everyday lives.

Publications

Whitney, R.A. and Sotomayor, L. (2025) Peripheral Best Practices and the Politics of Visibility: Urban Planning and Social Urbanism in Mexico City. Cities, 158, 105667, pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.105667

Rady, F. & Sotomayor, L. (2024) Barred and Banished: Encampment Evictions, Public Space, and Permanent Displaceability in Toronto. Antipode, 56(5), pp1830-1856.

Sotomayor, L., Montero, S., & Ángel-Cabo, N. (2022). Mobilizing legal expertise in and against cities: urban planning amidst increased legal action in Bogotá. Urban Geography, 44(3), 447–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2039433

Sotomayor, L., Tarhan, D., Vieta, M., McCartney, S., & Mas, A. (2022). When Students are House-Poor: Urban Universities, Student Marginality, and the Hidden Curriculum of Student Housing. Cities, 124, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103572

Sotomayor, L. and Daniere, A. (2018) The Dilemmas of Equity Planning in the Global South: A Comparative View from Bangkok and Medellín. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 38(3), 273–288. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X17700495

Sotomayor, L. (2015). Equitable Planning through Territories of Exception: The Contours of Medellin’s Urban Development Projects, International Development Planning Review, 37(5), 373-397. https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2015.23