I am Associate Professor of Urban Anthropology at the University Honors College at Portland State University. Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, I have conducted ethnographic research in the city for more than two decades. My work revolves around planning and design practices, urban bureaucracies, materiality and the built environment, infrastructure and technology, property regimes, and militarism and security.

My first book explores the relations between urban knowledge, downtown renewal, and everyday repertoires and practices of (in)security in Bogotá. My current research is an ethnographic and historical study of aerial cable car technologies in the urban peripheries of Latin America and their promise and limits as forms of environmental, sociopolitical, and aesthetic retrofit.

My research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and Open Societies Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.