Belinda Tato and José Luis Vallejo founded Ecosistema Urbano in the year 2000, a multidisciplinary studio with offices in Madrid and Miami. They define their approach as ‘urban social design,’ in which urbanism, architecture, engineering, and sociology tools converge. The result of this sum of disciplines is an architecture that gives maximum prominence to spaces and dynamics that improve people’s self-organization, social interaction within communities and their relationship with the environment. Tato and Vallejo are both professors at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design since 2010, and they have implemented their projects in various countries around the world.  

Climatic design as a tool for public space activation

The solutions and strategies that Ecosistema Urbano proposes in their projects always involve zero or very low energy consumption. To achieve this, they resort to the use of natural resources and passive and active systems, as well as the adaptation of public spaces to climate, and the incorporation of local knowledge. These strategies finally make possible a use of public space that extends throughout the year, encouraging and favoring social interaction and public life as a constant, which means, especially in extreme climates, an important factor for improvement in the quality of urban life, often limited by inconveniences of a meteorological nature... [+]