Mariana Alegre
Owing to health reasons, Mariana Alegre will not be joining the class of 2023.
Mariana is a Latin American activist in public space, urban mobility and urban disobedience. She is deeply in love with Lima, her home city, despite all the challenges brought by inequality, lack of planning and the gap in access to public services.
After finishing her bachelor’s degree in law and her master in human rights at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Mariana discovered her passion for promoting urban rights. In 2010 she started leading Lima Cómo Vamos–an evidence based urban quality of life observatory–and since then she has been involved in several urban processes, research projects and public policies. Mariana was awarded with a Chevening Scholarship to pursue a MSc in City Design and Social Science at the London School of Economics. Currently, she is a tenured professor at PUCP, teaching Right to the City and Social Management.
Mariana is confident that citizens can overcome hardships and demand their urban rights. That is why she founded Ocupa Tu Calle (Occupy Your Street) in 2014 as a strategy to empower communities to engage in their public spaces. Currently she is developing Sistema Urbano, an urban ecosystem that fosters and promotes urban projects, and Nodal–Urban Nodes of Latin America seeking to contribute to train and empower the New Urban Generation in Latin America. She is keen to explore the urban effervescence of citizen movements and is excited to find urban disobedience everywhere in the world.