Juan Diego Martínez Otálvaro

Pre-Doctoral Teaching Fellow

Juan Diego Martínez Otálvaro is an architect and urban and landscape designer whose work examines how landscape and infrastructure mediate the transformation of urban territories under global warming. He holds an Advanced Master in Urbanism, Landscape and Planning from KU Leuven, where he graduated summa cum laude, and Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He currently works with RUA on landscape urbanism projects in Vietnam, Cambodia and other contexts and over the past two years has collaborated with research groups at KU Leuven on landscape urbanism contributing to academic publications in progress. 

His thesis, “Amphibious Urbanisms: Reasserting the Ciénaga Grande as a Counter-Landscape in the Colombian Caribbean” proposes design strategies to restore the wetlands dynamics, reweaving its communities with water, and reasserting it as a living counter-landscape to the mineral urbanisms of the region.

Before joining academia, he spent over a decade practicing architecture and landscape urbanism in Colombia, leading multidisciplinary teams on large-scale public infrastructure. He collaborated on the competition, master plan and design of Parques del Río Medellín, and later coordinated the detailed design of its first construction phase. He also worked as landscape designer for Corredor Verde La Picacha, awarded Colombia’s best cycling-infrastructure project in 2019. His practice has centered on translating active-mobility and landscape corridor projects from territorial analysis into built work.