Lumina Baptista

Teaching Fellow

Lumina Baptista is an architect and urbanist whose work bridges architectural design, landscape urbanism and social ecologies.

She earned her Master of Human Settlements from KU Leuven, Belgium, where her work focused on the study of urban fabrics in transcultural contexts and metropolitan park systems in contested territories. Building on a background in architecture and urban design, her work addresses the relationship between spatial design, ecological systems and human agency.

In her practice she has collaborated with international organizations for the development of underserved urban communities in her home city, Maputo, Mozambique. Her contributions include the design of sanitation infrastructure toolkits, a model for housing cooperatives in informal settlements and neighbourhood heritage conservation, addressing social, infrastructural and ecological challenges in rapidly urbanizing contexts, further supported by her Post-Master in Architecture for Crisis, Infrastructure, and Incremental Housing from Universidade da Beira Interior in Portugal.

During her architectural licentiate degree at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, she secured second place in the “Imagining the Future of Informal Housing in Maputo”, an academic competition promoted by the School of Architecture and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand. She later on served as a mentor in digital illustration at her alma mater, guiding students in the international illustration competition “Reimagining Architecture and Urbanism in the Post-Pandemic World” organized by the University of Alberta, Canada, overseeing both the visual and descriptive components of their submissions.

Drawing from her multidisciplinary lens, Lumina’s practice and research focuses on the intersection of adaptive design and social ecosystems.