The Emeritus Professor of the National University of Córdoba and Conicet researcher was distinguished for her work on women's rights to the city, housing and habitat.

The architect Ana Falú received the title Doctor Honoris Causa from the UNR in an act that took place at the Faculty of Architecture and was presided over by the Vice Chancellor Darío Masía and the dean of this house of studies Adolfo del Río, godfather of the doctoral candidate.

“This recognition of my career is recognition of the contributions that many have been making to feminism and from feminism, to the discipline and profession of architecture, planning, design, urbanism. This deeply honors me," said Ana Falú.

The professor and researcher maintained that “what the feminist perspective on cities and architecture does is place people and daily life at the center. She calls for the productive and reproductive to be interrelated in order to move towards livable, shared cities. That the State, the community, local governments be attentive to the most pressing social needs”.

The Dean of Architecture Adolfo del Río expressed: "It is an honor and a privilege that the architect Ana Falú is part of our academic community" and clarified that "when we pay tribute to a trajectory, we show what we want to be too". He highlighted "her work as a guide to action and her struggle to transform reality, for respect for diversity, for rights that have been postponed, for equality and for the definitive defeat of all discrimination."

The Architect Ana Valderrama, who connected online from abroad, said that "it is very significant to have someone like Ana Falú who enlightens us and clarifies the ideas to be able to inhabit this world." She explained that she is a professional who always positions herself on the side of life and care policies, on the side of human rights organizations, social movements, popular struggles, gender and diversity struggles, homeless, landless, on the side of racialized, stigmatized and criminalized bodies.

“I thank you for so much social commitment and work done. It fills me with pride that it is our Public University that grants him this recognition for his career," said Vice Chancellor Darío Masía, adding: "This recognition is also for that student you were and the political and social commitment that you have assumed from a very young age. The pains of the struggle that mark your family and personal history have not dented your convictions, on the contrary, they have generated Latin American and international networks that gave rise to institutional spaces committed to the most vulnerable human rights in our society.”

Masía highlighted her work and commitment to "building a feminist organization that recognizes the social division of labor and the differential use of time by women and men due to care tasks" and emphasized that "this feminist urban agenda places as a priority the collective over the individual and challenges political and technical planning”.

Gender in architecture and urbanism

After taking the oath and receiving the diploma and medal, Ana Falú gave the keynote address "Genealogy of a gender approach in architecture and urbanism."

“We have been building this critical thinking in a sustained manner within the framework of the plural, multicultural, diverse feminism of our Latin America. Politics and discipline must be feminized and for this we must appeal to creativity, to innovation," he said.

“Putting the collective above the individual, knowing the examples that allow us to question extractivism that is not only about private goods, but about our common goods, the privatization of services, lack of equipment that impacts people's lives and particularly in the lives of women because they live longer but are poorer, have less care and lower pensions than men,” she said.

“We need to question this, these women who are expelled by this extractivism on urban land, by excessive rents, by appropriation of their homes or by inability to pay their mortgages and end up occupying land. There are examples: there are co-housing, cooperatives on land provided by local governments, in use sessions, with participatory programs, professional cooperatives promoting new forms of work, coexistence, community generation through interrelationships, promoting common life. , thinking about common services: common laundries, storage places, terraces for common use, places to leave the bicycle and the baby's stroller.

These things from the microphysics of space that improve the quality of daily life, decommodify homes to avoid speculative uses, expand the affordable housing stock, generate safe, social alternatives to home ownership.”

path

The Architect Victoria Funes was in charge of reading the laudatio with the trajectory of the honoree.

Ana María Falú was born in San Miguel de Tucumán, studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the National University of Tucumán and graduated a few months before the Coup d'état in Argentina in 1976. This event marked her life since shortly after she had to leave the country with her husband and two children, traveling first to Brazil and then to the Netherlands.

Falú became involved in politics since he was a student through groups interested in the living conditions of the poorest sectors of the population, working with “villas” and neighborhoods without habitability conditions. This helped him to start work on social housing and habitat conditions. In his final degree project, he developed, together with the thesis group, the Campo de Herrera Cooperative Project, in Tucumán. The focus was placed on housing proposals for a sugar cooperative in which low-cost technologies were proposed, taking advantage of sugarcane bagasse as a material for the construction of prefabricated panels.

In the Netherlands he completed his postgraduate studies, first obtaining the Diploma in Social Housing at the Institute for International Studies, then obtaining the Doktoraal at Bouwkunde from the University of Delft. He continued to study precarious or informal settlements, focusing on issues related to land tenure. the land, to services and infrastructures, understanding that people can build their homes but they cannot solve the infrastructures, even less when they are occupations in peripheral or rural land.

In the early 80s, she moved to Ecuador with a contract from the Dutch Ministry of International Relations, as a technician for Dutch international cooperation. The conjugation of her different experiences and her growing commitment to feminism, which will start with her in Brazil, make her start working on the relationship between Women and Habitat.

In 1985 she returned to Argentina and won the teaching contest at the National University of Córdoba, where she is now Professor Emeritus. She also entered the Conicet as a scientific researcher. In the field of feminist research and action, she promoted numerous institutional initiatives and contributed to establishing issues related to women's rights to the city, housing and habitat.

She was regional director of UN Women for the Andean region between 2002 and 2004 and for Brazil and the Southern Cone Countries between 2004 and 2009. She implemented the LAC Regional Program of Cities without Violence for Women, Safe Cities for All in five countries of Latin America, which was a milestone in the installation on the feminist, government and society agenda of the need to intersect territories and women's rights to a life without violence. This program executed by the Women and Habitat Network and local governments was an inspiration for other regional and global projects and programs.

Journalist: Victoria Arrabal/Photographer: Karen Roeschlin