Maria Mercedes Jaramillo Loeb Fellow '24

Maria-Mercedes Jaramillo Garcés is a transcultural architect and urban planner.
After more than ten years of experience in urban design, master planning, and strategic land use planning in France, she has been orienting structural transformations for Bogotá since 2021 as the city’s secretary of planning. Prior roles have included urban development director at ProBogotá Región, an independent nonprofit organization sponsored by the top 50 Colombian companies (2015-2020) and CEO of Bogota’s Urban Regeneration and Development Company (2020-2021).
During Covid 19 pandemic, Maria was appointed by Mayor Claudia López to tackle poverty, feminization of poverty, and hunger, engaging in new scales of territorial planning, from the very local to metropolitan dimensions. As a result, Bogota has a new Land Use and Master Plan, Bogotá Reverdece, 2022-2035; a new metropolitan governance structure, Región Metropolitana Bogotá-Cundinamarca; and a new Secretary of Planning. Her role is to shape the future of needed innovations: providing 1 million housing units, enabling 1 million additional jobs, and deploying a feminist ease-of-access care system while preserving strategic ecosystems, fostering adaptation to climate risks, and promoting local, innovative, and participatory planning.