Urban Studies Center
Introduction
urbam EAFIT (founded as Center for Urban and Environmental Studies in 2010, in Medellín, Colombia) is a training, research and projection center that is part of the EAFIT University, a social organization founded by Juan Luis Mejia Arango, Alejandro Echeverri, Jorge Giraldo") and Michel Hermelin Arbaux").
The idea of its founders was to create a center where various actors from a wide variety of sectors and ideologies could come together, to develop pending conversations around city issues. Its headquarters, the casa manigua or casa urbam, is located in the Aguacatala 2 neighborhood, near the Aguacatala Station of the Medellín Metro.
History
2010
Juan Luis Mejía Arango, rector of EAFIT, invites Alejandro Echeverri to found the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies.
2014
The first cohort of the Master's Degree in Urban and Environmental Processes enters.[1].
2020
In January 2020, the Undergraduate Degree in Urban Design and Habitat Management was officially opened.[2].
2021
In October 2021, on the occasion of a postponed celebration of the Center's 10th anniversary,[3] a spatial transformation of Casa Urbam was carried out. In this redesign of the house, a series of workshops, conversations and co-creation spaces were developed, the result of which was Casa Manigua: a renaturalized version of the headquarters, seeking to be a nucleus of biodiversity. As part of this event, the Medellín Botanical Garden gave the Center a seedling of Calliandra Medellinensis or Carbonero Antioqueño, a tree endemic to the Metropolitan Area. The planting of the tree was an open event attended by the director of the Garden, Claudia Lucía García[4].