ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITOR MARIANA LEGUÍA
Mariana Leguía is a Peruvian-British architect and urban designer currently based between Lima and Toronto. In 2007, along with her partner Angus Laurie, she co-founded LLAMA Urban Design (www.llamaurbandesign.com). The practice focuses on giving the city back to pedestrians. To achieve this goal, it has developed urban strategies that encourage encounter between a diversity of users within the public realm through enhancing the small scale and diversity of land use and tenure in both regeneration and urban expansion projects. Within her own research, ‘Small is More’, at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2006–7, Mariana found that integration and activity in the public realm depends not solely on density or the traditional concept of land use, but is related to the diversity and pixelation of programme mainly along the ground floor of buildings, where small-scale units with a mix of uses can create a balance of activity, achieving a level of integration among different socioeconomic groups. As part of LLAMA urban design, she is currently working to develop this research into a book. In 2002, she co-founded the Lima-based practice (Y)ncluye. Ciudad (www. yncluye.com), through which she has developed new participatory design processes, which have been put into practice for projects in Chincha and in Pisco, 200 kilometres (124.2 miles) south of Lima. The practice is concerned mainly with the design of public, civic or community buildings as anchors of activity for the configuration of public spaces. Between 2006 and 2009, Mariana worked extensively on different urban projects for a large architectural office in London, including a masterplan for the historic Covent Garden in central London and a number of other major international urban projects in Russia, Europe and the Middle East. Between 2002 and 2003 she worked as a collaborator at Estudio Teddy Cruz in San Diego, California, a practice based on the US–Mexican border zone. Her experience has led to a blending of the global and the local, from bottomup methodologies applied in remote villages in the Peruvian Andes to her largescale strategic work for entirely new cities in Europe and the Middle East. Mariana is currently a professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Catholic University of Peru. She holds an MSc in City Design from the Cities Programme of the LSE, and a degree in architecture and urbanism from Ricardo Palma University in Peru. She has lectured in universities in both Peru and the UK. Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6(t), 7(b) © LLAMA urban design, Mariana Leguía, Angus Laurie; p 6(t) © Mariana Leguía; p 6(b) © (Y)NCLUYE. arquitectura. ciudad. Mariana Leguia, Maya Ballen, Nelson Munares
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