Ana Mendez

Architect and urban planner by the Escuela Técnica Superior de Madrid (ETSAM), Ana has worked as a landscape architect in offices in Amsterdam and London, and as a free-lance in Madrid, and has taught landscape architecture and territorial planning at the Universidad Europea and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and at the University of Tongji in Shanghai. She has also been involved in activist and political projects linked to the production of territory, the construction of the public space, the creation of structures for open culture and, lately, the institutional frame of urban commons. She is a founding member of action-research collectives such as Observatorio Metropolitano and Urbanaccción. Ana's professional and activist background merged in developing the citizen-led platform Ahora Madrid that won the government in Madrid in June 2015, where she worked in the coordination and development of the program and later as advisor to the City Council. Ana is currently doing doctoral research at the University of Sheffield on the becoming-common of the public with a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council. She is part of the Urban Commons Research Collective, the Oficina de Acción Comunal, and the European Municipalist Network.

Between October-December 2022, she will be doing an Overseas Institutional Visit in Bruxelles, co-hosted by CESIR and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – VUB. The aim of the visit is to share and discuss early research findings. The 'Becoming-Common of the Public' research focuses on integrating commoning experiences in urban planning processes. It applies an iterative analysis method through three phases with interviews and workshops. Fieldwork in Barcelona studies actors and strategies involved in public-social initiatives developed under the municipalist government of Barcelona en Comú, 2015-2021.

 

Publications

Urban Commons Research Collective: Emre Akbil, Alex Axinte, Esra Can, Beatrice De Carli, Melissa Harrison, Ana Méndez de Andés, Katharina Moebus, Thomas Moore, Doina Petrescu, Urban Commons Handbook (Barcelona: dpr, 2022).

Méndez de Andés, Ana, David Hamou, and Marco Aparicio Wilhelmi, eds., Códigos comunes urbanos: herramientas para el devenir-común de las ciudades (Barcelona: Icaria. 2021).

Méndez de Andés, Ana, Políticas públicas municipalistas y acción de gobierno en las ciudades del cambio, in Ciudades democráticas: la revuelta municipalista en el ciclo post-15M, ed. by Laura Roth, Arnau Monterde, and Antonio Calleja-López (Barcelona: Icaria, 2019), pp. 113–43.

Méndez de Andés, Ana, ed., Urbanacción 07/09 (Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 2010).

 

Collective Research & Action

European Municipalist Network
Observatorio Metropolitanoo
Atlas of Change
Lines of Flight