Biography

Ricardo Avella holds a double degree in architecture from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Politecnico di Torino, and graduated cum laude from the European Post-Master in Urbanism at TU Delft. He is now a doctoral candidate at TU Delft, and his research focuses on the modernization of the Venezuelan Amazon during the Cold War era, and on the role of rural housing as an instrument of colonization in the context of agrarian reform.

He has dedicated himself in recent years to understand the role of urbanism in remote and peripheral areas of the Venezuelan Amazon, exploring spatial strategies that can facilitate the growth of local initiatives in a systemic way to overcome the region's dependence on the extraction of non-renewable resources. Ricardo has worked with research groups and artists on this topic, publishing essays and giving lectures internationally. Architect and urbanist, he had his own architectural practice in Venezuela, and collaborated as an urban designer and spatial analyst with ORG Permanent Modernity in Brussels in many large-scale urban projects. He has also been a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Central Venezuela, and worked as coordinator of an advanced master's degree in urbanism at the Università IUAV di Venezia.

Awards

• Gerda Henkel Stiftung PhD Scholarship (2022).
• NALACS Master Thesis Award (2020). Winner of the 2018-2019 award, awarded by the 'Netherlands Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies' to the best master thesis written in a Dutch institution about a Latin American or Caribbean topic.

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