In January 2025, the Holcim Foundation played host to a second Global Fellowship—this time for Latin America—in Mexico City. The immersive two-week program occurred in collaboration with UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and focused on sustainable construction rooted in the social, environmental, and political realities of the region. The Fellowship is part of the Holcim Foundation’s global initiatives to support next-generation practitioners in the built environment.
From North to South: A shared journey
This Latin American edition of the Fellowship builds upon the momentum of the inaugural one, the North America Fellowship, held in New York City in August 2024. Both programs addressed urgent sustainability challenges and encouraged interdisciplinary exploration, but each was shaped by its regional context.
In New York, the focus was Decarbonization at Scale, engaging with global design firms and high-density infrastructure to explore scalable solutions to reduce carbon in the built environment. In contrast, the Fellowship in Mexico City turned the lens inward—toward land, water, materiality, and community—by highlighting practices that are deeply embedded in place and culture.
Latin American cities often operate in dualities—rapid growth and systemic inequality, formal and informal development, risk and resilience. This creates a unique urban fabric where local knowledge and lived experience are as critical to sustainable solutions as technical expertise. The Fellowship took this complexity as a starting point, using Mexico City’s layered context to explore how sustainability can be reframed.Together, these Fellowships chart a journey: a progression through different scales, climates, and systems, with shared values around knowledge sharing, collaboration, and driving change in the industry.
Tackling macro-challenges from the ground up
From Sao Paulo to Lima, Bogota to Mexico City, Latin American metropoles are growing fast—but also facing profound constraints: environmental degradation, sprawling informal settlements, water scarcity, and a growing need to rethink infrastructure and construction practices to address inequality.
Yet these challenges are also driving innovation. Across the region, communities and practitioners are redefining how to build - drawing from indigenous knowledge systems, climate-responsive design, and grassroots engagement—while dealing with the complexities and inefficiencies of local regulations. This reframing opens the door to construction models that are more sustainable and more socially rooted, locally appropriate, and economically viable.
The region also carries a unique legacy of indigenous knowledge, rich biodiversity, and cultural depth that can open doors to alternative and regenerative ways of building and living. This isn’t about nostalgia—it’s about reactivating systems of knowledge and care that have existed for centuries, and integrating them with contemporary tools and design practices.
The Fellowship’s theme, “Unearthing Futures.” invited participants to uncover, reinterpret, and reimagine what sustainable construction looks like through a Latin American lens. Over the course of the two intensive weeks, Fellows and participants, engaged in seminars, studio sessions, site visits, and collaborative design work structured around five core themes:
- Soil & urban development: Investigating how unchecked urban expansion affects soil health, with an eye toward restoration strategies and development patterns that conserve natural ground conditions.
- Water & hydrological resilience: Learning from traditional water systems and contemporary nature-based solutions to address Mexico City’s complex relationship with water—scarcity, quality, and flooding.
- Community & social equity: Engaging with participatory design and community co-creation to ensure that built interventions respond to the lived experiences and aspirations of diverse populations.
- Recycling & adaptive reuse: Highlighting how circular thinking and material reuse can mitigate extractive patterns and extend the life cycle of the built environment.
- Heritage & identity: Exploring how architecture can both honor and reinterpret cultural narratives by balancing modernity with preservation and social sensitivity.
Learning from practice
As with the first Fellowship in New York, this one brought together a network of architects, designers, and sustainability experts from the breadth of Latin America. It was facilitated by Gabriela Carrillo and Jose Amozurrutia Cortes of Colectivo C733, with support from UNAM, and guidance by Saba Meidany and Luisa Pastore of the Holcim Foundation.
Firms such as JSa, Locus, Riparia, and Taller Capital were joined by David Barragan (Al Borde, Ecuador), Marta Maccaglia (Semillas, Peru), Michael Smith (EntreNos, Bolivia), and Edgar Mazo (Connatural, Colombia), offering insight into community-centered and environmentally sensitive design practices.
Site visits included the Utopias public space projects, the evolving La Condesa neighborhood, and the Xochimilco canal and wetland system – each providing a different lens on regeneration, infrastructure, and local identity.
These exchanges emphasized the value of designing with constraints that can generate more thoughtful, place-specific, and inclusive outcomes. A valuable lesson learnt is that innovation also comes from making the most of what is already there—whether a material, a story, or a community connection.
Empowering a new generation of regional collaborators
The Fellowship served as a platform for knowledge exchange, creativity, and catalyst to create lasting relationships. Working in teams, Fellows developed proposals and frameworks that addressed the challenges of their own cities, applying lessons from Mexico City to their local contexts.
The work wasn’t about exporting solutions but rather adapting them and acknowledging that while challenges are shared, answers must be locally grounded. In that way, the Fellowship modeled the type of regional collaboration that could accelerate transformation at scale.
The collaborative explorations emphasized the interconnected nature of today’s urban challenges and the range of powerful ideas that the next generation can readily tap into through their energy, vigor, and willingness to contribute to positive change.
Moments of reflection, shared social activities, and laughter rounded out the experience, creating a vibrant cohort connected by a common purpose: to shape cities and communities that are balanced, inclusive, and deeply connected to their local contexts.
What’s next?
The Holcim Foundation Fellowship will be heading to Europe, with upcoming editions in London (in July with UCL) and Brussels (in September with ETH Zurich). Interested participants are encouraged to watch for announcements and application updates.
