Dr. Santiago Mota

Biography

Santiago Aurelio Mota is a transdisciplinary educator, designer, and researcher who is dedicated to envisioning and realizing equitable and desirable futures for communities confronting climate change. His work focuses on knowledge co-creation to support government entities, multilateral organizations, planning firms, educational institutions, and independent social organizations across Latin America and the United States. Engaging in active collaboration, Mota generates contributions aimed at enabling built environments to adapt and thrive in a warming planet. Over the past decade, he has led an independent architecture and urban design practice that has developed holistic projects at various scales, including built works such as La Unidad Market and a Community Center Park in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico, and Plaza Central Sisbichén in Chemax, Yucatán, Mexico. Mota’s projects often integrate social equity with extreme heat adaptation and hydrometeorological resilience strategies. Concurrently, he serves as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank’s Housing and Urban Development Division, focusing on platforms that map climatic futures for cities and regions in Latin America and the Caribbean. His extensive expertise encompasses architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban ecology, and advanced geospatial data analysis. He is also a Design Critic in the Master of Design Engineering program at Harvard University, contributing to the Graduate School of Design and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Research Interests