Verena Andreatta is architect and urban planner (Bennett University, 1981). She works for the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since 1982. She was awarded with a NFP fellowship and enrolled in the 44th ICHPB-International Course on Housing, Planning and Building at IHS (1984) following the workshop ‘Settlement Planning and Design’ coordinated by S.K. Das and Forbes Davidson, with a specialisation on “Low Cost Infrastructure, coordinated by Marc Jansen.

Her career ascended upon returning back from her period of study in Rotterdam. She became Director of Urban Projects of the Municipal Planning and Information Agency-IPLANRio and later became its president (1993-2000), the highest position of this partly autonomous municipal organisation. During this period IPLANRio was restructured and then transformed into the Municipal Institute of Urbanism Pereira Passos-IPP. Before becoming president of IPLANRio, she managed important projects in the city. She coordinated the project ‘Rio Orla’ concentrating on the city’s waterfront (30 km of beaches) and the ‘Urban Revitalisation of waterfront of Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon’. These two projects were undertaken prior to the UNCED-United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992). During the period of her presidency she actively participated in Rio de Janeiro’s most important municipal programmes – ‘Rio Cidade’ and ‘Favela Bairro’ which were large-scale urban revitalisation and upgrading of Rio’s formal and informal areas.

Apart from managing the municipality’s most strategic municipal agency, she also was directly engaged in the management of large-scale urban operations in the city, reporting directly to the mayor of the city and being part of strategic urban policy groups within the municipal government, receiving and discussing with visiting experts from various international organisations. She played an important role in strategising the most important urban interventions in Rio de Janeiro. She also coordinated the design of and implementation of the city digital map and the integration of the physical and fiscal cadastre. During her presidency, Verena gave an international projection to the work of IPP by linking its staff to international agencies and institutions like UN Habitat, IHS, Municipality of Barcelona and others. It was under her presidency that IPLANrio gain the international award at the 1996 UN Habitat II Conference with the Best Performance Urban Indicators.

Additionally, while being IPLARio president, Verena also worked in Praça XV Urban Revitalisation Project and in the management of the master plan for the Praça XV prepared by Oriol Bohigas and Nuno Portas, two internationally renown European architects commissioned by IPLANRio to elaborate alternative solutions for that vital part of the city.

Right after returning from IHS, Verena started publishing more frequently and she engaged herself in several books and articles like the ‘Manual of the Cultural Corridor or Rio de Janeiro’ (1985), where she outlines how to rehabilitate and reform existing buildings or build new ones in Rio’s inner city historical core. She also published a “Guide to Shopping in Rio’s Inner city (1987) within the framework of the programme to revitalise economic activities in Rio’s inner city. She also published an article entitled ‘Living in Rio’s Inner City’ (1991). At the moment, she works as a special senior advisor of IPP and is based in Barcelona where she is earning a special leave to develop her PhD research with the Polithecnic University of Catalunya – ETSAB. She regularly visits Rio de Janeiro to continue her work with IPP focusing on old port area redevelopment processes, urban revitalisation and other areas of interest of IPP. She is also engaged in various academic activities in Barcelona, lecturing for the Architecture Union of Catalunya in the European Biannual of Landscape Architecture, and publishing in Spanish and Catalan with Jordi Borja and Zaida Muxi, Manuel Herce and other prominent professionals from Barcelona.

“When I think of the knowledge I acquired at IHS, I think that my period of study at IHS meant an empowerment for me. It provided me with the possibility to actually realise that through the technical knowledge I would be able to transform the city, the management of planning processes, and would be able to act with efficiency. I followed my professional career within IPLANRio/IPP, within the perspective of a public agency, but with a strong belief that this transformation was a concrete opportunity and not a probability to act in the future. Fortunately I was able to participate in municipal governments that had clear policies in place and unequivocal urban projects intervention methods that actually had the power to transform public spaces” (Andreatta, 2005).