Lucia Fernandez is an international specialist on informal recycling, Lucia has worked for more than ten years with waste pickers’ organizations in over 20 countries. Her committed work assisting small cooperatives and trade unions in her native Uruguay and supporting large-scale networking has led to the creation of the Latin-American Waste Pickers Movement and the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers. Lucia has applied her unique academic foundation, where urban planning and sustainable development come together to bring innovative solutions for sustainable and inclusive cities, to a research affiliation with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT between 2011 and 2013.
She holds an MA in Architecture on spontaneous recycling dynamics in the cities of Montevideo and Paris during the 19th century from the Ecole d’Architecture de Grenoble. She also holds a MA in Ethics and Sustainable Development from the Faculté de Philosophie de Lyon, France, on the intersection of tradition and modernity around waste management. Lucia originally studied and taught architecture at the Uruguayan University, where she conducted interdisciplinary research for the inclusion of waste pickers into municipal waste management policies.