Architectures of Ownership: Whose Ground Is This?
Architect and researcher based in Valencia, Spain, currently pursuing a PhD at the Universitat Politècnica de València. My work explores how systems of property, governance and ownership shape architecture and collective urban life, investigating how legal, political and economic structures become embedded in the built environment. Combining urban ethnography, spatial mapping, archival research, photography and critical writing, I approach architecture as both a research practice and a tool for understanding contemporary urban transformations.
The project has been shaped by international research experiences, including a Visiting Scholar position at Columbia GSAPP (2025-2026) in New York and a research collaboration with Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2026). In 2025, I received the Fundación Arquia/Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts XI Research Fellowship, supporting the international development of my doctoral research.
Alongside my academic work, I'm co-founder of CLAB, an architecture collective working across research, competitions, exhibitions and cultural initiatives. Through CLAB, I have collaborated with the City Council of Valencia, Las Naves Innovation Centre and World Design Capital Valencia 2022, while participating in València 360 as one of the five emerging creative teams selected to imagine the city of 2050.
My work moves between research, writing, mapping and public engagement, seeking to translate complex spatial questions into accessible formats. Through architecture, the aim is to reveal the often invisible systems that organize collective urban life while opening new conversations about how our cities are governed, negotiated and transformed, and to imagine how our urban spaces could alternatively be.
Every day, we move through spaces that feel public without knowing who defines their rules. A square, a courtyard, a campus, a garden or a lobby may seem accessible, yet each embodies systems of rights, responsibilities and relationships. Ownership takes spatial form through architecture.
Architectures of Ownership investigates how different property regimes shape collective urban life. Rather than asking if a place is public or private, the project explores how public, private, cooperative, civic and hybrid models produce distinct relationships between buildings, institutions and the communities that inhabit them. Focusing on the interface between architecture and the city, it examines how systems of property become visible through thresholds, access, maintenance, programming and everyday use, shaping belonging, care, participation and exclusion.
Building on ongoing doctoral research and previous fieldwork in New York and London, the project expands an established methodology into an open and collaborative practice. Combining urban ethnography, archival research, policy analysis, spatial mapping, photography and conversations with institutions, researchers and local agents, it develops a shared vocabulary for interpreting urban contexts through the lens of property.
Conceived as an evolving practice rather than a fixed outcome, the project may unfold through collective mapping, public walks, exhibitions, workshops, site-specific installations or publications. More than documenting urban spaces, it seeks to reveal and question the invisible rules through which architecture and systems of ownership organize collective life, inviting new conversations about who defines, negotiates and transforms the spaces we share.
At a time when housing crises, community ownership and new forms of commoning are redefining cities across Europe, the project asks: if architecture designs buildings, how does property shape the relationships they make possible?