Víctor Cano-Ciborro
His academic background is built on a strong foundation: a PhD awarded cum laude and the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize (2020/2021) from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid —entitled Narrative cartographies: Architectures from the sensitive regime of resistance–, along with a Master’s in Advanced Architectural Projects (recipient of the Spanish National Arquímedes Prize for young researchers in 2013) and a Final Degree Project recognized at the 12th Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2013).
He has conducted research at prestigious international institutions. In 2017, he was a Future Architecture European Platform Fellow, a project funded by the European Union and based in Slovenia. In 2018, he lived in Ahmedabad, India, as a recipient of the CEPT University Teaching and Research Fellowship. He was also a predoctoral visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (six months in 2019) and at Universidad de las Américas in Quito, Ecuador (2019-2023). As a postdoctoral researcher, he has worked at The New School (New York, 2022-2023) and joined Brown University (Rhode Island) in August 2024 as a Marie Curie Fellow.
He has participated in seven international research projects — three in Ecuador, one in Peru, one in New York, and two in Europe — the most notable of which is Failure: Reversing the Genealogies of Unsuccess, 16th–19th Centuries (Horizon 2020 – Marie Curie Grant, ID: 823998). In 2025, he was awarded the La Caixa Social Foundation Grant to develop the project Counter-Cartographies of Migrants to the Canary Islands.
His work has been published in 17 peer-reviewed journals indexed in SJR or JCR, 14 of them as the first author, featuring articles that highlight how historically stigmatized bodies construct their own spatiality—architectures of resistance and subaltern urbanisms—through cartographic and ethnographic methods. Key publications include: Invisible networks: Counter-cartographies of dissident spatial practices in La Jota street, Quito (CITIES, 2023); Three Moments of Migratory Movement as Urban Generator in Solanda, Quito(Bitácora Urbano Territorial, 2023); Detroit Geographic Exploration Institute: Map, sensitive notation, and activism to make visible the spatiality of marginalized communities (RITA, 2023).
He is also the co-author of Rebel Bodies, Rebel Cities (CEPT Press, 2022), a book-catalogue that establishes a teaching and research methodology based on critical cartography in conflict territories, specifically in India.
In 2012, he co-founded the editorial project Displacement’s: an x’scape Journal, and in 2016, he launched the collective Arquitectura Subalterna, whose research has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016 and 2018), the Oslo Architecture Triennale: After Belonging (2016), and the Chilean Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017). During the 2023-2024 academic year, he was part of the Cohort of Planetary Respondents for Columbia University’s (GSAPP) Affirmations seminar. In 2024, he was guest editor of Materia Arquitectura, a journal based at Universidad de San Sebastián (Chile), where he curated Issue 26: Cartography and Resistance. He has been awarded two officially recognized research periods (sexenios) by ANECA, corresponding to 2013–2018 and 2019–2024.
In academia, he served as a Teaching Assistant in Architectural Design Studios at ETSAM (2012-2015). From 2018 to 2023, he was a Visiting Professor at CEPT University (India), where he supervised eight undergraduate thesis projects. Since 2022, he has been a Postgraduate Lecturer in the Master’s in Advanced Architectural Design at Universidad de las Américas in Quito, Ecuador, where he teaches Introduction to Research and has supervised nine master’s theses. Currently, he is an Associate Teacher at Universidad Europea de Canarias, where he coordinated the Architecture Degree for a year and leads the university’s critical urban studies research line.
He has also served as a tutor for workshops and summer schools at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, CANactions School of Urban Studies in Kyiv (Ukraine), Kosovo Architecture Foundation, MA Cities at Central Saint Martins (London), Universidad de Valparaíso (Chile), Universidad Católica Santa María in Arequipa (Peru), and EPFL in Lausanne, (Switzerland).
As a practicing architect, he has worked independently and collaborated with firms such as ‘Gazapo & Lapayese’, ‘z4z4’ (where he was Project Manager for TB House), and ‘Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’. He was a finalist in Europan 14.
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