Andrea Bolnick is an urban design practitioner focusing on issues pertaining to the Global South, informality, and the effects that climate change has and will have. She has a keen interest in spatial injustice and efforts to reverse it. She has worked for over 20 years alongside urban poor communities, designing and implementing projects.
Andy is a proven innovator. She has pioneered the design of fire and flood-resistant informal shelters that are quick to build, durable, and affordable. She also engages the government around rapid shack upgrading as an immediate solution leading incrementally to formal housing.
She was the driving force behind conceptualizing and implementing re-blocking projects, a participative design intervention that incorporates innovative shelter solutions with spatial reconfiguration. She is also the co-creator of the Empowershack project, an initiative that has received international acclaim.
Andy is an Ashoka Fellow. She was a runner-up in the FT/Citi Ingenuity awards in 2013 and co-winner of a Digital Serious Games Competition in 2017. In 2021/2022, she was awarded a Harvard Loeb Fellowship. From August 2022 she will be based at MIT as a Visiting Scholar at the Norman. B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
