Jorge Pérez Jaramillo

Jorge Pérez Jaramillo is a Colombian architect specialised in territorial development, with more than thirty-three years of experience combining public service, professional practice, teaching and international advisory work. He was Deputy Planning Director of the Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley in Medellín between 2004 and 2008 and Director of the Administrative Department of Planning of Medellín between 2012 and 2015, two positions at the centre of the city's widely studied urban transformation.

At the metropolitan level he led the Metropolitan Guidelines for Territorial Planning, the highest ranking framework governing land use planning across the ten municipalities of the Aburrá Valley, together with strategic projects such as the system of metropolitan centralities. As Planning Director of Medellín he led Agreement 48 of 2014, the city's Land Use Plan, structured around Strategic Intervention Areas and the river macroprojects, and the formulation and adoption of the MEDRío area in 2015, which included thirty-six partial urban renewal plans and framed the Parques del Río Medellín project. He was local manager of the seventh World Urban Forum, held in Medellín in 2014 with UN-Habitat, and coordinated the process through which Medellín won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2016.

In practice he has won national and international competitions, including the Imprenta Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and, in 2012, the international competition for Parque La Carlota in Caracas. He has been dean, professor and lecturer at the architecture faculties of Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Universidad Gran Colombia and Universidad Santo Tomás.

He is a senior consultant to the World Bank, has collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank and has advised UCLG since 2017. He was a Rockefeller Foundation resident fellow at Bellagio, visiting fellow at King's College Cambridge and guest professor at IURD Berkeley, and published the book Medellín. Urbanismo y Sociedad in 2019.