Oscar Oliver-Didier is a Bronx-based urban designer and researcher
from Puerto Rico that, after 15 years as an educator and practitioner,
became a Henry M. MacCracken and Urban Doctoral Fellow in
American Studies at New York University. He is also a member of the
adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University and
has taught at The New School Parsons and the School of Architecture
at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR). Until recently, he
served as the Senior Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the
Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning.
His research interests lie at the intersection of radical place-making,
memory, and Latinx futurity from the 1970s to the present. For him,
experimental land-based relationships become an essential means for
recovering urban sovereignty and a way to partake in the sequences
of social reproduction in new terms. He has also published on public
housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx,
and the performative nature of urban protests and occupations.
He was director of the research collective CIUDADLAB; the
Laboratory for Housing, Planning and Urban Studies at the PUPR; and
was an Auxiliary Adviser on urbanism to the Governor of Puerto Rico.
He has edited multiple journals such as ENTORNO, Polimorfo, and
Planning Perspectives. He holds a Master of Architecture in Urban
Design from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in
architecture from PUPR with distinction. In 2019 he was awarded the
Michael Weil Award for Urban Design, a recognition of excellence in
the pursuit of urban design in the NYC public sector, and the Héctor R.
Arce Quintero Award in 2012, recognizing the work of an individual
that promotes the city through practice, academia, and/or the public
sector.