Catalina Freixas

Catalina Freixas has taught in the Sam Fox School since 2004. She is engaged in urban humanities research and practice, with a focus on neighborhood resiliency. Freixas seeks to use Wraparound Theory as the intellectual framework to treat neighborhood problems in a comprehensive fashion while also intimately involving community residents and stakeholders. Her ultimate research objective is to use her current neighborhood project as the first step in developing an interventionist methodology that can be effectively employed elsewhere.

Freixas’s ongoing research attempts to identify characteristics of resilience as integrated processes and systems.  Her long-term objective is to use this research to generate quantitative eco-urbanism strategies that can be utilized to promote resilient communities in a wide range of urban settings. She is currently working with St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, St. Louis Public Schools, and the Urban League to undertake a pilot project in the KingsVille community, a highly distressed area in North St. Louis. Freixas’s previous research sought to better understand the causes and consequences of urban racial residential segregation as well as to generate new mitigation strategies. This project led to Segregation by Design: Conversations and Calls for Action in St. Louis (Spring, 2019).

Her work has been supported by grants from The Divided City initiative and InCEES. She has shared her research widely at national and international conferences and in peer-reviewed papers and publications. Freixas weaves her approach to resilient design into her studios and seminars which has had a significant impact on students in our undergraduate and graduate programs.