Ana Falú

Ana María Falú (born 1947) is an Argentine architect and a social activist for human rights and for women's rights. She has been Regional Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM; now part of UN Women) for the Andean Region (2002–2004) and for Brazil and the Southern Cone Countries (2004–2009). She is a researcher and Professor at the National University of Córdoba (UNC), where she is the Director of the Housing and Habitat Research Institute (INVIHAB). In the field of feminist action, she promoted numerous institutional initiatives and contributed to the establishment of women's rights to the city, to housing, and to the habitat. She is co-founder of the Women and Habitat Network of Latin America, of the Centro de Intercambio y Servicios para el Cono Sur Argentina (CISCSA), of UNC's Interdisciplinary Program of Women's and Gender Studies (PIEMG), and of Articulación Feminista Marcosur, among other areas of action in favor of women's rights. In 2013 she won the Feminist Career Award together with other Argentine women.

Early years Ana Falú was born in San Miguel de Tucumán in 1947, the granddaughter of Syrian immigrants. She is the sister of singer Juan Falú, disappeared student activist , and lawyer and politician Dr. Jose Ricardo Falú. She studied architecture at the National University of Tucumán's Faculty of Architecture and graduated a few months before the 1976 coup d'état. This event marked her life, as she had to leave the country, along with her husband and two children, traveling first to Brazil and then, because of Operation Condor, to the Netherlands. Falú became involved in politics as a student, through groups interested in the living conditions of the poorest sectors of the population, visiting towns and neighborhoods without conditions of habitability. This helped her to start work on social housing and habitat conditions. In her final year's project she developed some houses for a sugar cooperative in which she also proposed using low-cost technologies such as cane bagasse as a material to make prefabricated panels.

Career In the Netherlands, Falú completed a Diploma in Social Housing at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture's Department of International Studies. She continued to study precarious and informal settlements, focusing on issues related to land tenure, services and infrastructures. Her thesis was titled Low Income Housing and Infrastructure. and for Brazil and the Southern Cone Countries from 2004 to 2009. Her position at the UN allowed her to establish more than 10 programs in the region, one of the most important being Safe Cities for Women, Safe Cities for All. This was a pioneering effort which served to inspire other global programs.

In 2009 she returned to Córdoba to do research and work at UNC, where she teaches and directs the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism's Housing and Habitat Research Institute.

Falú has maintained her connection with the United Nations, and she is currently the coordinator of UN-Habitat's gender advisory group.

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