Petra Hurtado

Petra Hurtado (née Stieninger) has worked in the field of urban sustainability for over 10 years in leading positions as well as a consultant and researcher in the public, non-profit and engineering sectors, and has also taught at various universities.

She studied Spatial Planning at the Technical University of Vienna (TUW) where she also completed her PhD on “Changing Human Behavior towards Energy Saving through Urban Planning” in partnership with New York University. Her doctoral thesis was published as a book in 2013. She has lived in Chicago since 2011 and spent her first year there researching sustainable urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, sponsored by an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation grant. She is currently a self-employed consultant in the field of urban sustainability and works with universities in the USA, Europe and South America on various research projects.

The main subjects of her work and numerous publications are global urban development, sustainable cities, smart cities as well as behavioural change and environmental psychology. Petra teaches “The Psychology of Urban Sustainability” at the TUW and is a guest lecturer at Loyola University Chicago and the Universidad Tecnologica de Bolivar in Columbia.