Annual Symposium

Program

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Leonie Sandercock

Friday, May 4, 9:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Native Chicano Suite, Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center

The connections between urban growth and social justice are complex. The current housing affordability crisis, increasing income disparity, and threats of natural disasters are felt disproportionately by those without voice and power in our current political and economic structure. As we look to the future, how can we learn from past lessons to meaningfully address the challenges of growth by considering problems and approaches through a lens of social justice?

Leonie Sandercock is a Professor at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP). Her main research interest is in working with First Nations, through collaborative community planning, using the medium of film as a catalyst for dialogue, on the possibilities of healing, reconciliation, and partnership. Her documentary (with Giovanni Attili) ‘Finding Our Way’ serves as a catalyst for dialogues in BC communities (see www.mongrelstories.com and www.facebook.com/FINDING.OUR.WAY.thefilm). Her other research interests include immigration, cultural diversity and integration; the possibilities of a more therapeutic model of planning; the importance of stories and storytelling in planning theory and practice; and the role of multimedia in planning.

Dr. Sandercock’s current work focuses on the work of healing, reconciliation and the possibility of partnerships between Native and non-Native Canadians as well as community development and cross-cultural dialogue in historically divided communities. Since 2010, Leonie has been working on a new curriculum, Indigenous Community Planning (ICP), within SCARP’s Masters degree.

This event is presented by the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Urban Design & Planning and is co-sponsored by the Canadian Studies Center in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and UW Department of Urban Design & Planning with additional support from the College of Built Environments.

2017: Program Building Workshop 

Thursday, May 4, 9:00 am — 4:00 pm

Petersen Room of Allen Library, Room 485

Panel Topics

Time

Planners are comfortable describing, analyzing, and intervening in cities on spatial terms, but what about the temporal aspects of cities? How do we account for the city’s gradual or sudden changes, its rhythms, memory, long-term visions, or rare events?

Panelists:

Ann Bostrum, Weyerhaeuser Endowed Professor in Environmental Policy, Evans School of Public Affairs
Tracy Fuentes, Ph.D. Candidate
Boyang Sa, Ph.D. Student
JD Tovey, Ph.D. Candidate
Moderator: Phillipe Valliant Ph.D. Student

Evidence

Our current national political discourse has reminded us that basic notions of “fact” and “truth,” to say nothing of the more complex practices of science, are never uncontested. This points to longstanding issues in planning practice (whose knowledge counts in political decision-making?) and in urban research (what counts as evidence?), but also raises more immediate concerns about urban planning in an era of attack on science. Also, what do you do when the data sources you have relied on are no longer available?

Panelists:

Christopher Campbell, Department Chair, Urban Design & Planning
Bob Mugerauer, Professor and Director of Ph.D. in the Built Environment Program
Ihnji Jon, Ph.D. Student
Moderator: Susmita Rishi, Ph.D. Candidate

Lightning Talks

Mary Roderick, Ph.D. Candidate. Strategic Green Infrastructure: A Geodesign-based Planning Support Approach
Marina Alberti, Professor and Director of Ph.D. Program, Urban Design and Planning. Cities: EcoEvolutionary Dynamics
Qing Shen, Professor in Urban Design & Planning. My current research in Urban Environment & Transportation
Dorian Bautista, Ph.D. Student. The Importance of a Systemic Framework for Resilience: Feedback from Complex Adaptive Socio-Ecological Systems (CASES).
Ann Bostrum, Weyerhaeuser Endowed Professor in Environmental Policy, Evans School of Public Affairs. Bringing Climate Change Home with the CIG Time of Emergence Tool.
Mingyu Kang, Ph.D. Student. Quantification of Urban Form and Human Behaviors

2016: The Future City: Emergence of a New Science 

Keynote Speakers: Drs. Luis Bettencourt & Carlo Ratti

Thursday, May 5, 9:00 a.m–4:00 p.m

Intellectual House

What drives urban evolution? Are there underlying mechanisms and universal laws of urban change? What are the scenarios of plausible urban futures? What do we know, and what do we not know? How can big data and new technologies transform the sciences, decision-making, and the practice? What are the emerging challenges for future research? What kinds of cities do we want to live in? How can communities imagine and direct urban change to create the cities we desire?

Luis Bettencourt, from Santa Fe Institute, is a theoretical physicist who studies the city as complex system with an emphasis on identifying underlying laws that drive innovation and urban change as well as the role of social networks within these urban systems.

Carlo Ratti, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, directs the Senseable City Lab which explores urban imagination and social innovation through design and science.

2015: Scale and Resilience in Planning: from the Salish Sea to the Chengdu Plain 

Thursday, May 7, 9:00 a.m.–4:15 p.m.

Petersen Room of Allen Library, Room 485

The intellectual focus of the Symposium will be the ways in which socio-ecological system processes operate across scale, and the methodological implications for scholarship and planning practice. The Symposium will focus on two case studies (Western Sichuan, China, and the Salish Sea Basin, US-Canada) to address concepts and theories of cross-scale interactions. We aim to gain a better understanding of how to choose relevant scales for analysis of specific problems, and how approaches from various disciplines are useful at different scales. Our wish is to make this event a time when we can benefit from the application of theories and concepts about scale and resilience to concrete case studies.

Lance Gunderson, from Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, has served as the Executive Director of the Resilience Network and is Co-Editor in Chief of the online journal Ecology and Society.

Frans Padt, from Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education and the Department of Landscape Architecture, is a pioneer in addressing issues of scale-sensitive governance of the environment.

2014: The Centrality of Urban in the Anthropocene: Implications for Graduate Research and Education

Keynote Speakers: Drs. Geoffrey West & Henrik Ernstson

Tuesday, May 6, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

Center for Urban Horticulture, NHS Hall

The study of cities is gaining a new centrality. Planetary-scale changes pose inevitably new challenges to understand complex interactions among ecological, socio-economic, and political processes that govern urban development. A very diverse and complex landscape of disciplinary studies ranging from ecology to public health, sociology and political science is shifting the focus of a significant component of their inquiry towards the “urban”. The emerging urban centrality gives “urban studies” a new responsibility and offers our field a unique opportunity for leading a long term interdisciplinary research agenda, transforming modes of inquiry, and reconfiguring educational settings.

Geoffrey West is Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute. He has a BA from Cambridge and Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, where he was on the faculty. West’s interests are in fundamental questions ranging from elementary particles and universal scaling laws in biology to developing a science of cities, companies and global sustainability. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging & death, cancer, ecosystems, innovation, and the accelerating pace of life. He has received many awards and been featured across the media. His work was selected as a breakthrough idea by Harvard Business Review in 2007 and for Time’s 2006 list of “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Henrik Ernstson‘s background lies in system ecology (Ph.D.) and applied physics (MA), but he has developed a core interest in urban political ecology and social movement studies. He is currently Stig Hagstrom scholar at Department of History, Stanford University and was previously at the Stockholm Resilience Center. He is PI of two research projects that combine ethnographic, critical and social network studies around ways of knowing urban ecologies and socioecological movements in Cape Town, New Orleans and Stockholm. Recently he published on urban ecology and African/postcolonial urbanism in Antipode and Regional Studies and leads an book project with studies from Lagos, Rio, Delhi, Yixing (China), San Francisco and Berlin.