Presented by Nik Luka
Join us on February 2nd, 2022 | 12:05 PM-1:05 PM (EST)
Architects, planners, engineers, and other specialists share common preoccupations with questions of design. We struggle with (and muddle through) responses to the climate emergency and intertwined 'wicked problems' including the infrastructure gap, housing affordability, landscape recovery, and of course the renormalization of routine vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on work I am now doing with my research team in Sweden and Canada, I will comment on how professional specialists are transcending disciplinary boundaries in practice. I'll focus on a family of case studies holding promise but remaining fraught with procedural challenges: the densification and retrofit of older suburban landscapes in major metropolitan areas. How might governance mechanisms be (re)conjugated with politics of continuity and change to tackle these challenges, given the complex challenges of collective action where feedback loops are often abstract and/or long and slow by nature? Why does design matter in getting beyond the 'stovepiping' problem in public policy? How can we, as designers, act on the premise that it's not how dense we make it, but how we make it dense
Nik Luka
Nik Luka is cross-appointed to the Peter Guo-Hua Fu School of Architecture and the School of Urban Planning as well as Associate Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal at McGill University and a regular member of TISED.
Prof. Luka's main interest is in urban design as an interdisciplinary approach to better understanding the form, processes, uses, and meanings of space in everyday settings and how this can enable us to develop sustainable yet strategic design and policy interventions.