To kick off the Design Matters lecture series on Wednesday, September 24, Dr. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor of Urban Planning and Associate Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, will offer an expert’s take on the challenges facing the urban landscapes of modern Canadian and American cities.
With degrees in architecture and urban planning, Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris’ research focusses primarily on the public environment of the city: its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on those who live in urban centres.
Although the field of urban design has flourished in recent years, many of the issues and problems haunting urban environments have yet to be resolved.
As social and physical changes affect our public realm, Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris’ position as a faculty member at the Luskin School of Public Affairs places her in the ideal context to analyse the cultural determinants of design and planning and their implications for public policy, quality-of-life issues for inner city residents, transit security, urban design, land use, and transportation issues in North America.
“New social forces and concerns constantly shape our cultural landscapes at an increasingly fast rate,” she explains. “Many of these have important spatial and design implications when it comes to thinking about how we should design and build our cities.”
Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris’ lecture will highlight some of the most prominent forces that are shaping our cities and social lives, including intensifying globalization and immigration flows that have led to new ‘ethnospaces’ and the proliferation of informality in cities; the rise of a post-Fordist economy centered around consumption, tourism, and entertainment; increasing flows of population to urban areas and increasing automobile ownership, and the explosion of new information and digital technologies.
Further, Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris will explore how concern about climate change, the epidemic of obesity and sedentary lifestyles, and fear of crime and terrorism have emerged or intensified to impact design decisions in the last several decades.
Join us at the Downtown Campus (906 – 8 Avenue SW) on Wednesday, September 24 at 6:00PM, as Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris offers insight into the role and responsibility of urban design in addressing the outlined challenges, and proposes new normative goals for urban design.
Design Matters is sponsored by Gibbs Gage Architects and Section23 Group. For more about the lecture series, visit: http://evds.ucalgary.ca/content/design-matters-lecture-series
Registered architects may earn 1.5 continuing education credits from the Alberta Association of Architects for attending a Design Matters lecture. Sign-in sheets will be at the registration table at every event.