SUMMER CITIES SYMPOSIUM 2018

Sean Burkholder is a new Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to joining the School of Design he was an Assistant professor of Landscape and Urban Design at the University of Buffalo. He is also the director of the Landscape Affairs Group, a Landscape Research and Design consultancy focused on the human-entangled freshwater ecosystems of postindustrial regions. The relationship of these issues and their experiential understanding are being explored in a forthcoming book authored by himself and Karen Lutsky titled: Curious Methods (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019). Sean is also co-directing the $1.5m Healthy Port Futures project from the Great Lakes Protection Fund in close collaboration with a range of local and federal agencies. This project stresses the inherent value of landscape design research in the process of maritime infrastructure projects that typically aim only at single-value outcomes. Underpinning all of this work is a particular interest in the way in which substrate and ecology influence the urban landscape and how these systems are interpreted by others.

Eduardo Rega Calvo is an architect, urban designer and researcher based in New York. He is an architecture faculty at PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches graduate history/theory and research seminars and design studios. His most recent project, Architectures of Refusal compiles an atlas of social mobilizations that refuse capitalism, colonialism and human rights violations by revealing their spatialities, urbanisms and architectures. Eduardo is a PhD candidate at ETSA Madrid and an editorial board member of UrbanNext. He is a co-organizer of the recent Structural Instabilities conference at PennDesign and is co-editor of the forthcoming Structural Instabilities journal with e-flux. He holds a professional degree in architecture and urbanism from the University of Las Palmas and a masters of science degree in advanced architectural design from Columbia University. His work has been published and exhibited internationally, most recently at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale After Belonging Agency. His research and design work focus on architecture’s capacity to translate, operate in, and contribute to insurgent social and political movements.

Vincent deBritto is Senior Lecturer in the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Minnesota. He has a B.Arch from California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo and a MLA from Cornell University. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer and intern architect in California and London. His clients included Holland America Lines, Apple Inc., and the San Francisco Zoo. As a landscape architect, he has received a national honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for the Westminster Presbyterian Church Columbarium and a GSA citation for the US Port of Entry in Warroad, Minnesota. He currently teaches courses on representation, climate change adaptation and resiliency, and runs the Cities on Water study abroad program. From 2012 to 2016, he taught the Design Duluth studio with Ozayr Saloojee.

Jean–Luc Fournier is a dynamic and effective educator, researcher, and communicator with an array of professional experience working with Indigenous organizations, institutions and community groups. His main area of research is Mamiwinini-Anishinaabeg Toponymy, History, Language (Mamiwininimowin), Culture, Traditional knowledge, Customary legal system, Traditional land tenure(s). Fournier holds a degree in Aboriginal Studies and Environmental studies from the University of Ottawa.

Chris Hoyt is senior architect with the National Capital Commission in Ottawa where he guides buildings and master plans through federal approvals. Over the course of a 20-year career, Hoyt has worked as an architect on noteworthy projects such as City Centre in Washington DC, the Bridgepoint Health Redevelopment, and the Bay Adelaide Centre, both in Toronto. He has taught architectural and urban design studios at Andrews University in Michigan and at Carleton University. 
 
Hoyt is a licensed architect in the District of Columbia and a member of the Ontario Association of Architects, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and the American Institute of Architects

Nik Luka specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals. Trained as an architect and planner, with a Ph.D. in urban and cultural geography, Luka works extensively on participatory planning and community-based design processes—including adaptive strategies for making infrastructure fit well into local contexts—as well as substantive interests in housing, residential mobility, and the dynamics of peri-urban spaces. He collaborates intensively with Montréal-based government agencies and civil society organizations. His project work also focuses on the Berlin-Brandenburg region, central Sweden, and various urban(ising) settings across Canada. Currently-funded research includes (a) transdisciplinary approaches to the coproduction of new infrastructure for landscape connectivity to support safe movement of humans (active transportation: walking and cycling) and other animals (wildlife corridors) in rural, periurban, suburban, and urban contexts; (b) action-research investigations into crowdsourcing for the deliberative coproduction of strategies for neighbourhood improvement through storytelling and participatory urban design, linking specialists (professionals in architecture, urban design, planning, engineering, public administration, and related filed) with nonspecialists (‘local experts’—citizens and other place-based stakeholders whose voices are rarely heard in meaningful ways); and (c) comparative studies with Swedish and Belgian colleagues on new transit-oriented development (TOD) strategies in Sweden, the Low Countries, and Canada, as well as joint projects with on patterns of transformation in the postwar suburban landscapes of the Swedish welfare state. Luka is an Associate Professor in the Schools of Architecture and Urban Planning at McGill University, where he is also affiliated with the School of Environment, the Institute for Health and Social Policy (IHSP), the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), and the newly-formed Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM).

Karen Lutsky is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. She has held teaching and design research positions in landscape architecture at a number of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and University at Buffalo -SUNY. She also notably held the 2014/15 Miggs Caulkin Urban Visiting Professor Fellowship in the department of landscape architecture at the Ohio State University. Her current design research focuses on landscape architecture’s role in the future of the littoral zone of the Great Lakes and the potential of the lakes’ emergent land to address larger environmental issues and establish healthier relationships between people and the water. Karen is particularly interested in how landscape architecture, a design field that has long worked with issues of change and adaptation, may move the region to better celebrate and engage the dynamics of the shoreline in its efforts to establish a more resilient future. Karen received her BA in ‘Environment and Society’ cum laude from Brandeis University and her MLA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ar. Smitha Mysore is a Professor of Architecture and Program Coordinator, Center for Smart and Sustainable Technologies at SJB School of Architecture and Planning (SJB SAP), Bangalore, India. At SJB SAP, context-sensitive design possibilities, equity, access and historical influences have been central to her teaching. Prof. Mysore has been leading and coordinating studio teams, which explore methods to incorporate larger concerns impacting built environments through analytical studies and design projects at the undergraduate level. In addition to teaching theory and studio courses, her academic engagements include international collaborations, faculty-curated international architectural tours and coordinating architectural research as the first recipient of a Science and Technology grant for architectural research from the Vision Group for Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka, India. Prof. Mysore’s efforts as an academic Planning Consultant for the Center for Sustainable Development, Bangalore, a not-for-profit organization, contributed to the ongoing review of the BIAPA (Bangalore International Airport Planning Area) Master Plan.

Steven Rugare is an Associate Professor at Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, teaching courses in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism. Among his current courses are the graduate seminar “Forces that Shape Cities” and seminars on “World’s Fairs and Architecture” and Frank Lloyd Wright. From 1999 to 2009 he was a member of the professional staff of Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, working on publications, events, exhibitions, and design competitions, and he continues to collaborate with the staff on programming. With Terry Schwarz, he edited the first two volumes of the CUDC-s Urban Infill journal.  He has presented his research on at the International Planning History Society, the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, and other venues. And he is currently working on a book on modernism in the communicative and planning context of world expositions. Before coming to Kent State, he taught at Oberlin College and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He received his bachelors in political philosophy from Michigan State University and an MA from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Saloojee previously taught at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, where he was an Associate Professor of Architecture with affiliate faculty status in Landscape Architecture and Religious Studies. Before moving to Minnesota in 2005, he studied, taught and practiced architecture here in Ottawa, receiving his B.Arch and Post-professional M.Arch (Theory and Culture) from Carleton University. He completed his Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London).

Professor Saloojee teaches courses in architectural design, urbanism, and history that explore themes and questions of water, landscape, infrastructure, post-coloniality in alternative urban and landscape futures. His research and academic interests include a focus on politically contested terrains through the intersections of architecture, landscape, and cultural geographies. He is currently working on a project called “The Incommensurate Archive,” an outcome of his doctoral work that explored the issue of the archival gap in South Africa’s colonial past and post-colonial present.

He continues to work with the interdisciplinary, multi-partner collaboration at the University of Minnesota – the Great Lakes Design Lab – with professors Karen Lutsky and Vince Debritto. At Carleton University, he partners with Professor Catherine Bonier on the co-directorship of the Carleton Urban Research Lab(C.URL) at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism whose focus centers on water, cities, and equity.

Born in 1966 and holding a Master’s degree in environmental science, Mr. Tremblay started his career with Tecsult in Montréal before becoming the environment advisor for the city of Gatineau in 1992, a post he has held for various municipal and regional departments ever since.  In this capacity, he has participated in regulatory and policy work touching all spheres of municipal environment, including contaminated sites rehabilitation, land use in natural and industrial risk areas, waste management, water purification, mosquito control, health risk assessment, noise and nuisances, as well being the president for five years of the Association of waste managing municipal organisations (AOMGMR).  He is also, since 2004, a part-time teacher at the Université du Québec, University of Ottawa and La Cité Collégiale in various environmental science topics.  Married and the father of two, he resides in Gatineau.

Né en 1966 et détenteur d’une maîtrise en Science de l’environnement, Mr. Tremblay a débuté sa carrière chez Tecsult, à Montréal, avant de devenir conseiller en environnement pour la Ville de Gatineau en 1992, poste qu’il occupe depuis pour divers services municipaux ou régionaux.  À ce titre, il a participé à la préparation de règlements et politiques touchant à toutes les sphères de l’environnement municipal, incluant la réhabilitation de sites contaminés, l’occupation du territoire en zone de contraintes naturelles ou anthropiques, la gestion des matières résiduelles, le traitement de l’eau, le contrôle des moustiques, l’analyse de risque sur la santé, le bruit et les nuisances, tout en servant à titre de président de l’Association des Organismes municipaux de gestion des matières résiduelles (AOMGMR) pendant une période de cinq ans.  Il est aussi, depuis 2004, chargé de cours à l’Université du Québec, l’Université d’Ottawa et la Cité Collégiale dans divers sujets en science de l’environnement.  Marié et père de deux enfants, il réside à Gatineau.

Dr. Mary Trudeau is a professional engineer with thirty years of experience in the development and implementation of environmental policy, programs and projects, with particular specialization in water resources and infrastructure management. She is the Director of Envirings Inc, an environmental policy and program consulting company. As a consultant to all levels of Canadian government and several not-for-profit organizations, she has undertaken numerous studies to inform policy and program development in the areas of water environment protection, sustainable urban water infrastructure, climate adaptation and science-informed policy. She is also a sessional lecturer at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.

In addition to her consulting assignments, Dr. Trudeau recently undertook academic research on the effects of urbanization on surface water hydrology and associations of hydrologic change with negative effects on fish richness. Results are published in the Journal of Hydrology (2015 and 2016) and Ecohydrology (2017).

Prior to her career as a consultant, Dr. Trudeau managed several municipal water infrastructure portfolios with the City of Ottawa (then the Region of Ottawa-Carleton). One of these portfolios was to manage a surface water monitoring program, which included evaluations of stormwater infrastructure performance. Dr. Trudeau also initiated and implemented an environmental effects monitoring program to assess the effects of municipal infrastructure on receiving waters. Prior to this portfolio, she was responsible for maintenance of the central water purification facilities and operations as well as maintenance of municipal communal well systems. Other portfolios included management of an accredited laboratory, management of the potable water metering network and assessment of non-revenue water. Dr. Trudeau has successfully managed large, multi-disciplinary teams, public advisory committees, multi-stakeholder technical advisory committees, and staff groups of up to 70 persons.

Sarah Yankoo is Algonquin, Austrian, Irish, Romanian and Scottish and edge walks between the bush and the city that gathers in Pikwakanagan First Nation. Sarah is a graduate of York University’s Environmental Studies program where she focused on philosophy, arts, culture and communication, concurrent with an Indigenous Studies certificate and a minor in English. In her final year of study, Sarah worked with the Centre for Aboriginal Student Services as a programming assistant and community engagement liaison while serving in an executive role with the Aboriginal Students Association at York University (ASAY). Through this work, Sarah supported multifaceted events which featured A Tribe Called Red, Ryan McMahon and Sho Sho Esquiro, establishing/recognizing space, dialogue and engagement among communities in and around York U.

After graduation, Sarah worked with the Council of Ontario Universities (COU) on Aboriginal self-identification, a provincial gathering of Aboriginal Education Councils from both colleges and universities as well as a speakers series, “Research Matters”. Following her contract with COU, Sarah served as an appointee to the Premier’s Council on Youth Opportunities and began advisory and media work during the iteration stage of the Ontario Indigenous Youth Partnership Project (OIYPP). Now in its fourth year, OIYPP connects philanthropic partners such as the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal People in Canada, Tides Canada, Inspirit Foundation and the Ontario Trillium Foundation with youth led projects and initiatives. Concurrently, Sarah worked briefly with the Algonquins of Ontario as a culture and heritage mapping assistant, facilitated workshops in schools as an artist supported by the Ontario Arts Council, advised on the eligibility committee for the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ JUNO awards in 2014 and 2015 while developing and performing her own artistic works. Sarah currently works for the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation coordinating communications for the land claim negotiations.