A symposium jointly organized by the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) and The School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC.

It has been 40 years since the first UN Habitat Forum was held here in Vancouver, BC. That Forum established the critical importance of cities for maintaining basic levels of social and ecological sustainability. What have we learned in those two generations? What has changed? What has stayed the same? This symposium offers a chance to both look back and look forward.

This symposium examines the linkages between global capital flows, urban policy initiatives, the waxing and waning of local democratic control, and the urban form that these three interacting factors make manifest. The ongoing world-wide rural to urban migration, combined with the Intensified competition for capital and influence among cities, is changing their shape, function, political processes, and demographic distribution. Vancouver, London, Dubai, and New York become festooned with new “cash boxes in the sky” – impressive high end residential developments stimulated not by those seeking homes, but by wealthy buyers hungry for safe investments in stable economies.

Meanwhile both Dhaka Bangladesh and Surrey, BC double in population in just a few decades, growth fueled by the intra and extra national migration of people of far more modest means. These are pure “Arrival Cities” in the parlance of Doug Saunders, author of the book of the same name. Into this context we must also include other linked global challenges, including climate change, resource depletion and food insecurity.

Thus, relevant questions that this symposium will explore include: Is it possible to combine top-down, highly organized and performance-oriented strategies, with bottom-up more individualized grassroots entrepreneurial approaches? Which of these, or which combination of these, is measurably more sustainable, more politically practical, and more economically astute? How can new forms of governance, urban policy and planning enable the emergence of alternative urban design outcomes? What is the role of design in the imagination and construction of resilient and democratic urban districts?

The symposium aims to explore emerging paradigms in the context of four interconnected themes.

1. Capital: Restructuring, Reimagining, and Redirecting Capital Flow and Value Growth in the Making of the New City.

This theme explores how to re(de)fine and articulate alternative planning mechanisms and spatial practices that both acknowledge and/or overcome purely market-driven developments. Can modern, equitable, and resilient urban transformation be financed outside of neoliberal market mechanisms? Do the processes of global finance now inevitably work against an “economy of means” and a socially sustainable and equitable new city? Is there a way to build this new city to insure that capital value gains stay in the hands of the largest number of residents? How can global capital flows be harnessed toward more socially sustainable ends in both the developed and the developing world – in both the catchment areas where investment is for the rich (London Vancouver and its ilk) and in peripheral zones where the largest share of new urban dwellers must find a home (Dhaka, Surrey and its kind). How can creative financial engineering and public-private partnerships be integrated sustainably? How can cultural capital be leveraged to transform the design of cities?

2. Reimagining Governance and Planning Policies

This theme explores how new forms of governance, including innovative planning and policy mechanisms, can affect the social and economic equity of cities. Can democratic participation truly exist in contexts where social and economic equity is unbalanced? Where in the world are successful experiments with new forms of urban policy happening? At what level of political and economic power are they implemented? What kind of population do they serve? What are the trend lines for and against the democratization of urban policy decision-making? Has democracy more or less control of city building as the century progresses? How do we understand the changing role of policy and democratic decision making in cities subject to large global capital flows? Similarly how do understand the role of policy and democratic decision-making in “Arrival Cities”?

3. Reframing the Agency of Design

This theme explores the agency of design in envisioning resilient (social, economic, political, environmental, and spatial) urban developments. What is the role of physical design in enabling social imagination, debate, and democratic space? What are the costs and benefits of increasing or decreasing the degree of citizen control in city building? How do we imagine design as an agency of social sustainability and capital accumulation for the broadest spectrum of urban residents/citizens? How do we understand the value of urban design when deployed in the service of the global competition for “world class status,” usually manifest in the most provocative iconic displays of wealth and power (from the Shard in London to the Vancouver House in Vancouver to the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai). Can we reasonably and realistically posit an alternative? And what does it look like?

4. Looking Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the 1976 UN Habitat Forum

As 2016 will be the 40th Anniversary of the first UN Habitat conference and Habitat Forum located in Vancouver, BC in May 1976 we also especially welcome papers that reflect on this milestone and what has been learned, and not learned, about urbanism since that time. Abstracts can be submitted via email in PDF format to: ubcdesignforum@gmail.com ​Additional information regarding the symposium is available on http://www.urban-design-forum.sala.ubc.ca/