Conference

Housing +

Andrea (Andy) Bolnick is the founding Director of Ikhayalami, an NGO that was established in 2006, with the primary aim of developing and implementing innovative technical solutions for informal settlement upgrading. Andy is an urbanist and development practitioner who has a practical and theoretical base in architecture and urban planning (Wits 1985; Lund University 2010) and a degree in Political Science (Wits 1988).  Her greatest learning, however, has come through the precedents she has set by working, conceptualizing and implementing catalytic projects with urban poor communities.

Andy is adept at designing both systems and form.  She has been a driving force behind the idea and implementation of re-blocking: a participative design intervention that couples innovative shelter and infrastructural solutions with the spatial reconfiguration of informal settlement layouts to ones that are more rationalized. This initiative has influenced the state (through partnerships and change in Policy), poor communities and social movements.

More recently she is focusing her attention on a collaborative partnership with the BT community and the ETHZ Architecture and Urban Design, known as the Empowershack project. It focuses on the design and implementation of a series of double story prototypes linking this to the spatial reconfiguration of a settlement in Khayelitsha and the development of a new financial model for informal settlement upgrading. She has also conceptualized and started to develop a digital tool to help augment participative planning processes for informal settlement upgrading.

 In 2011, Andy was awarded an Ashoka Fellowship. In 2012 Ikhayalami was a finalist in the FT/Citi Bank Ingenuity Awards and in 2013 the re-blocking initiative came second in the Africa/Middle East category. In 2017 Ikhayalami won first prize to further develop a digital toolkit for informal settlement upgrading. In January 2018 the Empower Shack project was nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects Prize.

Bob Buckley is at the Urban Institute. He was a Senior Fellow at the New School, Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Advisor at the World Bank. He has also taught at a number of universities. He has written widely on urbanization and development in both the popular press and academic journals, and has helped prepare projects in a variety of places.  

Chee received a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a registered architect in the State of New York and has founded her own studio in 2018.

Chee has more than 10 years of international working experience including projects in New York, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. Currently, her designed projects, the CITIC Tower (528m) in Beijing, Suzhou IFS (450m) in Suzhou are nearly under completion. She has previously practiced at ASpace (Shanghai), KPF( New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong), OMA (Beijing), Atelier FCJZ (Beijing) and RMJM (Hong Kong).

When the time Chee was in MIT, she received the Carroll Wilson Award by the Entrepreneurship Center, the Harold Horowitz 51’ student research fund on the affordable housing research project. Her first built project “Pinwheel House” was originally designed during the 1K house Studio at MIT in 2009 and was built for the rural poor after the earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2010. It was finally built in 40 days within USD 6,000. The pinwheel house received worldwide recognition from the United State, China, Spain, Denmark, Australia including interviewed and published by the MIT technology review and news office, Wall Street Journal, Architectural Record, Archdaily, Arquitectura Viva, Metropolis Magazine, and Builder Magazine etc. The Pinwheel House project was also selected and exhibited as the Alumni Collection at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017, the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture in 2010, and the Divergent Convergence, Designing China by USC, American Academy in China in 2009.

Alejandro believes in the ethical responsibility of designers to contribute towards a better society. He is cofounder and Director of URBAM, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies, at EAFIT University in Medellin, Colombia. His experience combines architectural, urban, environmental projects and planning. He is a Loeb Fellow from Harvard GSD and was given the Obayashi Prize 2016.

Between 2004 and 2008 as Director of EDU, the Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano of the Municipality of Medellin, and then as the city’s director of urban projects, he led the Social Urbanism strategy to improve the most impoverished neighborhoods, with the support and partnership of the city’s mayor Sergio Fajardo; making Medellin a blueprint for the future for other distressed cities worldwide.

Since 2010, from URBAM, he delves into the urban, environmental and social issues of emerging developing countries, particularly those with weak political and institutional structures. He is also active in design through his studio, Alejandro Echeverri + Valencia Arquitectos, focusing on projects with low environmental impact for tropic regions. Alejandro has collaborated as a professor, lecturer and juror in various international and national institutions.

His work has earned the Colombian National Architectural Award in 1996, the Pan-American Biennale in Urban Design Award 2008, the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2009, the 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard GSD in 2013, among others.

Christoph Heinemann (*1969) studied architecture at RWTH Aachen University of Technology and at the École d’Architecture de Paris la Villette from 1990-97. He co-founded ifau architects together with Susanne Heiß and Christoph Schmidt in 1998. From 2001-2009 he has been teaching urban design as assistant professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology, Department Urban Design, Prof. Heinz Nagler. Since 2017 he is professor for Architecture and City at HCU Hamburg.

ifau (Institute for applied Urbanism) is a Berlin based working group of architects focusing on interrelated, interdisciplinary projects in the field of architecture and urban design. They are especially interested in process-oriented strategies and participative design methods. ifau (Institute for applied Urbanism,  Susanne Heiß, Christoph Heinemann, Christoph Schmidt) realised numerous projects for arts institutions as Palais Thinnfeld in Graz, Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht , The Showroom in London, Artists Space and the Goethe Institut - Wyoming Building in New York (in  collaboration with Jesko Fezer). Their series of exhibitions and talks Spaces of Negotiation - focusing on possibilities and potentials of a social architecture open for appropriation - was shown in Berlin, Vienna and New York. Recently they completed the Cohousing projects R50 and IBeB in Berlin (in  collaboration with Jesko Fezer and Heide & von Beckerath), which have attracted particular attention among experts. Currently ifau is involved in the design of a mixed-use housing block at Spielbudenplatz in Hamburg. ifau's works and texts have been published in numerous books and architectural magazines.

for further information:http://www.ifau.berlin.heimat.de

Sheila Kennedy received her Bachelor's Degree in history, philosophy and literature from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. Kennedy studied architecture at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and received the Masters of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where she won the SOM National Traveling Fellowship and was graduated with Distinction, the School's highest academic honor. In 1990, she founded Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA MATx) in partnership with Juan Frano Violich. As an Associate Professor at Harvard's GSD, Kennedy was Director of the M Arch II Program from 1991-1995 and is Professor of the Practice of Architecture at MIT.

As a founding Principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture Ltd. (KVA), Sheila Kennedy has established a new model for an interdisciplinary design practice that explores architecture, digital technology and emerging public needs. Designated as one of Fast Company's Masters of Design, Kennedy is described as an “insightful and original thinker who is designing new ways of working, learning, leading and innovating”. In 2000, Kennedy established MATx, a pioneering materials research unit at KVA which engages applied creative production across the fields of design, electronics, and architecture and material science. MATx works collaboratively with business leaders, manufacturers, cultural institutions and public agencies to create designs building components and architecture that advances the widespread implementation of sustainable digital materials. MATx has developed designs and technology applications for Dupont, Siemens, Osram, Herman Miller, Saint-Gobain, The North Face, the City of Porto in Portugal, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States Department of Energy. The MATx Portable Light Project, a non-profit global initiative that enables people in the developing world to create and own portable energy harvesting solar textile kits has been recognized with a 2009 US Congressional Award, a 2009 Energy Globe Award and a 2008 Tech Museum Laureate Award for technology that benefits humanity.

Kennedy's work has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the International Rotterdam Biennale, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA), and the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) “Design & the Elastic Mind” exhibition on breakthrough designs for new technologies. Kennedy has served as an advisor to the United States Department of Energy, the National Academy of Sciences' Government-Industry Partnerships, and the Vision 2020 National Technology Roadmap. She is the author of multiple patents for the integration of digital technologies into architecture, building materials and textiles. Kennedy's research and work in architecture have been recognized by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Academy of Sciences.

Kennedy's writings and work have been published in Material Misuse (S. Kennedy; Architectural Association of London), Material Ultra Material (Harvard University, 2002), Extreme Textiles, (M.McQuaid; Princeton, 2005), Open House: Designs for Intelligent Living, (Vitra Design Museum, 2006), Design for the Other 90% (C. Smith; 2007), and Digital Culture in Architecture, (A. Picon; Birkhauser, 2010) Kennedy lectures widely and her work has been featured in journals of architecture, design culture, anthropology and optoelectronics, as well as National Public Radio, CBS News, CNN Principal Voices, BBC World News, Wired, Science News, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and The New York Times.

Marie Law Adams is a co-founding partner of Landing Studio, an architecture, design and research practice whose work negotiates the intersection of large-scale global infrastructure with urban environments. Since 2005 Landing Studio has developed projects with port facilities and infrastructure entities in Boston and New York by designing shared industrial and public access landscapes, light installations, festivals, exhibitions and industrial/community operations agreements. The work of Landing Studio has received such honors as an AIA Honor Award in Regional & Urban Design, a Progressive Architecture Award, and the Architectural League Prize and has been exhibited at institutions including MIT, RISD, Parsons and the City College of New York.

Adams is a registered architect. She earned a BSArch degree from the University of Michigan and a MArch from MIT, where she was a Presidential Fellow and recipient of the AIA Medal.

Kenneth A. Munkacy is the Senior Managing Director of Boston-based Kingbird Properties, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Grupo Ferré Rangel (GFR).  Kingbird Properties is a real estate investment management company focused on value-added multifamily apartments in the U.S. and Latin America, primarily in secondary and tertiary cities.

Grupo Ferré Rangel is a fourth generation family office founded in 1918 based in San Juan, Puerto.  GFR owns and invests in a diversified consumer-centric portfolio of companies that includes media, real estate, newspapers, digital marketing and printing throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico and Latin America.  Its lineage includes a former governor of Puerto Rico, Luis A. Ferré (1968-1972), whose son Antonio Luis Ferré Ramirez de Arellano created the first Puerto Rican company to be listed on the NYSE (1965), where he served as president (1982-1990).

With Kingbird Properties, Mr. Munkacy will be responsible for creating and implementing its investment strategy, acquisitions, joint ventures and investment management platform in the U.S. and Latin America.

 Mr. Munkacy was previously a Senior Vice President of GID Investment Advisers LLC, and Senior Managing Director of GID International Group, where he was a member of GID’s Executive Committee and was responsible for GID’s international real estate strategy investments, joint ventures and portfolio companies in Brazil and India.

With over 25 years of real estate experience Mr. Munkacy has worked on real estate investments and/or managed real estate operating companies in 15 states and 16 countries.  His experience includes serving as Managing Director, Asia at Starwood Capital (Tokyo); Senior Managing Director of GE Capital Golub Europe (Prague); President of Koll Asia Pacific Development (Shanghai); and Managing Director at TrizecHahn Asia Pacific (Hong Kong).  He also served as Director, Development/Acquisitions with Xerox Realty (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xerox).

Mr. Munkacy graduated with a BA in Economics – Government from Franklin and Marshall College in 1976 and earned his Masters of City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, with a concentration in real estate development/finance in 1981.  In 1977/78 Mr. Munkacy was selected as a New York City Urban Fellow, where he served under Mayor Koch in the New York City Planning Commission. 

Mr. Munkacy serves as Vice Chairman of the Global Exchange Council with the Urban Land Institute.  He is a member of PREA, where he is also a member of its International Affinity Group.

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna founder and principal at Torolab (1995), an artist collective, workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of life styles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. His work has been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Havana, Liverpool, Lyon, Montreal and Venice Biennials; and has been awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative, among others.


Cárdenas Osuna has been an advisor for Tijuana’s gov on sustainable city development and social innovation; founded the Digital and Creative axis for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tijuana-Rosarito-Tecate; currently directs the non-profit organization ‘Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio’; directs the program of the Transborder Farmlab in Tijuana; directs the Applied Social Research and Innovation Lab (LiiSA) in Tijuana/Mexico City.

Adèle Naudé Santos, FAIA, is a Professor and served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning from 2004 to 2015. Prior to that she was professor at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design where her academic focus was the design of housing environments.



Professor Santos has an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association in London. She also received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University as well as a Master of Architecture and a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.



Her academic career includes professorships at University of California Berkeley, Harvard University, Rice University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as Chair of the Department of Architecture. She was the founding Dean of the new School of Architecture at UC San Diego and has had numerous visiting appointments around the world, including Italy and in her native South Africa.



In addition to her academic work, she is principal architect in the San Francisco-based firm, Santos Prescott and Associates. Her architectural and planning projects include affordable and luxury housing and institutional buildings in Africa: South Africa, Swaziland, and Botswana; affordable housing in California and Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; the Center for the Arts at Albright College, Reading, PA; the Yerba Buena Gardens Children’s Center in San Francisco; City Links, A Vision Plan for San Diego. She is currently working in Guatemala on a children’s center, and has several projects under construction in China.



Dean Santos has received housing awards and honors including the 2009 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. She has won numerous competitions for projects including the Perris Civic Center (CA), three facilities at Arts Park (CA), the Affordable Prototypical Multi-Family Housing for Franklin/LaBrea in Los Angeles, and Penn Children’s Center (PA).



Most recently at MIT she was the Principle Investigator for a two year study for Sekisui House, Japan, on sustainable urban housing and community 2050. She, along with fellow MIT faculty and students, have begun a research project with a major firm in China to design and construct a demonstration business park.



She serves as a juror for numerous national and international design competitions and award programs and has published extensively in journals and books.

She holds N.C.A.R.B. Certification, is a registered architect in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and is a Member of the Pennsylvania Society of Architects, the American Institute of Architects, and the Architect’s Registration Council, UK.

Rafi Segal is an award winning designer and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT. His practice engages in design and research on both the architectural and urban scale. Segal’s projects include Villa 003 of the ORDOS 100 Project, the Kitgum Peace Museum in Uganda, the Ashdod Museum of Art and more recently the winning proposal for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. His current ongoing projects include the design of a new communal neighborhood for a kibbutz in Israel and the curating of the first ever exhibition on the architecture of Alfred Neumann undertaken during the 1960s.

Segal is co-editor of Cities of Dispersal (2008), Territories — Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (2003), and A Civilian Occupation (2003), and has exhibited his work widely, most notably at Storefront for Art and Architecture; KunstWerk, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Venice Biennale of Architecture; MOMA in New York; and at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale. His writings and exhibitions have provided a critical contribution to architecture’s role in the peripheries of our cities.

Rafi Segal hold a PhD from Princeton University and two degrees from Technion — Israel Institute of Technology — M.Sc and B.Arch. Prior to MIT he taught architecture and urbanism at various European and US schools including Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Columbia University’s GSAPP, the Cooper Union School of Architecture, and Princeton University.    

Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2002 until January 2009.  He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988, and he is currently the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), a unit of the School’s Center for Advanced Urbanism. He was president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for 2011-2013. Vale holds degrees from Amherst College (B.A. in American Studies, summa cum laude), M.I.T. (S.M.Arch.S.), and the University of Oxford (D.Phil.), which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author or editor of ten books examining urban design, housing and planning.

Much of Professor Vale's most recent published work has examined the history, politics, and design of American public housing. These books include From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2001 "Best Book in Urban Affairs"); and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (2005 Paul Davidoff Award). This research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also received the Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, an EDRA/Places Award for “Place Research,” and the John M. Corcoran Award for Community Investment.

His most recent book, Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (University of Chicago Press, 2013) focuses on Atlanta and Chicago, comparing the slum clearance era that yielded the first public housing with the current spate of public housing demolition and redevelopment. This book has received "best book" awards from both the International Planning History Society (2014) and the Urban Affairs Association (2015). He his also co-editor, with Nicholas Bloom and Fritz Ubach, of Public Housing Myths: Perceptions, Reality and Social Policy (Cornell University Press 2015; 2016 Best Edited Book Award, International Planning History Society). He is currently at work on new book project that explores the variation of HOPE VI public housing redevelopment practices across the United States, provisionally entitled "After the Projects."

Prior to his work on public housing, Professor Vale was the author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), a book about capital city design on six continents, which received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians.  A revised, 2nd edition of the book was published by Routledge in 2008. He is also the author of The Limits of Civil Defence (Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1987), a book based on his dissertation.

Additionally, Vale is co-editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City:  Continuing Struggles and New Directions (2001); co-editor, with Thomas J. Campanella, of The Resilient City:  How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (2005); and co-editor, with Bish Sanyal and Christina Rosan, of Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice (MIT Press, 2012; 2014 Best Edited Book in Planning History, IPHS). Finally, he is the author of a monograph about the history of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Changing Cities:  75 Years of Planning Better Futures at MIT (SA+P Press, 2008).

At MIT, he has won the Institute’s highest award for teaching (MacVicar Faculty Fellowship), as well as multiple departmental awards for advising and service to students.

Alexandros Washburn is the former Chief Urban Designer of New York City. He is a global expert on urban design in an era of climate change who believes resilience begins at home.  After a long public career, he now works with his community in Red Hook Brooklyn to create bottom-up urban design solutions through his development company, Brooklyn Capital Partners LLC and his design company DRAW Brooklyn LLC.

He is the author of the landmark book, The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience and is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Liveable Cities in Singapore.  He has been a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University and Princeton.  He is a graduate of Harvard University and winner of the New York Public Architect Award.

Trained as an architect, he began his public career working for US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.  He then founded the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation to rebuild New York's main train station and later joined the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the New York City Department of City Planning.

His career combines politics finance and design to get things done.  And in a world facing the question of how to grow during climate change, he fervently believes The Answer Is More Brooklyn.

His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For the greater part of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on small-scale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan.

He led the Smithsonian Institution's project titled, "Garden, City, and Empire: The Historical Geography of Mughal Lahore," which resulted in a co-edited volume on Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, Prospects, and The Mughal Garden: Interpretation, Conservation, and Implications with colleagues from the University of Engineering and Technology-Lahore. These and related books have won awards from the Government of Pakistan and Punjab Government.

The overall Mughal Gardens Project won an American Society of Landscape Architects national research merit award, as did a project on The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj led by Elizabeth Moynihan. This work has been generously supported by fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art, and the American Academy in Rome.
In 2002, Professor Wescoat became head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he taught courses on "Landscape Experience, Inquiry and Design," the "Theory and Practice of Landscape Architecture," and design studios on urban ecological design in Chicago. Together with colleagues and students at the University of Illinois he contributed to a cultural landscape heritage conservation project at the Champaner-Pavagadh World Heritage Site in Gujarat, India, for the Baroda Heritage Trust.

More recently, he has organized a garden and waterworks conservation workshop at the Nagaur palace-garden complex in Rajasthan for the Mehrangarh Museum Trust; and a workshop on the "Three Shalamar Baghs of Delhi, Lahore, and Srinagar" with colleagues from those cities.

At the larger scale, Professor Wescoat has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins, including the history of multilateral water agreements. He led a USEPA-funded study of potential climate impacts in the Indus River Basin in Pakistan with the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). More recently, he led an NSF-funded project on "Water and Poverty in Colorado." He is currently conducting comparative research on international water problems.

In 2003, he published Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White (Cambridge University Press); and in 2007 he co-edited Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power (Springer Publishing) for LAF Landscape Futures Initiative.