After a long and necessary summer, we are ready to start our program on the upcoming Friday 1st of October. We are glad to announce that this year will have mainly in-person classes and that we have many new guest professors in our faculty team. We warmly welcome Faranz Arefian, Mattia Leone, Melissa García Lamarca, Kristjana Adelgeirsdottir, Diego Vega and Farzana Gandhi. (Check out our social media for more information about them!)
For our Humanitarian Shelter and Settlement (HSS) course we are very honoured to have Brett Moore joining us. He is Chief of Shelter and Settlement Section of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where he coordinates humanitarian shelter actors in both preparedness actions and disaster response. He will be exploring how international agencies respond to displacement crises. This HSS course draws upon a team of experienced lecturers in the field, working on International Relief Institutions. We are very glad to have with us another year the great faculty to this course such as David Sanderson, Marta Peña, Andreas Schiffer, Gonzalo Sánchez Terán and Verónica Sánchez Carrera. The first part of the program will also have Mbongeni Ngulube and Nerea Amoros and will end with the new course taught will by Faranz Arefian, director of Silk Cities; on Post-disaster reconstruction and recovery at scale, from policy to practice.
This year will be full of new insights, methodologies and implementation examples related to humanitarian response and recovery of natural and conflict disasters. After the first extensive months, we will focus on a wide variety of bottom-up and low technology practices which will be disclosed guided by Emilio Hormias and Gonzalo Lizarralde respectively. They will be, followed by Diego Vega and Kristjana Adalgeirsdottir bringing their extended experience from the Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute (HUMLOG Institute)
We will start the next year with our wonderful professor Clara Irazabal, one of our long-time collaborators, followed by a new course on housing and environmental justice taught by Melisa Garcia-lamarca which we are excited to also welcome to our thesis supervisor team. Another new professor we are happy to include is Mattia Leone – Associate Professor in Architectural Technology at the Department of Architecture (DiARC) – his course ‘Climate-Resilient Urban Design principles and methods’ will provide methodological and technical skills to support the integration of Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and sustainability concepts within urban plans and projects, in a multi-scale perspective.
Later on, at the beginning of 2022, we will be hosting the Mundus Urbano consortium workshop as part of our local Socio-Spatial Workshop for Integrated Urban Upgrading. This two-week workshop in UIC Barcelona intends to study the spatial inequalities and lack of social cohesion on a broad and local scale to contribute to discussing alternative strategies for mitigation and integrative measures towards a more sustainable and resilient urban development path. This year, our workshop will be guided by our director Carmen Mendoza Arroyo and Farzana Gandhi – associate Professor of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Design whom will also be involved in our International Regeneration Workshop in March. The workshop which takes place in a different country delves into topics that allow our students to apply different tools and strategies according to topics and contexts, with the common objective of having them acknowledge the main arguments in the foundation of contemporary urban regeneration and development projects. The location and content will be announced very soon! Stay tuned for updates in the upcoming weeks.
We are looking forward to working together this year, being closer and fostering sustainable urban and architecture solutions for a better future.