Keynote speakers

Felicity Atekpe (Associate Professor in Architecture & Practice) has over two decades of experience as both a practitioner and academic in architecture, urban landscape, and interior design environment architectures. As Director of Practice & Design of Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, she provides academic leadership across all programmes. Her focus is on emphasising the school’s critical practices that address both individual and public domains, articulating new ways of designing practice and its pedagogy for future architects. Felicity emphasizes innovative pedagogies, ethics, and alternative qualification routes for aspiring architects. Her research explores home and belonging, equitable urban landscapes, and The Everyday. She serves as a Commissioner for ARB Professional Practical Experience (PPE) and consults on Planning Design Codes in the UK. Previously, Felicity founded White Table, an architectural practice focused on sustainable urban design and small-scale infrastructure projects that populate the strategic armatures of place.

Laura Uimonen is a University Instructor and postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University in Tampere Finland. Cities as part of nature is her main value with a strong effort plan for co-living in shared environments.   Ecological and cultural values of a place are vital for the radical change needed. Every site plays a part in the vital ecosystem connected to the neighbourhood, part of town, the whole city, the entire region and beyond to seas and oceans, up to air and deep down into the soil. Her research focuses on biodiversity and urban design in research projects Biodiversity interventions on wellbeing (BIWE) and Enabling multispecies transitions (MUST). In urban planning and design and landscape planning teaching she addresses the importance of a reflective architect in multidisciplinary co-development for a truly sustainable way of life. Uimonen has experience with perspectives on critical environmental challenges from field biology, urban ecology, environmental education and urban planning and design. Uimonen is an architect, a Doctor of Arts and has an education in biological nature inventories. She has researched railway stations and railway parks as public spaces and public art processes in urban planning.

Architect (M.Sc.), D.Sc.(Tech) Henrika Pihlajaniemi works as an associate professor at the Oulu School of Architecture, University of Oulu. She lectures and teaches sustainable architecture, as well as architectural and urban lighting, and leads research projects related to lighting and sustainability. Her research has covered themes of daylighting design, ecological housing, participatory design, adaptive and intelligent lighting, lighting-related well-being, and lighting education. Her recent research projects scrutinize the design perspectives of sustainable darkness. She currently leads a Europe-wide consortium studying Art of Darkness – the use of well-considered.darkness to enhance and develop urban and cultural heritage contexts. Additionally, she works as a lighting design consultant in her architectural office (M3 Architects). Her completed lighting design projects include lighting master plans, urban parks, public buildings, light art, and luminaires. She and M3 Architects have received numerous awards in national and international architectural and urban design competitions.

Born and trained as an architect in Romania, Prof Doina Petrescu has studied philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris with Jacques Derrida, and completed a PhD in Women’s Studies at the University of Paris VIII, supervised by Helene Cixous. Prof Petrescu is Chair of Architecture and Design Activism at the School of Architecture, where she has been working since 2001. She is the 2022 Jubilee Professor at Chalmers University and has been Visiting Professor of Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2014-15) and taught at Architectural Association London, Iowa State University, EA Paris-Malaquais and the UAIM Bucharest. Her research addresses outstanding questions in architecture and urban planning focusing on issues of co-design, civic participation, gendered practices, political ecology, co-production and urban resilience. In the last decade, she has conducted 14 research projects (total funding €4.9M) with partners in 18 countries and high standing research outputs. She has published 10 books, over 45 articles and chapters in books and refereed journals and over 50 articles in other publications.