SEAC hosted this talk by Marina Kolovou Kouri, Brenda Pérez-Castro, Phan Tran Kieu Trang and Dr. Supreeya Wungpatcharapon on Roundtable: Community-Led Development as Pathway to Urban Equality. This event was chaired by Prof. Hyun Bang Shin and Dr. Barbara Lipietz.
Inequality has been, and continues to be a scourge, globally, and reducing inequalities, ensuring ‘no one' and ‘no space’ is ‘left behind’ is famously a mantra of the UN SDGs (see SDG goals 10 and 11). In the Asia Pacific region, ESCAP (2018) identified inequality as one of the key challenges facing cities and urban areas, along with climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted - and exacerbated - this pressing policy and development planning challenge. In such context, the proposed roundtable explores the potential of community-led development approaches in tracing pathways to urban equality, presenting the result of action research in four cities connected through the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) network and the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) research programme.
A video recording of this event is available to watch here.
This event will feature:
1. Voices from Yangon: Community-led housing as a pathway to urban equality - presented by Marina Kolovou Kouri
2. Danang fishing villages: Preserving cultural heritages to improve livelihood in response to rapid urbanisation - presented by Phan Tran Kieu Trang
3. Housing + : Tracing a community-led pathway to urban equality in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand - presented by Supreeya Wungpatcharapon
4. Community-led development as a pathway to urban equality: bringing about structural change in Southeast Asian Cities? - presented by Brenda Pérez-Castro
Speaker and Chair Biographies
Marina Kolovou Kouri is an urban designer and researcher working on community-led development with a focus on Myanmar. She has collaborated with civil society and grassroots organisations in Yangon on urban safety, housing access, displacement, and participatory design.
Brenda Pérez-Castro (@brendajpc) is a sociologist, urbanist, and international development practitioner from Colombia. She worked in Asia for the last 6 years and was the Regional Coordinator of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), where she coordinated the ‘Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality – KNOW’ action-research project, implemented in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar. Prior to her engagement with ACHR, she worked as consultant to the UN-Habitat Asia-Pacific Regional Office and as Urban Development Manager for Habitat for Humanity Asia-Pacific. In Latin America, Brenda worked for over 10 years in different capacities for international cooperation agencies and NGOs on slum upgrading, climate change adaptation and mitigation in cities, and sustainable urban mobility.
Phan Tran Kieu Trang has expertise in Urban Planning and is also interested in higher education and community development. Since 2014, she has been working for Danang Architecture University as a lecturer and a dynamic youth leader who inspires hundreds of students to contribute to community development and pioneers for new initiatives in education. She is the Head of Community Engaged Learning Center (CELC) focusing on integrating CEL in teaching and researching, and also the project manager of Vietnam Network of Engaged Scholars (VNES). In personal life, she has a small happy family with two kids. Cooking is her favorite hobby in spare time.
Dr. Supreeya Wungpatcharapon is an Associate Professor at Faculty of Architecture, Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand. She has been involved in the KNOW research project with DPU, ACHR and CODI to investigate the practice of community development network of Baan Mankong in Nakhon Sawan Thailand. Her design and research interests are socially relevant architecture, participatory design in urban and community development.
Dr. Barbara Lipietz (@BLipVid) is Associate Professor at the DPU and Vice Dean International for The Bartlett, UCL. Her research and activist work focuses on the governance of urban transformations at various scales, with a particular interest in community-led planning towards the just city.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.