Welsh School of Architecture appoints Prof Aseem Inam as Chair of Urban Design

The Welsh School of Architecture is looking forward to welcoming our new Chair of Urban Design, Professor Aseem Inam, who will commence his new role in April 2017.

Professor Inam is currently the Director of TRULAB:  Laboratory for Designing Urban Transformation, a pioneering research-based practice in New York. He is an urbanist and activist-scholar-practitioner who is designing urban transformation at the intersection of urban theory and design practice.

Professor Inam has worked professionally as an architect, urban designer and city planner in France, Canada, Greece, Haiti, India, Morocco and the United States. He has worked on a number of high profile projects, such as helping the Government of Haiti develop a strategic framework to rebuild housing following the 2010 earthquake in Port au Prince and designing a new city on the U.S.-Mexico border. His professional work focuses on developing new and more effective modes of transformative urban practice, in which design is critical.

He has published two books, Designing Urban Transformation (2014) and Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities (2005).  He has also published a number of award-winning journal articles, book chapters and professional reports on various aspects of urbanism, including the crucial role of theory in practice, design of transit-oriented developments, critical analysis of smart growth, legacies of colonial urbanism, and ways in which informal urbanisms can lead to new modes of design practice in the 21st century.

In addition to research and practice, Professor Inam is dedicated to teaching in order to generate new knowledge and create generational shifts in critical thinking and urban practice. He has previously held posts as the John Bousfield Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto, and as the founding Director of the highly innovative Graduate Program in Urban Practice at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He received awards for his teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California.

He received his Ph.D. in city planning from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, his master’s in urban design from Washington University, and his master’s in architecture from the Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Belleville in Paris.

The Welsh School of Architecture has established strengths in the area of urban design, an example of which is our MA in Urban Design, run in collaboration with the School of Geography and Planning. Our ambition is to grow research excellence in this field. A key priority for the Professor Inam as our new Chair in Urban Design will be to co-ordinate our existing capabilities and to enable us to actively engage with other universities, cities and regions, both locally and globally.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Inam!