ACD April 2021 Webinar

Together Resilient: Everyday and In Time of Crisis

Gloria Lau, Manuela Powidayko, Rhonda-Lee Davis - Together Resilient

Thursday, April 29th
4:00pm - 5:00pm EST / 1:00pm - 2:00pm PST

Co-sponsored by the AIA Housing and Community Development Knowledge Committee

Session Description:

Everyday and In Time of Crisis: As multiple crises and movements have converged the past year, we all have the desires to contribute as much as possible to address racial injustices and health inequities in our society. During these moments, we also feel the urgent needs to reflect upon our own roles as designers in various communities while making certain that the people we love and collaborate with are supported. This discussion session intends to create an intimate space for recognizing and honoring people who help us build individual and community resilience and to energize us moving forward.

The discussion session is built upon our work from Together Resilient, a women-led organizing effort to marshall creative community-centered financial, organizing, and design strategies to uplift and support those most at risk who are taking action to build resilience in their communities. We (Rhonda-Lee Davis, Gloria Lau, and Manuela Powidayko) will be representing our Urban Design Forum Forefront Fellowship group - six women of color that came together to center community resilience in tackling environmental injustices. We will share our work, how we are rethinking our framework, and how we are re-engaging with ourselves amid current events.

Our discussions will reflect on how we have weathered the pandemic and racial injustices in the past year as professionals and as individuals and discuss how we collectively envision approaches that center on building community resilience. We welcome the participants to join us throughout the session, reflecting on the following questions: If those that are closer to problems are closer to solutions then why is our society not built around empowering and investing those perspectives? How should we connect our personal selves with the communities we partner with? How do we make meaningful dialogues in the backdrop of this new normal?

#FindYourPeople #LearnTogether #DesignWithCommunities #CommunityDesign

Speaker Bios:

Gloria Lau (she/her) is a landscape architect and planner working at the intersection of urban landscape, resilient infrastructure, and equitable design. She has 10+ years of experience managing public space and urban design projects and is currently a Senior Landscape Architect at Stantec. Gloria serves as Director of Projects at Open Architecture/New York, a volunteer organization which provides pro-bono design services to underserved communities. Gloria is a member of Design as Protest and an invited participant of ASLA Diversity Summit. She is also an advisor to APA-NYM Diversity Committee and a 2019-2020 Urban Design Forum Forefront Fellow.

Manuela Powidayko (she/her) is an architect and urban planner specialised in climate adaptation: from the development of policies, zoning tools, and building code regulations to the creation of community engagement strategies. At the NYC Department of City Planning, Manuela serves as the project manager for Zoning for Coastal Flood Resiliency, an initiative that encourages the adoption of building-scale resiliency measures within the city’s floodplain. She is also a consultant at Instituto Limite in Brazil and a 2019-2020 Urban Design Forum Forefront Fellow. Manuela earned her Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University.

Rhonda-Lee Davis (she/her) is an urban planner with experience in land use analysis, affordable and supportive housing development, and community resilience planning. She is passionate about the role affordable housing and more economically inclusive community development play in promoting equitable urban communities for all New Yorkers. Currently, Rhonda-Lee is exploring the implementation of creative entrepreneurship strategies in young adult supportive housing settings as the 2021 recipient of the National Coalition for Shelter NextGen Innovation Award. She was a 2019-2020 Urban Design Forefront Fellow. She earned her Master of Urban Planning from CUNY Hunter College.