Slum Upgrading and the Right to the City: Policies, Design and Transformation will be the first of a three panels series revolving around the urgent need and impact of design across disciplines, scales, and geographies. This session would look at slum upgrading and what policy makers, planners and designers should be mindful of and how to work with communities to tackle the inequities in our cities which were laid bare by COVID-19. This last crisis add up to the increasing frequency and severity of disasters produced by climate change, and the systemic racial, religious and economic discrimination that plagues cities.

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• Event Curator: Sameh Wahba, Global Director for the World Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice

• Event Moderator: Francisco Brown, Research Affiliate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Speakers Include:
 

• Sheela Patel, Director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Chairperson, Slum/Shack Dweller International (SDI), based in Mumbai, India. 

• Jorge Mario Jauregui (Argentina/Rio de Janeiro), Architect and Urban Planner “The Favela-Bairro Program,” based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Bio

• Inês Magalhães, Former National Housing Secretary and Minister of Cities, Senior Housing Expert, Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil 

• Jennifer Musisi, Former Executive Director of Kampala City, City Leader in Residence, Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, based in Cambridge, MA 

• Anacláudia Rossbach, Regional Manager for the Latin America and Caribbean Region, Cities Alliance, based in Mexico City.

• Sameh Wahba, Global Director for the World Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice based in Washington D.C.