Maged Senbel

Maged’s research focuses on analytical methods for making cities more ecologically sustainable as well as the deliberative and participatory processes that contribute to implementing sustainable designs. His professional experience is in the areas of architecture, planning and urban design; and his teaching experience is in architecture, urban design, planning, landscape architecture and creativity. Interdisciplinarity and enhancing the reciprocity between theory and practice are the continuous threads that weave together the various strands of his work.

Maged Senbel’s research explores parallel areas of inquiry: a quantitative and critical assessment of the relative merits of different urban design typologies; and a qualitative analysis of inclusive public engagement to advance sustainable urban design decision-making. Maged has conducted quantitative assessments of urban form using ecological footprint analysis as well as carbon and GHG accounting.  Maged has also conducted qualitative research on citizen access to neighbourhood scale physical planning. He is particularly interested in developing and testing new combinations of multi-media tools to improve public engagement related to urban resilience and climate change mitigation and adaptation.  

His current projects include the relationship between urban form and GHG emissions and a lifecycle analysis of GHG emissions at the neighbourhood scale in the Vancouver area.  He is also the principle investigator in a multi-year community-based interdisciplinary research project examining the use of multi-media tools for communicating the issues of climate change and peak oil, and their requisite planning imperatives, to community residents.

Maged also has a pedagogical research agenda that seeks to integrate community-based design learning, and problem based learning with his research agenda.  Maged's passion is urban sustainability. Inspired by the ongoing quest for environmental and social justice Maged traverses the space between architecture and planning, between design and public decision-making. He enjoys supervising students in a wide range of research topics related to ecological urban design, including the development, analysis, visualization, communication and multi-media exploration of the theory and practice of urban design.

Maged joined SCARP in 2007 after spending three years at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture + Planning where he launched and directed the Westside Studio. This is an interdisciplinary teaching and research center in Salt Lake City's lowest income and highest diversity neighborhoods. It brings together students from architecture, business and urban planning to work with neighborhood residents and community organizations on local development issues. He was named Lowell Bennion Public Service Professor and was the 2006 Professor of the year for the college of Architecture + Planning.