Pablo Sendra
Architetto e Urban Designer
Cities are becoming more rigid, homogenous, and over-determined from the top-down. But the places that we – as humans – find fascinating are those that enable social contact, unpredictable interactions, unexpected activities, and which can be adapted and shaped according to people’s actions.
How can urban designers create more human conditions for unpredictability to occur?
Our role as urban designers is to create the conditions – both through the physical and social infrastructure – for unpredictable interactions and activities to take place.
Speaker
2025
Pablo Sendra is Professor of Urban Design and Public Participation at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. He combines his academic career with professional work through his own urban design practice, LUGADERO LTD, which focuses on facilitating co-design processes with communities. At UCL, he is the Director of the MSc Urban Design and City Planning and the Coordinator of the Civic Design short course. He has carried out action-research projects in collaboration with activists and communities. He is co-author of Designing Disorder (with Richard Sennett, 2020), which has been translated into nine languages, co-author of Community-Led Regeneration (with Daniel Fitzpatrick, 2020) and co-editor of Civic Practices (with Maria Joao Pita and Civic Wise, 2017). He is part of the City Collective for the journal City.
