Building healthier, more sustainable communities will be the focus of an upcoming conference in Kelowna.
Faculty from the School of Engineering will be among the featured speakers at the Building SustainABLE Communities: Innovation Through Collaboration Conference being held November 21-24 at the Delta Grand Hotel. Gordon Lovegrove and Ahmed Idris are both scheduled to speak at the event.
Lovegrove, who specializes in sustainable communities through applied sustainable civil engineering, will lead in several discussions. The first, entitled Improved Circulation: Getting to the Heart of Community Mobility and Health in the Netherlands, “relates to understanding how successful urban planning has impacted progressive communities.” Lovegrove explains “we can build upon their design approaches and improve our communities.”
In a group discussion entitled Getting active in SMARTer Growth Neighborhoods, Lovegrove and Idris will join UBC Okanagan associate professor of Geography Bernard Momer to discuss making urban areas more walkable, bikeable, and transit oriented by reducing sprawl through system-based land use planning and design principles.
Lovegrove will also join Greg Harris, founder of Kelowna Intentional Communities, to lead a discussion on co-housing, a traditional form of housing in Scandanavia, Asia, Israel, and First Nations communities, which promotes healthier aging in place, socialization, and affordable housing, current challenges facing all communities.
“Our goal is to add to the discussion already underway in the Okanagan and specifically in Kelowna” says Idris. “By participating in a conference with hundreds of urban planners from around the province, we are making a difference in the future design direction of our communities.” Idris is a behaviour modeller whose work is focused on building public transit usage.
For more information about the conference visit: https://freshoutlookfoundation.org/sessions/