This lecture will be in person and is part of the Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Still Making Space for Gender"

Chelina Odbert (she/her) believes in the power of community-engaged design to advance racial, environmental, and economic equity in neighborhoods and cities. As Founding Principal of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), she has built an award-winning practice that brings good design to places where it is not often found and connects localized design interventions to large-scale policy change. In 2022, the firm received the prestigious National Design Award in Landscape Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

An urban planner by training, Chelina’s experience and expertise cover a range of topics from participatory planning to gender-inclusive design. She has written extensively about KDI’s community-engaged approach to planning in the U.S. and abroad, and she has been recognized by notable institutions, including the Van Alen Institute, Ashoka Changemakers, and the Aspen Institute. She has held teaching appointments at Harvard Graduate School of Design and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Chelina received her Master of Urban Planning from Harvard University.

"Toward a Just Public Realm: Gender Equity in the Built Environment": Due to centuries of biased planning and design centering men as the “neutral” users of cities, urban spaces around the world continue to exclude, inconvenience, and endanger women, girls, and people of marginalized genders. Women have different, more complex travel patterns than men and are more likely to be caregivers, often experiencing public spaces with dependents. Matching gender equity policies with practice continues to be difficult. KDI is working with communities to create gender-inclusive spaces that include active participation, integration, universality, knowledge-building, power-building, and investment.

In this lecture, Chelina Odbert, Founding Principal of KDI, will explore 15 years of work across scales and geographies that demonstrate how planning and design can be tools for gender equity.

Suggested Reading: “Designing for Urban Inclusivity” by Chelina Odbert, Chapter of Designing Peace.

"Still Making Space for Gender" centers women and LGBTQIA+ folk in the built environment. While the discourse framing gender morphs and gender identities broaden and become more intersectional, the predicament remains the same. Women and LGBTQIA+folk continue to struggle against exploitation and fight for equal rights and equity opportunities in the United States, with this situation troubling unrelenting claims of exceptionalism at home and abroad. Although gender politics are ever present, achievements are hard-won and sometimes rolled back in the face of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other ingrained expressions of exclusion. Buildings, cities, and landscapes are not only where battles over gender unfurl, but these spaces also foster identities and incite change. In this lecture series, trailblazing women and LGBTQIA + design practitioners, scholars, and activists—working in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—insist that gender must remain in sharp focus if we are to shape equitable and just built environments.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact  ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu " rel="noopener" target="_blank"> ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu .

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.