The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents the first in a new lecture and film series on cities and urban development on Thursday evenings beginning 29 March. Learning From… examines cities and their response to new architectural and urban conditions in a rapidly transforming global economy. Lagos, Vancouver, Astana, Toyko, and rural Chinese villages that are swiftly becoming major urban centres are selected as key cities in contemporary architectural debate for their complexity of social, ecological, economic, and political issues.

The series takes its title from Learning From Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s vastly influential publication which analysed the commercial strips and architectural symbolism of Las Vegas in order to understand urban sprawl. In this spirit, the series brings together experts to explore specific urban conditions and their relevance to the future development of cities. Lectures begin at 7 pm; admission is free.

29 March
Lagos Wide and Close
A film by Bregtje van der Haak with Rem Koolhaas and The Harvard Project on the City, Netherlands, 2005, 60 min.

Filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak follows architect Rem Koolhaas and a team of students from The Harvard Project on the City over a 2-year period as they research Lagos, Nigeria. Narrated by Rem Koolhaas, the film represents a unique engagement with a hardly documented city, capturing multiple perspectives of a volatile moment in its evolution. Lagos is home to an estimated 15 million people whose very survival depends on improvisation, networking, and risk-taking. Despite extreme poverty, power shortages, and systemic water and traffic problems, the city is expected to be the third largest in the world by 2020.

05 April
Vancouverism and its Discontents
Trevor Boddy, critic, curator and historian of architecture and consulting urban designer

Trevor Boddy examines Vancouver’s influential model of high-density housing combined with green space almost 20 years after its radical redevelopment plan. An overemphasis on residential development at the cost of office space has led to an unprecedented suburbanisation of the downtown core. The lecture offers a contemporary reading of the coastal city’s unique urban and geographical situation and the issues at stake for shaping its future.

19 April
Learning from Astana
Jeffrey Inaba, principal of the Los Angeles-based firm INABA, program director of SCIFI, the postgraduate degree program
at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and the director of C-Lab at Columbia University

Jeffrey Inaba examines the urban centre of Kazakhstan, the world's 9th largest country with a population of only 16 million people. With its rich oil and natural gas reserves and strategic geographical location, Kazakhstan is poised to experience an economic boom and has already attracted major international architectural firms.

26 April
Tokyo Nine Flux
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, co-founder of Atelier Bow-Wow

Architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow is celebrated for research that defines new urban and architectural typologies in Tokyo, where otherwise unrelated elements of the built environment are combined and adapted for utilitarian purposes. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto interprets urban space in Tokyo as a causal chain of responses to flux - natural phenomena such as earthquakes and typhoons that pose a constant threat to the city, and increases in population, traffic and waste.

3 May
Urbanising Southern China: Poverty, Minorities, and Development
Gregory Guldin, Professor of Anthropology at the Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, Washington

A specialist in Chinese urbanisation, ethnicity, and politics, Gregory Guldin examines the social and environmental consequences of accelerated industrialisation in China, as agricultural villages become dense urban agglomerations at unprecedented rates.