Erick Villagomez

Erick Villagomez is a Lecturer in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches architecture, urban design, visual representation, and critical approaches to design and planning practice. His work examines how cities are shaped by often-invisible systems—technical standards, economic models, regulatory tools, and representational practices—and how these systems influence power, equity, and democratic participation.

Trained as an architect, Villagomez’s scholarship critically interrogates dominant assumptions in contemporary architecture, planning, and urban design, including the presumed neutrality of economic and environmental metrics. His writing explores how tools such as zoning, floor space ratios, development viability models, architectural form, and carbon accounting function not only as technical instruments, but as political and ethical ones.

Alongside his academic work, Villagomez is the founder and principal of Metis Design | Build, a private practice that engages projects ranging from furniture and residential construction to urban design and spatial research. The practice adopts a holistic, hands-on approach to design and making, foregrounding material realities, construction processes, and the social and environmental consequences of design decisions. This direct engagement with building practice informs his teaching and scholarship, grounding critical inquiry in lived, material experience.

Villagomez is the founding editor of Spacing Vancouver and a long-standing public scholar whose work bridges academic research, professional practice, and civic discourse. Through books, essays, and public-facing series, he has worked to make planning knowledge accessible while exposing the assumptions embedded within it.

At SCARP, Villagomez emphasizes visual literacy, critical thinking, and ethical responsibility as core competencies for future planners. His teaching treats representation, drawing, and emerging technologies—including AI—not simply as skills, but as ways of understanding and questioning the systems that shape urban life.

His research, consulting and writing has influenced patterns of urban development locally and abroad — contributing to the adoption of ‘green’ urban design processes, plans, codes, standards, guidelines and prototypes.