Louisa-May Khoo

Bio and CV

Biography

I was an urban planner in Singapore, involved in urban research and public policy formulation for many years. My interests navigate the intersections between marginalization, urban policy, and social justice in cities. As Senior Assistant Director with the policy research think-tank - Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), Singapore, I led the housing and social research teams, focusing on issues relating to planning, affordable housing, immigration and diversity. Having been awarded the International Doctoral Fellowship by UBC, I moved to Vancouver in Fall 2018 to extend my work with marginalized communities, and to build competencies in community planning and participatory action research. Broadly, I am interested in the relationship of the brain and the city, to explore the extent to which urban planning and city building are complicit in the mental health issues we are witnessing in many cities. Deploying the term 'neuropolis' (Fitzgerald, Rose and Singh, 2016), I seek to understand the city as a matrix of transactions between individuals and the environment, enveloped in how physical spaces and social lives are organised in a digital age. More pertinently, I am concerned with how the changing urban experience impacts on people's wellbeing, and how digitization in particular, is recasting worldviews through the reconfiguration of knowledges around how we dwell, how socio-spatial relationships in the city have been reformatted, and with what consequences.

Louisa holds a BA and a MSSc in Geography, both from the National University of Singapore. 

Supervisors

Supervisors

Heather Campbell

Maged Senbel