Maged Senbel's research focuses on public engagement in long term neighbourhood planning. He strives to make planning more accessible to both expert and non-expert audiences. His publications include research on neighbourhood scale energy performance and comparative GHG emissions analysis, municipal climate change planning, youth engagement in climate change planning, leadership in sustainability planning, and different approaches to spatial thinking for people new to design. He has additionally theorized on approaches for cultivating inclusive and intercultural visions of a compelling urban future. Maged is currently leading a 3-year SSHRC funded project on inclusive planning practice with a near term focus on refugees and vulnerable immigrants and a long term focus on all minority groups. He is also leading ongoing research on community scale reductions in energy and emissions.
His current projects include equity and inclusion in planning, planning for refugees, visualization, public engagement, youth engagement, and the use of digital and social media in climate change planning. In addition to running an urban design lab at SCARP Maged is a member of the team at the elementslab in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and is a research associate in the Planning Evaluation Lab.
Maged's commitment to sustainable urban design, and particularly to its implementation in neighborhood-specific, inclusive and socially just ways, makes his work closely aligned with SCARP’s vision of sustainability through the democratization of planning. In addition to the profound and increasing challenges that cities have faced since their inception, the many challenges of climate change require cities to employ creative and often radically transformative solutions. Planning for climate change, and for maintaining healthy and resilient communities in the face of finite resources, requires planning agencies to promote agendas of change that are neither popular nor easily realized. Maged's work seeks to facilitate this transformation and to contribute to its fair and inclusive implementation.
Maged's innovative, integrative and experiential approach to teaching has earned him UBC’s top honour in graduate teaching. In 2012 he was awarded the Killam prize for graduate instruction from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, which awards one prize per year. He was also named Professor of the Year at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture + Planning in 2007. Since arriving at UBC in 2007 his supervision has included 9 Ph.D. students; and 63 Masters students.
Maged supervises projects, directed studies and internships in a wide variety of topics related to urban design, environmental planning, climate change planning, inclusive planning, public engagement, urban agriculture, multi-media, social media and youth engagement. He employs an experiential learning approach and mentors his students through a sequence of individual and team based projects in real world situations that mimic professional practice. His teaching activities have directly engaged numerous communities and groups with little or no access to planning professionals. Student work has resulted in a series of professional quality outputs and ongoing relationships that have served both the partner communities and planning students and graduates.
