Public Space Lab, guest talk:

Vikas Mehta

December 1 @ 7PM

Zoom: https://NewSchool.zoom.us/j/96929689560

Vikas Mehta is Professor of Urbanism and the Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design and Coordinator for the Urban Design Certificate. Dr. Mehta’s work focuses on the role of design and planning in creating a more responsive, equitable, stimulating and communicative environment. He is interested in various dimensions of urbanity through the exploration of place as a social and ecological setting and as a sensorial art. This work emphasizes the sense of place and place distinctiveness, design and visualization of urban places and activities, and cities and regions as just, equitable and sustainable living systems. Dr. Mehta’s work on the urban street emphasizes the street as a heterogeneous, multicultural, multigenerational and multiuse public space. He has developed new measures of sociability that have advanced existing methods to study human behavior in public spaces. Dr. Mehta is the co-editor of Public Space Reader (Routledge, 2021); co-editor of Companion to Public Space (Routledge, 2020); editor of Public Space, a 4-volume anthology (Routledge, 2015); and author of 101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School (with Matthew Frederick, Three Rivers Press/Penguin, 2018) and The Street: a quintessential social public space (Routledge, 2013 and 2014) that received the 2014 Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) and was also a finalist for the 2014 Francis Tibbalds Award for Best Book of the Year. Dr. Mehta is the co-editor of two journals, Children, Youth and Environments and the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding.