EDRA56 Keynote & Plenaries

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EDRA56 Keynotes and Plenaries

EDRA56 Keynotes and Plenaries EDRA56 Halifax will include feature keynotes and Plenaries from world renowned speakers about their innovative and impactful work to advance climate action, justice, and design.

ROBERTO ROVIRA || The Art of Uncertainty and the Crisis of Why: The Role of Imagination in Climate Action and Design

Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 1:15-2:30 PM

Roberto Rovira is Principal of Studio Roberto Rovira, Professor, and former Chair of FIU Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design in Miami, Florida. With a multifaceted background, he views landscape architecture as pivotal to shaping public imagination through projects that combine art, design, and natural systems. Honored in numerous national and international competitions, his work and the work of his students have been widely published and recognized by prominent institutions. Rovira lectures broadly and has been published in notable media like Fast Company, Landscape Architecture Magazine, TEDx, Princeton Architectural Press, Routledge/Taylor Francis, Land Journal, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. He has served as President of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, as well as VP of Leadership and Research at LAF. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and an MLA from Rhode Island School of Design.

In an era increasingly supercharged by data, analytics, and technical precision that is simultaneously disconcerting for its uncertain future, the need for imagination, and visionary thinking has never been more urgent. As the climate crisis accelerates, the design and research communities must go beyond deductive analysis and incremental adaptation to embrace bold, creative visions for the future.

In this keynote, Rovira will explore the intersection of environmental design, resilience, and the power of optimism. Drawing from his work in landscape architecture, art, and ecological visualization, Rovira will challenge attendees to view climate action not as a mere response to crisis but as an opportunity to shape dynamic, inclusive, and regenerative communities. He will highlight the need for comfort with uncertainty—an essential mindset for envisioning the unknown and developing flexible yet powerful frameworks for action.

Through examples from his research, design projects, and the Ecological Atlas, Rovira will illustrate how data-driven insights can merge with artistic interpretation and visionary thinking to create landscapes that respond to ecological and social challenges. His talk will invite researchers, designers, and decision-makers to cultivate a forward-looking approach—one that integrates scientific rigor with the poetic and the practical, empowering communities to navigate an uncertain future with resilience and imagination that addresses the crisis of why we do what we do.

HalifACT || Acting on Climate Together

Thursday, May 29, 2025, 1:15-2:30 PM

Join this special plenary session on one of the most ambitious climate action movements in Canada. It is a community response to the climate crisis that will build a more resilient and healthy future in Atlantic Canada while preparing for current and future climate impacts. On June 23, 2020, Halifax Regional Council unanimously adopted HalifACT – a transformational plan to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. Funds from Halifax’s Climate Action Tax directly support HalifACT in acquiring electric vehicles and buses, constructing net-zero buildings and leading projects that improve the resiliency of communities and infrastructure.

Speakers will discuss ways in which midsized cities can bring together conversations and create aligned action plans for different aspects of climate change, including infrastructural change, systems adaptation, social justice, improvements to the built environment, innovation and job creation, and sustainable housing. It brings together HalifACT leadership with partners in government, industry, design, research, and the community, to discuss their roles, challenges, and opportunities, and to answer questions from EDRA delegates.

DR. INGRID WALDRON || Mapping Racial Violence in Indigenous and Black Communities: A Case Study on Environmental Racism in Canada

Friday, May 30, 2025, 10:45 AM-12:00 PM

Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University. She is a health sociologist whose research focuses on the health and mental health impacts of racism in Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities, including environmental racism. Ingrid is the author of There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a Netflix documentary of the same name. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project, and co-developed Canada’s first environmental justice private members bill, which became law in 2024.

In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron examines the social justice dimensions of race, place, space, and the environment in Indigenous and Black communities by exploring how hierarchies and intersections of race, culture, gender, income, class, and other social identities are spatialized in rural and urban settings. She discusses how these identities are imbued in the places and spaces where we live, work, and play by unpacking the larger socio-spatial processes that create disproportionate exposure and vulnerability to the harmful social, economic, and health impacts of inequality in Indigenous and Black communities.

At the same time, she maintains a sustained and critical focus on race as an important analytical entry point for understanding the spatiality of violence in urban and rural spaces where racialized people are harmed by unemployment, income insecurity, poverty, food insecurity, poor quality neighbourhoods and housing, gentrification, criminalization, police brutality, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and proximity to polluting industries. In other words, she argues that the lived experience of spatial violence and toxic exposure live together and that it is not possible to understand the disproportionate impacts of these issues in Indigenous and Black communities in isolation. In so doing, she disrupts traditional notions of “the environment” that are centered on harmonizing cities and nature by engaging in a conceptual re-imagining of the environment as a product of both the symbolic meaning of space and the materiality of space.