Urban planning and designing is a concept that helps cities grow in various ways. With proper planning and designing of the cities, it gives more space for the population to grow and also manage all the resources so that all the people of the city are happy. These are some of the most basic things that are included in urban planning and designing. With technologies evolving every day, there still remains a lot that needs to be explored and implemented in urban designing space.
Featuring for the Cover Story of The Enterprise World’s this issue of Top 5 Successful Entrepreneurs To Watch In 2022 is Dr. Tigran Haas, a teacher, a professor at KTH Royal Institute of technology and a leader that is bringing out the best in people.
About Dr. Tigran-
Dr. Tigran holds advanced and multiple degrees in Architecture, Urban Planning + Urban Design, Environmental Science and Regional Planning. He has written over 100 scholarly articles and 10 books and has educated future corporate project managers on a master’s level for over a decade. He has also developed three masters’ programs and taught over 35 courses at graduate & post-graduate level. Dr. Tigran holds Three Post-Doc Fellowships from the University of Berkeley California, University of Michigan Ann Arbor and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston Cambridge.
His forthcoming books will be published by Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield, Rizzoli, Edward Elgar and Atheneum Scholars Press. He has also been a Former Director of International Centre for the Future of Places (CFP) at KTH Royal Institute of technology, Stockholm and the former Director of the Civitas Athenaeum Laboratory (CAL).
From 2016-2021, Dr. Tigran headed the centre, an international network hub and clearing house on research within public spaces. He is currently an Associate Professor of Urban Planning + Urban Design at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Digital Futures KTH Royal Institute of technology Faculty and Executive Board Member and a Guest Research Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in Cambridge, in the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU).
Dr. Tigran’s Journey at the Research Center-
Positioned at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, urban design and urban studies, KTH Royal Institute of technology’s Centre for the Future of Places CFP was an agora, a meeting place for leading thinkers, practitioners and researchers in urbanism who are pursuing solutions to the city’s key urban development challenges, with a particular focus on public space systems. Faced with new social, economic, political, cultural and environmental challenges, the question of the value of public space in planning and maintaining cities is critical to the future of urbanism.
“As a permanent mission, the CFP places a spotlight on public space and the public realm, and more specifically, the shifting of attention from object to places, as an essential aspect of urbanism and urbanization. Within that mission we have explored the interrelationships between urban form, human behavior, urban society, and social life, sustainable urbanism and housing in the wake of emergent global transformations looked upon through the cross-cutting lens of public space. Also, CFP’s mother Institution and Hub is the “MIT of the NORTH”, KTH Royal Institute of technology in Stockholm Sweden.
Since its inception in 1827, KTH Royal Institute of technology has developed into one of Europe’s leading technical universities and an important arena for knowledge development. As Sweden’s largest university for technical research and education, KTH Royal Institute of technology brings together students, researchers and faculty from all over the world. Together with business and society, KTH Royal Institute of technology is working on sustainable solutions to some of humanity’s greatest challenges: climate change, the energy supply of the future, urbanization and quality of life for a rapidly growing, aging population.
KKTH Royal Institute of technology’s research and education covers both science and all branches of technology as well as architecture, industrial economics, social planning, history and philosophy. The innovative climate promotes versatile solutions and the university’s education creates a new generation of engineers, architects and teachers.
Finally, their world-class ties, affiliations and research cooperation were also one of the reasons for this success and will further be strengthened with the international ties and upcoming work with UCL Bartlett in London and LCAU at MIT in Boston.
“We continue to develop the cooperation with UN Habitat and our other university partners such as TU Wien, LSE London, University of Chicago, University of Miami and ETH Zürich.”
Strengthening the ties between research and practice by supporting researchers to cooperate and to practically implement their research results is a central aspect of what the university is focusing to do in the coming years. After the work in the center where they have assembled the best urbanism network in the world and best clearing house on public spaces and urban places research, Dr. Tigran is looking forward to forming and leading perhaps a second research lab in his career, A City Research Lab called HAL.
“Cities are an amazing place with limitless opportunities, problems, challenges and source of ideas.”
The Centre and Dr. Tigran are recipients of 15+ awards for leadership and management from CEO Europe Magazine, ACQ Global Awards, CV Magazine Award, CIO Views Award, CIO Times, CXO Fortune, Insight Success, Silicone Review, Finance Monthly CEO Awards, World’s Leaders Magazine Awards and others.
“In my work in Academia over the last 25 years, I span and cover one of the largest urbanism networks in the world.”
Key Achievements of Dr. Tigran’s Journey-
Leadership is definitely a complex journey of self-transformation, a journey travelled by an individual who has been handed over the responsibility of guiding people towards achieving a certain business objective. Teaching Project and Strategic Management and Project Leadership for over 8 years has helped Dr. Tigran understand some of these things much better and the period of 5 years running a research centre and 5 years of a Lab before that plus being director of three educational programs has also helped immensely.
Getting things done from the project and research team you have in place is just one part of the job of a leader and the team has to be assembled in the best possible way where the issues of competence, equality and professionalism are crucial but also the finesse to know where each person can contribute the most.
“At the outset of my leadership role, I started to expand and build new networks and brake barriers of what is possible and impossible.”
Where the inner great relationship with the team and employees is crucial and is sine qua non for the sustainable longevity of the enterprise. Winning their trust, gaining honest feedback, achieving friendships and developing mutual respect is crucial.
Finally, as advice to others, ability to learn from the past and from mistakes is crucial; strong communication skills and building sustainable relationships on all levels; listening, understanding and doing; optimism and risk taking to a specific degree; reading people and adapting them to necessary task in the organization; anticipating problems and thinking outside the box; eliminating threats and psychopathic personalities.
“Regardless of the hurdles, don’t lose faith in your idea and your vision, fight to the bitter end if you see a great innovative, just, explorative and good idea.”
The Road Ahead-
After the success of a five-year sequel of the centre, the future looks interesting as the institute will be focusing more on either continuing the path they have set till now, or turning the ship into another, slightly less (un)charted destination. One thing is sure, that in the next two years the focus will be on the critical issue of humanizing cities within rising smart and new experimental urbanisms, but also issues of livability, comfort, health, aesthetics of cities and open public spaces.
“We will continue to look into this on micro, meso and macro level (house, neighbourhood, district, city and region).”
The main issue is that cities are getting more complex and the challenges are rising on a daily basis with multiple converging crises that seek answers for new theories, tools and approaches. The Research Lab – HAL halcyon Civitas Laboratory will try to answer these calls as it goes into the next period, being a successor to the Centre for the Future of Places CFP.
Tackling New Challenges of the Pandemic-
With extreme pressure on physical and mental health, leaders need to tap into their own emotional intelligence to make sure their teams come out of the pandemic stronger. University and college campuses such as at KTH Royal Institute of technology and MIT, Dr. Tigran’s 2nd place of work and KTH Royal Institute of technology’s partner university, are places where students study, socialize and live in close proximity to each other. They are also the nexus for social and cultural hubs where students are brought together from all corners of the world and where social and human capital is produced.
Due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus and the unprecedented impact it’s had on the society, they had to adapt to teaching, researching and networking online and most importantly, to do everything they can to protect the lives of their students and faculty. Maximizing online learning and teaching, developing robust but flexible systems, gathering information and applying the best practices have been some of the hallmarks of this difficult period, as well as great collegial and comradeship throughout.
The higher education sector has withstood pandemics and turbulent economic times in the past and it will withstand them again, preparing to be adaptable, resilient and sustainable in the long run. In a network society, city of bits and the new digital age, universities are better placed, more than ever, to provide students with an easily accessible online version of their courses.
“We have to learn and adapt, and we also need to prepare for the tougher challenges ahead of us, as unfortunately, there will be many more of these to come.”
Innovation is the Key-
“Innovation is the core value, fundus and keystone of the new Lab as well as it was of the Centre for the Future of Places that has been established to promote sustainable urban development by shifting the urban discourse from objects to places in order to promote healthy and livable cities, within the disciplines of Urban Planning and Urban Design. The Lab and the centre that preceded it, envisioned a networked community of leaders actively working across sectors, frontiers, and disciplines to build a more just, sustainable, and prosperous world.
The task of the Centre was to take a holistic approach in defining, classifying and establishing the public space as an independent academic research field. This means that the center systematically linked together knowledge from all disciplines related to the field of public space, such as urban planning, urban design, environmental psychology, urban sociology, architecture, urban economics, human geography and others.
The focus on public space served as a cross-disciplinary innovation framework to merge the knowledge from the different disciplinary silos; thus, creating links between the experts within them, to create a holistic understanding of the city that serves as the basis for practical and effective action, which will require extensive international cooperation.”
