F1 - Why do we draw? Examining the sketch effect

A drawing is never neutral. It's an argument, made visible.

This panel explores how drawing and visualization remain relevant to how we might imagine, debate, and shape cities together. Long before a policy becomes a place, someone has to draw it: to move it from aspiration to option, from option to something a room full of stakeholders can actually argue about and choose. Every image carries assumptions: about who belongs, what's possible, what's been left out of frame. AI and digital tools are making that visualization faster, sharper, and more polished than ever. Is the urban designer empowered or undermined by this shift? As the tools accelerate, how does the role evolve?

Join our panelists as we draw on new ideas, and on paper, in this creative and interactive session.

Speakers

Moderator: Katherine Perrot
PhD, RPP, MCIP
Assistant Professor, School of Planning, University of Waterloo

Katherine Perrott is an award-winning practitioner, researcher, and educator. As a professional planning consultant in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, she worked across the urban to rural spectrum on projects ranging from climate change action plans to site plan applications.

She has taught urban planning at the University of Toronto, York University, and Dalhousie University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, where she teaches urban design and planning to both undergrads and master’s students.

Katherine is a curiosity-driven researcher, with projects spanning topics from suburban reinvention and high-rise living to image-generating AI. The throughline is density, asking how to better plan for, visualize, and live well in densifying, increasingly complex communities.

Matt Knapik
MArch, MEDes (Urban Design)
Principal, Urban Designer, O2 Planning and Design

In his role as an Urban Designer at O2, Matt brings a multi-disciplinary skill set and keen design sensibility to projects in planning, landscape, and urban design. He is drawn to complex projects where institutions and infrastructures collide with the city.

Matt received Master’s Degrees in both Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Calgary. He sits on the board of directors for Calgary Reads and is a founding member of the award-winning design and research collaborative The Bench Project. For the last eleven years, Matt has taught and lectured at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary, where he was co-recipient of the Faculty of Environmental Design Award for Teaching Excellence.

Benjamin Gianni
Associate Professor, Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University

Benjamin Gianni is an Associate Professor in the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University where he leads the Urbanism program. Prof. Gianni received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch. from Yale University. He served as Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University from 1992-2000 and Director of the School of Information Technology from 2003-2006. He is Vice President of the International Council on Canadian, Chinese, and African Sustainable Urbanism (ICCCASU), a UN Habitat affiliate that examines urban development in these three regions of the world.

Professor Gianni’s research interests focus on the areas of housing and urban development. Of particular interest are 1) public housing constructed in the decades following WWII in Europe and North America, and its redevelopment from the 1990s onward, 2) urbanization, suburbanization and the study of large-scale housing ensembles in contemporary China, questioning the legacy of modernism and its transposition to different cultural and temporal contexts, and 3) the redevelopment of informal settlements in China, India and Africa, using design as a form of research to explore adaptable, culturally resonant, and market-friendly approaches to redevelopment.