What's Next | Julia Smachylo and Jackie Hamilton

Julia Smachylo is an urban designer as well as a registered urban planner in Ontario and the United Kingdom. As a doctoral candidate at Harvard, she is a member of the Urban Theory Lab, a Canada Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and has completed a doctoral specialism in Critical Media Practice. Julia’s research is situated in urban and landscape theory and political ecology, and aims to render visible the impacts of policy that connect resource territories to urban processes. Within this context her recent work traces the rise of incentivized environmental conservation in southern Ontario, focusing on forest landscapes. Using film as a method of investigation, alongside mapping, interviews and archival analysis, her research documents incentivized forest management to reveal the extent to which these landscapes are tied to the social, economic and political histories of production and conservation within the region. Within this framework she brings a particular focus on environmental stewardship as a form of collective praxis through which to engage the production of more environmentally sane and socially just cities and landscapes.