February 28, 2025 @ 4:00 p.m. MT | APA Utah Planning Lecture

About the Lecture

What is planning’s relationship to design? In this lecture, I will argue for the necessity and efficacy of urban planning as a form of “strategic design”, moving past traditional design’s focus on discrete solutions — be it a building or a landscape — but borrowing traditional design’s principles and methods to tackle systemic challenges like inequality, unaffordable housing, and climate change.

Speaker Bio

Siqi is an urban planner, technologist, and strategic designer who seamlessly integrates cities and technologies as dual focal points in his practice. With a strategic design mindset, he applies a creative combination of place-, community-, and technology-based solutions to complex, systemic urban challenges, such as climate change, infrastructural renewal, equitable development, and technological disruptions.

As a partner at Sasaki’s NYC office, Siqi leads the firm’s civic planning and Urban Technology practice areas. He also heads Sasaki Strategies, a team focused on digital product development, data science, and research and prototyping. His recent projects include a pioneering Technology Action Plan for Great Rivers Greenways in St. Louis, where he guided the organization’s technology investments to advance socioeconomic equity, and a community-driven master plan for Akron’s Innerbelt expressway aimed at addressing the historical and racialized impacts of Urban Renewal-era infrastructure. Siqi also spearheads Sasaki’s digital product development efforts, including Carbon Conscience, a tool for quantifying the embodied carbon impact of planning decisions, and Dashi, a digital twin platform designed to accelerate the implementation of complex capital and decarbonization programs.

Before joining Sasaki, Siqi worked as Director of Planning and Project Delivery at Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, where he oversaw key aspects of the Quayside development and technology incubation programs. He serves as a board member of Urban Design Forum, and is a lecturer at Harvard’s Master of Design Engineering program, where he mentors students in developing mission-driven new technology applications.

Webcast: https://aggiecast.usu.edu

Attend in person in Room FAV 150