Leonie Sandercock

Professor, School of Community and Regional Planning

Leonie Sandercock has been a professor in the School of Community & Regional Planning at UBC since 2001. She co-created with the Musqueam Nation the Indigenous Community Planning program in SCARP and also chaired the PhD program for 15 years. Her main interest is in working with First Nations, through collaborative community planning, using the medium of film as a catalyst for dialogue, healing, community development and cultural revitalization. Her current project is a community-driven feature film (Edge of the Knife) in partnership with the Haida Nation and the Inuit film production company, Kingulliit. This film premiered at TIFF in 2018 and was awarded Best Canadian Film at VIFF. Leonie now has a SSHRC grant to evaluate the impact of the film in the Haida community.

Her books include Making the Invisible Visible (1998); Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (1998); Cosmopolis 2: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (2003); Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy & Planning (2010); and, with Giovanni Attili, the documentaries Where Strangers Become Neighbours (2007); Finding Our Way: Beyond Canada’s Apartheid (2010).

Leonie received the Davidoff Award (2005) from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, for the best book on a social justice theme in the field of urban, regional and community planning, for Cosmopolis 2: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century; and the BMW Group Award for Intercultural Learning for her writing on Cosmopolitan Urbanism and for her film Where Strangers Become Neighbours (2007). In 2012 Leonie was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for lifetime contribution to planning scholarship by Roskilde University in Denmark. And in 2015 she received the Distinguished Planning Educator award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning for her contribution to planning scholarship, education, and practice.