Asst. Prof. Oscar Carracedo Garcia-Villalba

Oscar Carracedo is an architect, urbanist and educator from Barcelona currently holding a full-time position at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is the director of the Master of Urban Design programme and director of the Designing Resilience in Asia International Research Programme (DRIA). He develops his research and expertise in climate change, urban resilience (resilience by design/designing resilience), sustainability, urban systems, and decarbonising practices and processes. His expertise also includes urban development and urban regeneration, with a particular focus on informality in developing countries.

He displays his creativity and passion for the city and the built environment in a wide range of fields, from research and education to practice. His work explores the intersections between contemporary urbanization processes, climate change, hybrid dense cities and urban resilience.

Oscar has a very unique holistic background shaped by his education and professional expertise in architecture, urban design, and urban planning. Since 2000, he has developed a clear research stream in cities and the built environment, and an extensive research and teaching record in some highly prestigious institutions such as the National University of Singapore, Pratt Institute, GSAPP-Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), King Mongkutt’s University of Technology Thoburi (KMUTT), UPC-BarcelonaTech, Ramon Llull University (URL), and the International University of Catalonia (UIC), where he was an associate professor.

Oscar is the author of numerous books and articles, and drawing on his rigorous research, he has recently published “Designing Resilience in Asia. Planning the unpredictable, designing with uncertainty” (ACTAR, 2020), “Resilient Urban Regeneration in Informal Settlements in the Tropics” (Springer, 2020), “Silicon Singapore. Urban Projects for Hybrid and Resilient Innovation Districts” (Basheer, 2020), “Ibid./ In the same place. Nine Lessons and Six Possibilities about On-site Resilient Revitalisation Strategies for Informal Neighbourhoods” (ORO, 2016), and the co-edited volume “Advanced Studies in Energy Efficiency and Built Environment for Developing Countries” (Springer, 2019) among others. He has been invited to present as a keynote speaker in 14 countries worldwide including South Africa, Malaysia, Germany, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Ecuador, Colombia, and Spain. He has also lectured at many universities such as Pratt Institute (USA), IUA di Venezia (Italy), TU Darmstadt (Germany), NCKU (Taiwan), PUCE (Ecuador), EAFIT Medellín (Colombia), King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (Thailand), Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Kyushu University (Japan) among others. He enjoys networking and is actively engaged as an expert with UN-Habitat, World Bank and many other reputable international institutions which provided him with a strong ability to promote collaborations and liaise with senior leaders and stakeholders. Oscar co-founded his urban design, planning and architecture practice, CSArchitects, in 2004. In over 20 years of international professional career, he has delivered and managed more than 25 master and strategic plans, over 60 very prominent urban-scale commissions with strong applied research and a multi-stakeholder approach, and an extensive number of consultancies in urban design and spatial planning, as well as a dozen architecture and public spaces projects. Oscar has won two national urban design and planning prizes, and his professional work and curriculum have been awarded in 33 design and merit competitions. He also received the prestigious Barcelona Award for the World’s Best Store, and the applied research approach undertaken in his practice was awarded the prestigious TALENT award.