Be part of the transition towards brighter, better urban landscapes

Leandry Jieutsa, PhD candidate at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, has published an article in the Revue québécoise d’urbanisme on the rise of artificial intelligence systems in municipalities. The piece, “Les systèmes d’intelligence artificielle en urbanisme et dans les municipalités au Québec,” connects directly to his doctoral research, which examines the actor dynamics, organizational shifts and governance mechanisms shaping the AI innovation ecosystem of Quebec municipalities.

On October 1, 2026, Shin Koseki, holder of the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, took part in a public panel on quality of life and the city of tomorrow, organized by the Initiative en santé urbaine of Université de Montréal’s École de santé publique.

Alexandre Campeau-Vallée, a Montreal-based photographer and researcher, is presenting a new exhibition at the Niagara Falls History Museum’s Ontario Power Generation Gallery. Picture Yourself Here: The Photographic Attraction of Niagara Falls runs from August 9, 2026 to January 10, 2027, and was produced in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape.

Rashid Mushkani will undertake a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law and Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP) under Professor Catherine Régis. Supported by IVADO’s 2026 postdoctoral research funding program and Régis’s research funds, he will examine how people affected by AI can influence the decisions governing its design and use.

The UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape welcomes Nour Necib, an architect who joins the Chair as a Master’s student in planning (City, Territory and Landscape option) at Université de Montréal.

The UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape welcomes Camille Lemaître, who joins the Chair as a PhD student in environmental planning at Université de Montréal. Her work focuses on the sustainable development of continental hydrographic basins.

Roxane Kasprzyk is an alumna of the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape. After three years working at the Chair as a research and communications assistant, she has completed her research-based Master’s in the “City, Territory, Landscape” option, graduating with the distinction “excellent.”

Shin Koseki has been appointed to the advisory committee of the International Max Planck Research School for Multimodal Digital Humanities (IMPRS-MDH), a new international research initiative addressing a central methodological challenge in computational humanities: moving beyond monomodal analyses of text, image, and space toward genuinely multimodal forms of knowledge production. The program brings together art history, linguistics, digital humanities, and artificial intelligence to rethink how meaning, interpretation, and argumentation emerge across media and cultures.

Rashid Mushkani defended his doctoral thesis, “The Urban Right to AI: Pluralistic Co-Design and Governance of Public Space,” at Université de Montréal on August 24, 2026, completing an interdisciplinary PhD in planning.

A new feature in the Swiss daily Le Temps spotlights the work of Shin Koseki, UNESCO Chair holder in Urban Landscape at Université de Montréal and affiliate of Mila, exploring how artificial intelligence can help reveal who gets overlooked in city planning. Trained at EPFL, Koseki brings a perspective that resonates directly with the Swiss urbanism community the article is written for.

Last month, Roxane Kasprzyk, a student at the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Environmental Design and a collaborator with the UNESCO Chair, took part in a charrette organized by Architecture Without Borders Quebec (ASFQ) and Design Montréal.

Discover the article “Can AI make cities more inclusive? Yes, if communities remain in control”, by Rashid Muskani and Shin Koseki, published in The Conversation.