Karen Kubey

Karen Kubey is a New York- and Toronto-based urbanist specializing in housing and spatial justice. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture in New York. Holding degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Kubey began her career as a designer of below-market housing.

She has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and MacDowell, and has completed a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently an assistant professor of architecture at University of Toronto, Kubey has taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia GSAPP and was a 2019-20 Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon. She convenes the American Institute of Architects Right-to-Housing Working Group.

Author photograph by Sharif Khalje