Laysa Abchiche Lima

Laysa Abchiche Lima is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Toronto and a Senior Planner with the provincial government. Her research explores the adaptive reuse of Olympic infrastructure, with a particular focus on Montreal’s Olympic Park. She examines the long‑term urban legacies of mega‑events and considers how design justice frameworks can inform more inclusive and equitable post‑Games planning. Her work engages critically with gentrification, displacement, participatory planning, and cultural memory.

Her broader research interests include entrepreneurial urban strategies such as urban revitalization and their social and spatial impacts on contemporary cities. She is particularly interested in how social exclusion materializes in the built environment through the privatization of public space, the production of fortress enclaves, and the marginalization of informal spaces. Her work asks how planning and architecture shape urban intersubjectivity and influence who is recognized and included as a fellow urban citizen.

She has lived and conducted research in Algiers, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro, where she studied uneven urbanization processes surrounding the Rio 2016 Olympics. She is committed to critical, interdisciplinary, and community‑engaged approaches that challenge dominant urban narratives and advance more just and inclusive urban futures.

Publications

Bezerra, M. do C. de L., & Abchiche Lima, L. (2024). Espaços de consumo contemporâneos: quando o marketing substitui o planejamento urbano. Periódico Eletrônico Fórum Ambiental da Alta Paulista. https://doi.org/10.17271/1980082720220244090

Palm, M., Dos Santos, H., Abchiche-Lima, L., Hosford, K., Comeau, É., Newbold, K. B., Ross, T., Winters, M., Widener, M. (2022). The Impact of COVID-19 on Transportation Inequities in Canada: A Scoping Review. Mobilizing Justice. https://mobilizingjustice.ca/rapports/

Abchiche-Lima, L. (2021). Exclusion, space, and planning: the case of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Paranoa: Journal of Architecture and Urbanism.

Abchiche-Lima, L. (2018). City marketing in strategic urban planning: the case of Porto Maravilha’s urban legacy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 48TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE URBAN AFFAIRS ASSOCIATION (UAA)

Abchiche-Lima, L. (2016). The sustainable city as a product of city marketing: urban mobility solutions in the case of Porto Maravilha. PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE NETWORK OF URBAN MORPHOLOGY (PNUM) 

Supervisor

Dr. Susannah Bunce