BIO

ALLYSE YIRAN LI

Born in Beijing, LI spent her childhood years between Beijing’s old core, Tsinghua’s campus and the Tokyo suburbs before calling Vancouver home in the early 2000s. Since founding RAAW Design Group in 2015, she has led over a hundred interior projects, spanning residential, commercial, multifamily, and hospitality sectors, delivering 1.12 million square feet of private and public indoor space to date.

As a design consultant and a designer-developer by practice, she received formal training in Urban Land Economics with a concentration in real estate development, Interior Design (NCIDQ certified) and Urban Design. Her doctoral work addresses the hyper-financialization of land rent in a Canadian context. LI’s multidisciplinary expertise is met with unparalleled design leadership, positioning her research mandate for grounding in real estate development. Her unique lived experiences in each of the cities she’s called home also provide valuable socio-cultural contexts, enriching her research on urban affordability and equitable densification.

Adjacent to her professional undertakings, her original pedagogy in interior urbanism for undergraduate thesis design studios focuses on socially-responsible design thinking, bridging gaps between industry and academe. LI also holds an ARCT in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music with theory and history pedagogy since 2011. Presently, she is the mother of two, and enjoys continued practice, teaching and research alongside navigating motherhood.

ABSTRACT

Li’s doctoral work confronts the hyper-financialization of land Rent where urban affordability is examined beyond a supply and demand dogma for Canadian urban centres. She explores a new model for real estate development, positioning private-sector developers as catalysts for driving attainable urban housing under market mechanisms. Rather than relying on subsidies or special funding programs which are too dependant on political dynamics, she draws from economics as a leverage to empower design solutions as systems thinking.

Her research draws from global case studies with innovations grounded in practice. Recognizing homeownership as a key source of financial belonging and long-term wealth generation for Canadian families, Li posits that enabling generational wealth accumulation is a critical step in building social resilience. The need to counter widening asset inequality and stalled social mobility— particularly for those who do not have the ‘bank of mom and dad’ in accessing the equity growth ladder within a globalized market. Framed as a two fold approach, the work explores how bottom-up market-driven mechanisms for urban land development can be better met with top-down policy interventions in urban planning with innovations in design for system changes.

Her ongoing research underscores a sense of patient urgency amongst all disciplines that shape the built environment and determine access to it. The moral underpinning of LI’s work is a recall of civic virtue by which recognizing the dignity of work is met by ensuring accessibility to housing (and equity-growths) for core urban geographies. Revisiting a metanarrative that reframes urban housing production as creating ‘commonality’ rather than simply ‘commodities’ is both fundamental and time sensitive.

As the Founder of RAAW+, LI is dedicated to redefining the role of the designer by focusing on affordable and attainable solutions, while fostering collaborative innovation. Since 2014, LI has sought to create pathways that utilize design thinking to cultivate synergies across multidisciplinary teams, redefining affordable attainable ways. By challenging the systems that shape our built environments and influence access to them, LI aims to promote a more inclusive, generous way of life—envisioning what can be called the "good life". Through this approach, LI works to enact change by design, creating spaces and solutions that empower communities and leave a lasting, positive impact.