Paul Rosenau - Personal Life

Personal Life

Rosenau was born in Edmonton, Canada on March 7, 1961 and spent the first four years of his life living in a small town in Western Canada. In 1965, Rosenau's father was appointed a job working for the Canadian government in Nairobi, Kenya, and Rosenau spent the next 14 years of his life living in and around East Africa. At the age of 6, Rosenau moved away from home to begin attending boarding school at Rift Valley Academy and after that, spent ten months of the year living away from home until graduating from high school in 1978. This time served Rosenau well as it forced an independence and confidence that comes with having to leave home at such an early age.

Paul played rugby and soccer throughout high school and Rift Valley Academy rugby teams had a reputation of ranking among the premier rugby teams in East Africa—often playing against British Club teams and local university teams in exhibition matches. Rosenau developed many close friendships during these formative years in Africa and he continues friendships until this day with some of his RVA classmates.

After returning to Canada at the age of 17 and experiencing a year of the culture shock of returning to what many like to refer to as "first world civilization", he spent four years at Trinity Western University, a small private university on the outskirts of Vancouver studying Urban Geography and Urban Planning. Generally, Rosenau spent these first couple of years in Canada missing Africa, and after barely getting by in his first two years of university, somewhere along the line, he "saw the light" and was able to finish his last two years with high honors, paying the bills with a modest soccer scholarship. Rosenau received offers from a number of graduate schools in the fields of urban planning and architecture around North America but decided to stay in Vancouver and complete four more years at the University of British Columbia finishing academia with two Bachelor's degrees in Urban Geography and Landscape Architecture and Masters degree in Urban Design and Planning. He continued to play varsity soccer and rugby during these years until injuring both knees with torn ligaments and decided to hang up his football boots to get down to the business of living life and trying to make a name for himself as an architect and an urban planner.

Growing up in rural Africa and urban Nairobi, Rosenau became exposed to "the suburbs" for the first time at the age of 17 upon his return to Canada. This undefined "middle ground" which exists in every North American city left an indelible impression on Paul's awareness of the antiquated nature of North American "zoning laws" and "land development patterns" so much so that Rosenau made it his focus in both his undergraduate studies in landscape architecture as well as his master's thesis in urban design to challenge the basic "outdated" premise of suburban land development and zoning theory. His academic campaign to reinvent suburbia was summarized by his motto in university, which was: "the greatest obstacle to innovation is the power of an outdated idea".

In 1992 after 4 years of real world tutelage in one of the largest architectural companies in Canada, Rosenau decided to put his money where his mouth was and opened his own urban planning company called EKISTICS Town Planning Inc. EKISTICS quickly gained a reputation as being an innovative and contemporary design company that wasn’t afraid to take risks and was willing to take on government bureaucracy at all levels in order to accomplish change in suburban land development patterns. EKISTICS began promoting "new urbanism" in Canada before the movement of new urbanism was formed and the rest is history.

EKISTICS has rapidly expanded and Rosenau now leads a group of 25 employees in his Vancouver office with additional administrative staff in Shanghai, China and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Rosenau currently works on a whole variety of architectural and urban planning projects and specializes in large scale land and resort development planning and design. The China market opened up in 2002 and he now spends over half of his time traveling around China and Vietnam and living in Shanghai.