Event Details
Who are our cities built for? Four distinct voices consider housing, belonging, and the future of public life.
Event Details
Who are our cities built for? Four distinct voices consider housing, belonging, and the future of public life.
Speakers for this event
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Frank Lewingberg
Frank Lewingberg
Frank Lewinberg is the co-founder and partner emeritus of Urban Strategies, one of Canada’s leading urban design and planning consultancies. He was responsible for the master plans of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood and has a continued interest in affordable housing. Based in his beloved Toronto, Ontario, Lewinberg’s groundbreaking publications, including Study of the Reurbanisation of Metropolitan Toronto, have shaped the discussion on urban matters in the city.
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Jane Farrow
Jane Farrow
Jane Farrow is a writer, broadcaster and dynamic interviewer, and facilitator who has dedicated herself to city and community building over several decades. She has written many articles and co-edited books, including Any Other Way, a queer history anthology of Toronto (Coach House Books, 2017), The Book of Lists (Knopf Canada, 2017 & 2005), and Wanted Words 1 and 2 (Stoddart). Her ten years at CBC Radio included producing and hosting for current affairs programs such as This Morning, And Sometimes Y, and Workology. Jane was the founding executive director of Jane’s Walk, a global initiative involving free, locally-led walking tours inspired by urbanist Jane Jacobs’s ideas about connected, livable neighbourhoods. She currently lives in Toronto.
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Jay Pitter
Jay Pitter
Jay Pitter is the author of Black Public Joy (Penguin Random House Canada), recently longlisted for the 2026 Toronto Book Awards, and co-editor of Subdivided: City-Building in an Age of Hyper-Diversity. Additional writing credits include Canadian Architect, The Walrus, and Azure, and she was a recurring storyteller on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air. An internationally recognized public space practitioner and adjunct professor, Pitter was named one of Planetizen’s 100 Most Influential Urbanists. A former John Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in Planning at the University of Toronto, she has taught or lectured at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Detroit Mercy, among others.
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Shawn Micallef
Shawn Micallef
Shawn Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness, The Trouble With Brunch: Work Class and the Pursuit of Leisure and Full Frontal TO: Exploring Toronto’s Vernacular Architecture. The updated and expanded edition of his first book, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, was published in 2024. He’s a Toronto Star columnist, civics instructor at University of Toronto, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College where he was also a 2011-2012 Southam Journalism Fellow. Shawn is a co-founder of Spacing, a magazine about Canadian cities and urban issues.
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Vincenzo Pietropaolo
Vincenzo Pietropaolo
Vincenzo Pietropaolo, CM was a city planner with the City of Toronto for over fifteen years before turning to photography full-time. An award-winning photographer, Pietropaolo has been deemed “one of Canada’s pre-eminent documentary photographers” by Canadian Geographic magazine. A life-long chronicler of the City of Toronto, he is the author of numerous photobooks on social justice issues, often combining photography with his own writing. A member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, he was recently appointed to the Order of Canada.
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Zahra Ebrahim
Zahra Ebrahim
Zahra Ebrahim is a seasoned leader and advocate with two decades of experience bringing communities to the center of decision making. This has included redesigning systems and services essential to the public’s wellbeing, with the goal of making cities work for residents who face the most acute barriers. Throughout her career, she has used walking as an instrument of social change, research, and connection, including as the Chair of the global Jane’s Walk festival. She currently co-leads Monumental, a national organization focused on projects that advance fair and culturally considerate citybuilding. She is an Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and the co-editor of Messy Cities. Zahra lives in Toronto with her partner, and their whippet, Zada.
Books
Black Public Joy
How much safety, belonging and delight do you feel when you walk through a park? Hang out in a coffee shop? Ride the subway to work? Explore a new neighbourhood? Now, how much do you know about how history, urban planning, culture and even your personal upbringing impact those feelings, and overall access, to public joy? For well over a decade, Jay Pitter has been thinking about public space and the ways it can be designed to not only contribute to social equity but also inspire joy for everyone. Her award-winning work helping cities navigate complex issues such as reimagining Confederate monument sites, the creation of cultural districts and the adoption of gender-responsive street design compels her to ask: “How can I ignite public joy?”
Pitter acknowledges egregious place-based violations faced by her community—historical and contemporary—while unapologetically bending the book’s narrative arc toward public joy. Declaring that Black public joy is so powerful that even the auction block could not extinguish it, Pitter guides the reader through an under-explored placemaking journey. In addition to unearthing historical rituals, the book builds on the current groundswell of Black-led initiatives highlighting hiking, dining, cycling, and frolicking punctuated by hashtags such as #BlackJoy and #BlackOutdoors. Pitter draws upon her practice expertise and research, delving more deeply to situate these moments and online conversations within the phenomenon that is Black public joy.
Along the way, she introduces us to beloved colleagues creating public joy in their communities, and also reveals vulnerable personal stories as ground for the book’s narrative. Black Public Joy’s themes—our collective desire for safely taking up space, feeling belonging, and freeing ourselves from fears of judgement—are universal. Pitter’s work calls on all of us to become better stewards of each other’s public joy, as well as to claim our own.
AuthorJay Pitter
PublisherPenguin Random House Canada (McClelland & Stewart)
Housing for All: How Toronto Built the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood
Architect-planner Frank Lewinberg — who’d identified the derelict industrial lands for development as a young city planner — and photographer-writer Vincenzo Pietropaolo first walked these streets in the early 1970s, as a housing crisis and rising interest rates loomed over the country. Now, St. Lawrence is a family neighbourhood, and home to 10,000 residents of mixed incomes, backgrounds, and professions, with blooming green spaces and affordable housing options seamlessly integrated into the heart of Toronto.
How did this model urban neighbourhood come to be? How can it inspire other bold, innovative solutions to today’s housing problems? With stunning photographs, Housing for All recounts a richly detailed history that delivers lessons, recommendations, and roadmaps for the future of affordable urban living.
AuthorFrank Lewinberg & Vincenzo Pietropaolo
PublisherCormorant Books
Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto
The updated edition of a Toronto favourite meanders around some of the city’s unique neighborhoods and considers what makes a city walkable
What is the ‘Toronto look’? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s streetscapes for decades. His psychogeographic reportages situate Toronto’s buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.
Stroll celebrates Toronto’s details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario
AuthorShawn Micallef
PublisherCoach House Books
Women, Walking: Notes on Lives in Motion
An anthology about moving through the world on foot – as a woman.
Women, Walking explores the broad spectrum of women’s experiences and perspectives on walking, from everyday strolls that let the mind breathe to ambitious journeys that test courage and resolve.
Co-edited by Zahra Ebrahim and Jane Farrow, this anthology features thirty vignettes, essays, graphic art, poems, and interviews, with contributors discussing identity, love, social connection, grief, and wonder. They each take us on a different path, but share common ground in highlighting the deep significance to be found in an ordinary walk.
The contributors come from all walks of life; among them are Jenny Odell, Miriam Toews, Andrea Gibson, Zalika Reid-Benta, Janika Oza, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Catherine Hernandez. Whether they take you on a meander or a hike, a parade or a promenade, they all offer relatable and insightful reflections on walking to lose yourself, find yourself, and everything in between.
Authoredited by Jane Farrow & Zahra Ebrahim
PublisherCoach House Books