Accelerating Housing & Mobility Solutions: How Must Communities Change For Now and The Future

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to communications@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Accelerating Housing & Mobility Solutions: How Must Communities Change For Now and The Future
CityTalk September 12, 2025

Mary W. Rowe Hi, everybody, it’s Mary Rowe from CityTalk. So nice to be back in the CityTalk space. It’s the beautiful, beautiful time of year in Toronto, anyway, I don’t know what it’s like across the country. Maybe people can chime in. I’m going to move my camera so you don’t get the sun blaring in there quite so aggressively. Tell us what the weather’s like. I see people are signing in where they are, with the Indigenous territory that they’re coming in from, but also, you know, do the Canadian thing, tell us what the weather is like. I’ll just describe for you that in Toronto it’s been an absolutely beautiful for several days … nice, temperate, not as hot as it was this summer. And you know, as the world falls apart around us, everybody, all the more reason for us to gather like we are and have conversations about real places, real people and particularly in places … Neighborhoods where we have some control over how we participate, how we contribute to community life, how we relate to our neighbours, how we invest in our businesses and our families and our friends and all the things that I know are top of mind for people that come onto a CityTalk … that we’re grounded in a place. And that’s the ancestral territory of a number of different Indigenous communities, First Nation and Métis, and how we continue to come to terms with and acknowledge the ways in which urban life and communal life has been exclusionary. And how do we take steps to make it more inclusive? And how resonant that is at a time now when the news is full of polarization and disruption and uncertainty. And so I don’t want to trivialize it by saying, “well, at least the weather’s nice,” but let’s just remind ourselves that … And maybe we take a moment just for you to all do this for a moment amongst, just in your own space, to just think, where are the signs of hope for you? One of our guests always starts his meetings with “what’s bringing you joy today?”, and it’s a good discipline. That’s a hat’s off to you, Nouman. When you come on, you can pose it again. But, you know, for us to just remind ourselves that so much of what is around us, we’re appreciative of, and we’re building always on assets and not always looking at what’s wrong and where the deficits are but talking about what our strengths are and how do we build on those. And that’s what the Canadian Urban Institute’s in the business of, is, I hope, we’re in the business of promoting hope and promoting place-based solutions that bring people and place together in ways that have, you know, we are more than the sum of our parts, as we know. So thank you for joining us. And we’re going to talk about leading urban change and I’m going to ask all my guests to put their cameras on. And just while they’re doing that, and you get to see who’s here, because we’re almost coast to … We’re coast to central Canada. We don’t have anybody from the East, but we do have folks coming in in the audience from the east. So thanks gang. And from the North. And we’re always sensitive to that, that there’s no one solution that fits everybody. No one size fits all. We don’t want places to look the same. They don’t. And all the better that they look different and that they feel different and they have different experiences. But we do have this common thread, don’t we, of this intersection between place and people. And that’s what we talk about on CityTalk. We’ve also got some pods. People know who follow us, CUI, you know that we’ve shifted a bit and moved, we’re now calling this “CityTalk Live”. We also have the CityTalk Podcast, another one dropped yesterday with Adam Greenfield. If you haven’t had a chance to, I’m sure you haven’t, because it just dropped yesterday, but it’s a discussion with an academic in London, UK, an American, who’s coined this idea of life houses and how critically important it is that we in our neighborhoods invest in a place when a particular challenge comes where you can go to get fellowship, maybe you need your cell phone charged, maybe you need a meal, maybe you need a place to sleep, whatever it is, that life houses have to become part of our structure. And it’s interesting in New Orleans, they are calling them “light” houses. Same idea, this idea of, and there’s a previous pod that dropped a couple weeks ago … I was in New Orleans last week, two weeks ago, for the Katrina 20 observances. And as many of you know, I spent five years working there post-Katrina. I learned a ton, always important to learn from the locals, which is what we’re about to do. So welcome to CityTalk. And, uh… As people know, please put questions in the chat. I encourage you to have discussions there. If you’ve got ideas, put them in the chart. Remember, we publish the chat, so if you put something in the chat, I don’t want you to regret it later. So it’s there for posterity. We post it, and we post this conversation as well. And the guests sometimes respond to the chat directly, but we encourage them to contribute to the conversation as a whole, rather than getting into side conversations. I am, I’ve got to say, I have my own little personal thing about this, that I feel these online platforms have maybe worked well for people with ADHD, but they’ve also made it more challenging for us to have focus. So, I’m trying to bring back the focused conversation and maybe dial down some of the multitasking. Listen, I am the first to be guilty of this. So, Karen, thanks for joining CityTalk, of course. You’re our frequent collaborator and we’re busy working with you on preparations for the Summit in December when we’re going to ramp up and talk about what we need across the country. But I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about this Leading Urban Change program that you’ve initiated at the School of Cities, why you’ve done it, and then we’re going to bring some real chat into what are the solutions we need to be leading … What are challenges we need to be leading solutions to? So over to you, Karen. Nice to see you.

Karen Chapple Thanks so much, Mary. It’s really a pleasure to be here. Always great to see you. So, you know, you mentioned solutions. David Miller has a book, right? Basically saying “cities are the solution.” And I believe in that wholeheartedly. I think you do too. This is where the innovation happens. Cities are where the talent is grown. And this is where future is. This is where city builders are finding the ways to address those intractable global challenges of inequality and climate change, and it’s through innovation at the local level. It’s all these thousands of different examples around us and how we scale them up. That’s how we’re going to solve those global problems. The issue I think that we see at the School of Cities is that we don’t necessarily have the capacity to solve those problems, and part of it is institutional misalignment. It’s sort of a, I hate to say this, but like a culture in Canada of not moving very fast.

Mary W. Rowe When you say “we” don’t have the capacity, who’s the “we” there?

Karen Chapple “We”, I think, I see the lack of capacity going, you know, all the way from kindergarten to the university to the …

Mary W. Rowe Are you talking about the academic sector?

Karen Chapple I’m talking about city builders everywhere.

Mary W. Rowe Ok, everybody, all of us …

Karen Chapple … that are just not … They have the solutions at hand, they know what to do, they may even have the language, you know we hear great language for instance around “complete communities” and how much we need them and why we need them, and you have plans that mention them. Yet we don’t have the alignment. We aren’t linking arms and moving the boat around in order to actually have those complete communities. So that, you know, us being a school, School of Cities at the University of Toronto, we decided that we really need to have some sort of executive training to really get people to understand how to work together, how to make change, how to push things forward when you don’t have good alignment.

Mary W. Rowe So that’s really what the executive training business could be. I mean, I’ve heard three things from you there: capacity, resources and alignment. I spoke yesterday at the Canadian Apartments Investment Conference, probably folks in the audience were there. And I did say that I felt like for housing we need a new bingo card, you know, with all the words that we repeat – stacking, all hands-on-deck, generational crisis, all this stuff. So we have our own version of that in city building. Somebody out there, create a city builder bingo card … watch, it’s going to happen. It’ll be done before the end of the program, because we have all these phrases. But you’re making total sense that these are things that are commonly understood as what we need, more capacity, more resources and better alignment. And this is the intervention that the School of Cities and your colleagues have done. So let me go next to you, Nouman. I was going to call you a veteran, which is sort of code for. … person of a certain age. I don’t want to be disparaging towards you because I’m of that age too, but you’ve been at this a while. Maybe … People know who Karen is, they may not know who you are. So can you just give us a little Coles Notes on you and how you’ve recruited into the city building orbit?

Nouman Ashraf Yeah, I’m founder and co-CEO of the Karen Chapple Fan Club. I think you were the other co-CEO.

Mary W. Rowe Yes, exactly. You and I could be part of that club. We’re open to new members. Anybody else?

Nouman Ashraf We are we are … I want to begin with what’s bringing me joy today. And I heard people put in the chat what’s bring them joy. What’s bringing me joy is that I’m going to be inviting a scholar from New Zealand, no less, who’ll be coming here to the Rotman School at U of T and Karen, I had Laura Muldoon, our colleague from School of Cities here in my office earlier and to do a, perhaps, a seminar at the School of Cities. Her research is actually on kindness as a competence. And I’m interested in exploring kindness and competence. Her research is on healthcare, but beyond that. The reason that’s bringing me joy is … folks, can I ask you in the chat to give me a rating from one to 10 that describes how elated and up you feel once you hear Mary Rowe speak for about five minutes.

Mary W. Rowe That’s such a set up. Don’t do that. CityTalkers … Resist that.

Nouman Ashraf Wait wait wait … And Mary, right … Mary said … that the world is actually on fire. So leading urban change is an initiative to hold this reality in tension with the fact that we can do something about it. And this is super important. I actually think that leading requires a reframe, right? The reframe meaning not that we are led, but the choices that we make on a daily basis can actually be, not just interventions, but actually a range of choices that can enable those safe houses that you spoke about, Mary. And I want to say that to me, my alma mater, my place of work and research and play, the University of Toronto, can be one of those places. And a pillar of that safe house or safe place or safe space is the School of Cities. Why am I interested in this game? I’m interested in this game because we can no longer separate civic leadership, organizational leadership, and personal leadership. I think these are inextricably intertwined.

Mary W. Rowe What are the three? Civic …

Nouman Ashraf … institutional leadership and personal. So to me, what happens in a public park, what happens institution, what happens in our personal domains have to be inextricably intertwined. And one of the key things that I have the privilege of facilitating in this program is a set of conditions where we can bring high psychological safety and high accountability to bear on the way in which we enable what I call emancipatory leadership, right? The ability to recognize the risks of past choices and to make better ones. And that’s why this program is timely, it’s a call to action, and we have skills.

Mary W. Rowe Great, thank you. You know, I often feel, we have trouble with language, obviously, and I always worry that we have, you know, I’m an urbanist, you’re an urbanist, I’m a city builder, and that they become exclusionary terms versus what we know is that everybody who lives somewhere is engaged, we hope, in their place. We hope they’re engaged, and they have agency … This is maybe part of our role too, is to encourage people to remember that they do have some agency, when you feel powerless, you have agency. And Jordan, we’re going to hear more about that because you’re going to talk to us specifically about that.

Nouman Ashraf May I be allowed one more comment?

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, of course.

Nouman Ashraf On the last thing that you just said.

Nouman Ashraf One of the outcomes of this webinar today for me is that when people look in the mirror, they recognize a city builder, us.

Mary W. Rowe You mean that whole thing?

Nouman Ashraf So instead of saying it’s a mayor, instead of seeing it’s a policymaker, instead of seeing it as a funder or a builder, it’s us. We have to see that side of ourselves.

Mary W. Rowe You know, back to New Orleans and my learnings there. I mean, I remember vividly a moment where … I was there for a charitable foundation, and we were making investments, as were all the major foundations in the U.S. Mine was very small, the one I was working for. But it was committed to the region. And we watched over time people having an expectation that the cavalry was coming, that there would be some big grand solution and that they would sort of suddenly … And there were lots of concerns about that, that that would be the wrong thing but there was a lot of expectation it would happen and then eventually they just said, “you know what the cavalry is not coming” and we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. You know they use that phrase which is now so commonly quoted, but I think that’s back to … how do we get the challenges to be manageable and I think you’re saying, you’ve got skills, you’ve got insights, you’ve got peers. Isn’t that the other key point of this program? So Lisa, can I go to you please? Tell people a little bit? I mean, you’re not new to CityTalk, but just remind people who you are, the background that you bring to this, what you’re currently doing would be useful for people to know. And then your particular engagement with this program leading urban change.

Lisa Helps Sure. Thank you, Mary. Good morning, everyone. I’m here on Esquimalt and Songhees territory in the City of Victoria, where I was mayor for eight years, including mayor during the pandemic, which felt like 30 years. And anyone who lived through that in an urban leadership role or any leadership role, I think could agree. After that, I worked in the Premier’s office, helping with some housing solutions there. And now I am co-leading a program called BC Builds. Which has a mandate to get housing built quickly. And so that’s what we’re doing. In terms of my role at the School of Cities and why this course on leading urban change is so powerful. And you mentioned peers, and I think Jordan will be able to really speak elegantly about that. Karen brought me in as the “lived experience” person, the person that could co-teach this course that has on the ground, in the trenches work on city building through some very difficult periods and challenges. And so what I love most about being involved in this course … I think what this course offers is really, it’s practical. There’s some great theory that weaves into practicality. So we did one course a couple years ago that was just general, leading urban change, any topic you want. The one that Jordan was involved in was focused on housing. And then this fall we’re offering a course on housing and mobility solutions together … building complete communities. And people bring their projects. This is my struggle right now. This is where I’m stuck. This is what I’m working on. This is where I’m stuck. And then we worked … It’s so powerful and also so fun and joyful. We work through… In a very honest and vulnerable way, what are the challenges you’re facing? Are they partnership-based challenges? Are they resource-based challenges? Do you not have, you know, the right maybe long-term thinking? It’s beautiful. And so everyone comes with their project. Some people come in teams, which is great. Good if two or three people can come together. And then they’re paired up and working with other teams from across the country who are trying to really make and … Mary talks about … this place based, make those changes in their community. And when people leave the course, it’s a six-week course, two intensive days in person, the rest online. When people leave, they literally go back to their communities with a roadmap that’s got the obstacles mapped, the solutions mapped, all of Nouman’s great work on case studies and Karen’s storytelling. And it’s so empowering. And again, we’ll go to Jordan for, I guess, his testimonial, but if we have these challenges, these intractable challenges, what we’re seeing through delivering “Leading Urban Change” twice is that people are coming and going away and they’re making these changes in their communities based on the peer learning and also what we can offer as faculty.

Mary W. Rowe Just some logistic questions before we go to Jordan. Karen, how long has the Urban Change Program been running?

Karen Chapple We’ve been running for over a year … A year and a half, yeah.

Mary W. Rowe You’ve had one cohort or more.

Karen Chapple We’ve had two cohorts so far, yeah.

Mary W. Rowe And how many people would that be?

Karen Chapple Well, what we’d like to do is just have small classes, 20 in a class, no more than that, because we want it to be a really intensive one-on-one experience and group experience.

Mary W. Rowe So 40, there are 40 alums out there.

Lisa Helps 40 alums, 40 powerful people working in their communities on the solutions.

Karen Chapple Changing the world.

Mary W. Rowe Changing the world one block at a time. I’m not being disparaging with the number … I’m so interested though in terms of how we do this. Like …

Karen Chapple Yeah, how do we get to a million?

Mary W. Rowe So how do we get to a million? Right, so I don’t know if there’s anybody on the Teams chat from, or the Zoom chat who’s a graduate of the Maytree Policy School, but, and I think you’ve been a teacher there, Lisa, I think, haven’t you been? Or maybe you have too, Nouman, but this is a program that I think has been running for a number of years, and they have, just as you are, been building cohort, cohort, cohort, cohort, and I run into people that are graduates of that program and they continue to have colleagues that they can call on to say, “I’ve got this Gordian knot, how do I solve it?” I think this idea of, and even CUI has their own version. You know, CUI is 35 years old and invariably I will go and talk somewhere, someone will come up from the audience and say, “oh, I was an intern at CUI in 1992” or “I was there in 1995” or something. And there’s probably a handful of people on the chat that have similarly a long association with the institute that I run, but it is kind of step, you know, step by step, project by project. Jordan, talk to us. You’re one of the alums.

Jordan Soggie Yeah, well, um, my name is Jordan Soggie. I’m the CEO of Fort St. John Association for Community Living, and I also have a startup called Home with Benefits. Fort St John, a small city in northern BC, and just want to acknowledge that we live, work, and play on the official land of the Dane-zaa peoples in Doig River First Nations, Blueberry River First Nation, and Halfway River First Nation in Treaty territory. And we’re thankful for their hospitality, being able to work, live, and play there. I signed up for the Leading Room to Change workshop because we have had a housing need in our community for accessible housing for people with disabilities. And we needed to partner with as many people as possible to address that need. And I saw the overview of the Leading Urban Change Workshop through Lisa’s posts, and we were working towards a BC Build project for this build. And so I wanted to sign up to see if we could refine our project and overcome some of those partnership barriers as well as financing barriers and land barriers to actually get the build going. And I guess … It was far different than I expected. I expected it to be more of a traditional workshop on the bricks and mortar of building, the financing models, how to get your feasibility and all that kind of stuff, going through those steps and those processes, but it … after the first session, it really was overwhelming to see how it was really a retraining on how do we lead in these projects so that we can get better social impact because I think traditionally in housing, as you guys have had on the other sessions, talked about how it’s always been very focused on the profit of a housing project, the equity of a project, whereas this is retraining people to … What’s the social equity? What’s the long-term vision that we have for these projects and for our communities? And seeing the first session where everybody’s coming forward with the projects, the problems that they have from … Problems from architects, city planners, nonprofits, service providers, people who work with CMHC, board members, people in banking, like all coming with different perspectives trying to come up with better solutions for the barriers that we run into all the time in our systems in trying to address these problems. And it really was eye-opening to me. It’s like, oh, man, okay, this isn’t just a place where you can address a problem that you see, a systemic problem that you see, that anyone else is also trying to solve. If you see something that’s out on a limb, a bit more risky, you can bring this forward and we are going to all gather around and identify, you know, what are the policy barriers that we have? What are the practical barriers we have, the resource barriers, the relations that we need to have? What’s the power barrier? And is there a mental model blocking us? I think that was really eye-opening for me to really see that we could do a lot more through this program. And that’s when I knew that we could definitely bring our BC Build project forward and push that to completion. But I also had another project that has been in my heart for quite a number of years, I guess, in terms of helping people that are in rentals, get into homeownership. And that being quite a barrier in the way that our systems work. My background before being at the Association was in social housing and during the pandemic I saw, you know, lots of my tenants in my social housing portfolio fall into great arrears and we were faced with the direction to, you got to start evicting people because there’s too many rental arrearers and you would see on the other side, a lot of people that were in ownership were going to be okay if they had mortgages, there was a lot more relief there. And there’s the mental model that I saw that people would say, “well, why do you feel bad? It’s their own fault.” And I think that this workshop really helps combat … helps equip you for how you combat those mental models that we have learned over decades, that really bar us from being able to innovate in solving some of these problems.

Mary W. Rowe How did you find out about the program?

Jordan Soggie Through LinkedIn, honestly, I was just following Lisa and working towards the BC Builds program, saw her sharing it and had to take advantage of that because I wanted to make sure that we knew every option available to us to make our BC Build project successful. It really did help us finalize collaborations with our city, with our health authority, with partnerships and other organizations that we’re going to be including in that project. So now we’re moving forward, and we’ve just started on getting our pre-development set up now. So it’s going really well. And then the other project that I brought forward through Leading Urban Change was the home with benefits. So basically taking, I think it’s in line too with what’s happening right now with the Canadian government bringing back, you know, catalog housing, taking an old practice and retargeting it for the needs of today is kind of the model that I came up with was basically remodeling the pension plan towards down payments for home ownership through employment. So an employer would contribute rather than to a pension, they would contribute to a fund for the employee to use as a down payment after three years of retained employment to combat turnover because – it’s a huge issue within the human service sector. And help employees have the hope of ownership because 13 million Canadians have given up hope on ever being able to purchase a home because they can’t get past the down payment barrier.

Mary W. Rowe Down payment.

Jordan Soggie So through this workshop and through these sessions, it’s given me the tools to go out and get a team together, put it out there, get a champion employer set up, and now we’re running through the first iteration of this program with a group of employees and are looking at doing our second round in the new year. So it’s very impactful. I would highly recommend it to anybody who wants to be making irreversible change in their community.

Mary W. Rowe Irreversible in a good way. Yeah, it’s interesting this, I always say that CUI is about servicing solutions and how do we actually learn from each other across the country because we’re so, I mean, everything about Canada is siloed, everything about everybody is siloed, but how do surface? There you are in Northern BC and you may be doing something that Nova Scotia would benefit from. I know, I don’t know if there’s anybody from the University of Calgary on the chat, but John Brown in the Faculty of Architecture there, he has a thing every June where he brings in folks that are doing, do you know about this Jordan? They’re doing practical work, usually around, I think they’re doing it towards a PhD. And then they bring people in from across the country and they have an online thing and they all say, “oh, have you tried that” and “laneways, let’s try this” … And it does become, I think we just need more and more of these opportunities to learn from each other about – what are we trying, what are learning. And also, Karen, I’m interested in terms of the cohorts you’ve had so far, the 40. You know, I am hoping that a few projects failed, right? Like we need to hear from folks who’ve tried something and it was a dud. Because then we learn, that didn’t work. So either it gets tried differently or don’t try it.

Karen Chapple Yeah, 100% … It’s about failing fast, right? And that, I mean, I think that’s what’s the cultural piece that I mentioned before. That we’re very, very cautious. And we don’t even do pilots, you know, to the extent we should be. And so we, you, know, we’re encouraging people through the program to really get out and try new things. And, you know, we do systemic change, you know one step at a time. But keeping focused on that systemic change.

Jordan Soggie Mary, just kind of back to what you were saying about hearing the work of other people in the community or in different areas of the community. I mean, through the workshop, there was an architect there who originally was from Mexico, and we were sharing about our projects. And then he ended up telling me that the project that I was working on, there was a program in Mexico in the 90s that was exactly that, that provided housing for 30% of the population of Mexico during that time that it operated. And then also was able to connect with, you know, another leader at an organization that’s focused on home ownership financing and doing some amazing work in Vancouver and Toronto. And I think, yeah, just the power of connecting and comparing notes saves everybody a lot of time and on the note of failing I looked for 10 champions to start with and I got one to start with, so I mean I think one thing that they really taught in this course was how powerful perseverance is and why you really need a good foundation and vision so that you can actually make that change

Mary W. Rowe Powerful perseverance sounds very conspicuously to me like something that would come out of Nouman Ashraf’s lexicon. How do we do it Nouman? How do we keep people keeping at it?

Nouman Ashraf So I want to put my bias out there. I’m a hope-aholic. I’m somebody …-

Mary W. Rowe Clearly … My name is Nouman. I’m a hope-aholic. I get it.

Nouman Ashraf So to me leadership is not alchemy, it’s not turning lead into gold. But there are a few constructs that we use around pedagogy and curriculum in the program that I think are worth highlighting. One of them is what I call the 3D model. So it’s faculty to leader, it is leader to leader, and its leader to faculty. I would say to you, as Aristotle once said that practical wisdom is a combination of moral will and moral skill. The leaders bring the moral will, we supply some of the moral skill. Secondly, I think that what we need to do is to have people recognize that there are some universals and some very different and disparate particularities around this work. Generalizing is not the answer, doing a deep dive in a peer setting where you have both high psychological safety and high accountability allows us to sharpen our skills. And I’m interested in Jordan’s perspective on this, sharpen our skills and at the same time feel supported as we are iterating and prototyping. To me, Chomsky once said, why is it that all the kind of Wall Street bankers are in their offices before seven and the rest of us are still kind of trying to find a groove at 9 a.m.? I don’t quite have that view of the world. I think there’s lots of us doing great work in our communities, but having a central hub where we come together, find individuals who have like-minded foci, but different gifts and tools is important to highlight here. Jordan, what’s the one thing that you took away that surprised you from the cohort that you want everyone else to know about?

Jordan Soggie I think the most powerful thing from the workshop and from the cohort was just the trust. The trust and the vulnerability and how going out on the limb, you have to give something yourself if you want someone else to give back. I think that really took it to a whole other level and us being able to challenge each other in such a respectful and honoring way. And being able to refine the work that we’re all doing and making sure that we are vision-aligned and value-aligned in every step.

Nouman Ashraf Thank you. So one more thing I want to add, which is I know that my colleagues, Karen and Lisa take feedback deeply to their soul. And I think we encourage leaders as they come through to give us feedback on the program. And I also think that’s a huge leadership competence. So I’m notorious for my Nouman-isms. Here’s another one – feedback is data, not destiny. It’s just how people have experienced this in the moment and then use that to create something bigger and better. So I am not just a hope-aholic. I see reals … I teach in many programs across faculties and so on. The thing that to me is unique about leading urban change, it’s just-in-time leadership development with a specific goal in mind.

Mary W. Rowe What was the adage Nouman “feedback is data”?

Nouman Ashraf Is data, not destiny …

Mary W. Rowe I want to add to that … that data is not destiny either.

Nouman Ashraf Yeah, no, it’s true.

Mary W. Rowe Data’s not destiny either. And you know, data is, and I worry that we get caught up in, well, we’ve got the data, but data is only as good as what we do with it. Right? And it has to result in action. I worry, that, “oh, well, we’ve got the data”. You know, we all fetishize the latest thing. Go ahead, Lisa.

Lisa Helps And one of my, in terms of … I think maybe Nouman, it becomes a four-D model because there’s also faculty to faculty. In terms of data, Karen does two powerful sessions, one on values but one on data storytelling, specifically. And again, this is the learning in real time. So Karen does this really powerful session on how to use data, how to tell your story, how to link it to other people’s ambitions. I mean, I’m speaking for Karen. She can do this way more beautifully than I can. And then it’s not just like, okay, great, Karen has delivered this data-storytelling lecture. Then right in real time, people are encouraged … All right, any volunteers to … Gracefully, Karen gave them five minutes. And go and develop, what is your story? And then people stand up and do a two minute, like here’s how I would tell my story based on the data that I have and the lessons that Karen’s just conveyed. So I think data is powerful and I mean let’s go to Karen on this – how in terms of data and using it, to really tell stories because leading urban change is as much about engaging other people in your story of change as it is about finding the partners and finding the funding.

Karen Chapple Yeah, well, you say it better than anybody, Lisa. But data abuse is rampant. And this drives me completely nuts, equally with my undergrads as with the Toronto Star, just to see basic points being masked by very, very poor visualization, something that we at the School of Cities are known for. We have a data visualization lab. We do incredible maps and data viz. But what we really focused on, actually, we just wrote a textbook about urban data storytelling because we care about it so much. But what really care about is that the story comes through, that we have the moral tension, the protagonist, the sequence, and that it speaks to, ultimately, our core values, the things that are going to make … That we all care about and that we, and that this data can actually spur us to want to make change. And so a good data story can do that.

Mary W. Rowe You know, let’s … Some people in the chat, thanks Charles for putting in different comments about data, Charles Finley’s put in here that it’s data supported storytelling. That’s exactly right. And there’s a number of other topics that are going into the chat. Thanks gang. If you’ve got specific challenges, because I think it works both ways … When you recruit people into these programs, you’re recruiting individuals like Jordan who wants to do it. And he may … They may have a project or not. But I think the other way to do it too would be to say, here are the 10 or 12 Gordian knots that we’ve got going on in the country on a place basis, and we need to figure out what the solutions are to those. So can people put into the chat, it doesn’t have to be, don’t write your dissertation there, but are there particular topics that you think we should be looking for the best solutions? And while people are putting that into the chart, Karen, maybe for a minute, just describe the solutions contest that you’re in the midst of adjudicating that you ran until the end of the Summit.

Karen Chapple Actually this is our work with you Mary …

Mary W. Rowe It is, but I’m asking you to describe it … so go for it.

Karen Chapple We had a contest for local solutions. We had about 200 responses from across Canada, across sectors. We’re talking from culture to housing to the kid who wants to save bunny rabbits and that, you know, those solutions are going to be lifted up at the CUI Summit in Ottawa in December.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, and what has been so interesting about that process is 200 submissions, I think, right, Karen? And that was not with as much promotion as we always think we want to do. So, you know, my guess is, you know, if we go back to the Healthy Communities Initiative, which we did with the community foundations during the pandemic, and that was around placemaking, people may remember it, active transportation, and we had funding associated with that, with people that had projects. And I think we had a thousand projects that we were able to fund. And I think we had 6,000, six times the volume of requests. So I think part of our collective job here, gang, is to start demonstrating, with data, here are the challenges but here are the local solutions that we want to get amplified, scaled, tested, ratified, tweaked, and that it’s really a fundamental kind of ground up belief that we have – that this is how you address challenges. And I think we have an opportunity with the federal government that’s obviously looking for solutions and maybe they need a bit of a counter from those of us working on the ground to say this actually isn’t probably going to get solved at the center with a big bold solution it’s probably going to get solved with a whole lot of smaller solutions. But I don’t know, Lisa what do you think?

Lisa Helps Yeah, on that note, I 100% agree. I think that the solutions are local and can be scaled up. It’s difficult to scale down solutions. It’s much easier to scale up solutions when the funding and resources and partnerships are there. One of the things that we’ve done in terms of scaling up and sharing solutions, the last cohort, so our May 2025/June 2025 cohort, we’re doing case studies on many of their projects. We’ve got a group of students that are … And it’s really, they’re so powerful, they’ll be published on the School of City’s website. Beautiful thing for the learners because there’s somebody taking extra interest and putting effort into doing a case study. But then importantly, for everyone who didn’t take the course, who may have a similar challenge or opportunity, they can go and have a look at the case studies. So that’s, I think, something that we’ll like to continue to do on a go-forward basis, so the learnings aren’t just happening with these 20 people in these U of T classrooms, but that they’re shared widely.

Mary W. Rowe Yes, and thank you, people in the chat are responding with the challenges that they see. And it’s a little bit both/and I’m assuming Karen, people come and say … Jordan comes and says, “I work for this organization, I’ve got this”. Maybe we have, do we have a moment to put a call out to say, “There are these six or eight challenges, are you up for trying to tackle them? What would they look like?” So I’ll just throw one out and then let’s just workshop it here. If your passion was to figure out what do we do with the profits from housing development? You know, if you think of the critique in the housing sector at the moment, part of it is the polarization that people believe that the development community have been, to use a common phrase, making off like bandits, that they were making too much money in that sector. The dilemma is that now we have the sector with no money in it. And so would this be the kind of challenge that someone could tackle? A couple of people have put into the chat a model similar to Jordan’s, a new kind of model for home ownership. How would we go about that if it were a broad societal challenge, Karen? What would you look for if someone came to you and said, this is the challenge I want to focus on?

Nouman Ashraf Before Karen jumps in, I do think that, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “the measure of a first-rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” So one of the key …

Mary W. Rowe I thought that was the definition of insanity, but that’s somebody else. I guess that was …

Nouman Ashraf Yes. So to me, one of the capacities that through the program, beyond the program, we hope we instill in people is to share like you’re right and to listen like you are wrong.

Mary W. Rowe And some kind of higher tolerance for ambiguity, right? That there is no one single answer. There’s several answers. I get it.

Nouman Ashraf It’s super easy to say that’s a problem and what are the solutions versus trying to not just argue for nuance, but to ask the question, what are the incentives that we have to change to solve this? But to me, that’s a critical skill. But Karen, question was to you.

Karen Chapple Well, I just want to build off of that, you know, our challenges are often not what we think they are, because we are so organized into silos. So often I have had people come by with what they think is a housing challenge, but it’s actually a transportation challenge or a labor market challenge, right? And so that’s what’s, you know, that’s why we have to build these solutions, really, across sectors.

Mary W. Rowe Well, let’s … can we riff on that for a minute, because let me just take the concept of resilience, for instance. Resilience for me was largely embedded in my thinking in New Orleans 20 years after Katrina, because we found that sustainability was too fixed, the state didn’t work. And so resilience conveyed better a concept that you’re constantly working at it, building it, being more resilient, getting better, more adaptive. But resilience was a term that had been used in the psychological world forever. Social workers, psychologists, those disciplines have been using resilience because you cultivate it in an individual, you foster resilience from 18 months on, I think. And so we didn’t have that kind of cross collaboration. How do we do that? Tell us with these kinds of programs in universities, I’m asking all of you, how do you make sure that you’ve got the social workers there? Maybe you’ve got occupational therapists there. You’ve got sanitation workers. How do we get all the different players into this mix? Lisa, you were a mayor, I’m assuming you had to do this all the time. You had to constantly be thinking about different departmental inputs, different expertise. How do we do it?

Lisa Helps I’ll answer that question in a second, but I want to go back … Because registration is open right now. We are offering this course this fall. And we would
welcome …

Mary W. Rowe We’re like an NPR show go to your computer now …

Lisa Helps I want to just say, yes, to your question, would we welcome people into the program that are looking to solve broad societal challenges with respect to housing and transport? Absolutely. Yes. So we did, you know, I stressed earlier, come with your projects, but your project could be a big hairy policy question, because one of the things that … one of the sessions that I lead is mapping. Map your project, map the obstacles, and that could be, you know, in Jordan’s solution we’re trying to build a six-story building in Fort St John with all these partners. That is a legit problem that we made a map for. He did. But also you know how do we better distribute and better allocate and make more fair the profits from real estate development, that is also something that can be … you know, benefit from mapping. You know what are the obstacles, what is the way that we’re currently doing business that doesn’t work and to Jordan’s point … I love it … You know when when you’re sharing information and you just – then someone says back to you “oh …” … Anyways when Jordan, like that mental model stuff, I talk a lot about that in the course. Like some of the things that keep us stuck is … It’s just ourselves. It’s our own ways of thinking. So, Jordan, I’m glad that that was a key take away from you. So sorry, Mary, now I forget the second part of your question.

Mary W. Rowe It was more, how do we get out of … How do we get cross-discipline?

Lisa Helps Oh, right.

But there is … Nouman, I just want to raise for you that in the chat someone is saying that what you’re talking about is Critical Management Studies.

Nouman Ashraf So I would say to you, this is intersectional problem solving.

Mary W. Rowe Intersectional problem solving. And so how does it work in … Obviously within academic circles it works, but how does it work in the municipal sector at least? Because ideally local government should be the most holistic and integrated, ideally, but it’s hard, isn’t it?

Lisa Helps Well, I mean, I would say it’s actually hard not to, right? Like I spent eight years as mayor and there wasn’t one thing that was done by the city alone. There wasn’t on thing that, I don’t know, except for maybe picking up the trash, like very obvious things. But when we’re talking about urban challenges, solving urban challenges whether it was economic development, whether it transportation, whether it’s housing … And I think this is part of the skill set, I mean certainly that I gained as mayor, that we try and get across in the course – is almost everything requires others to work with AND not just the ones that you would expect. And one of the things that’s most difficult to do is build those unexpected partnerships, build those partnerships where you need to reach out and work with, and maybe embed into your organizational structure, or at least your committee structure, people with whom you would not usually find yourself working. And going back to resilience, that’s what really creates resilience, when you can … and also helps to combat polarization. So real lasting urban solutions. And I, you know, all the time when I was mayor, I’ll give you a … I don’t know, I don’t want to take too much time. If there’s time for it, I can come back to an example, but …

Mary W. Rowe Go for it. You’ve got time. Go.

Lisa Helps Well, okay. So this is a beautiful kind of, almost like, you know, when you get those chills. When I was mayor I had a community drop-in every two weeks. People would come into City Hall, into my office, like right into the mayor’s office, we had couches, we’d make tea, and then I’d say to … Anyone could come in, you didn’t need to sign up, you just come in and sit down. And then I get up to my very old fashioned flip chart and say, “all right, folks, what’s the agenda today? What do you want to talk about?” And people would say their topics, and then the person whose topic it was would get to speak first, and then everyone would have a discussion about it. And then … So there was one woman who was concerned because she lived next to a park where there were some people sleeping who were experiencing homelessness. And it was just a small neighborhood park and it was like two or three people. And she was very respectful and very, you know, like not kind of freaking out. And then honestly, the next person who spoke, he said, “I’m actually one of the people sleeping in that park.”.

Mary W. Rowe Wow.

Lisa Helps Yeah. Wow. Wow. And like the whole, … I’m even getting chills retelling the story, but that completely changed that whole … And so then everyone in the room, whether they’d come to talk about bike lanes or you know, the development or whatever, that became the conversation. How do we, you know, take care of homeowners and take care people experiencing homelessness and how can they have a relationship? So that’s kind of the real stuff.

Nouman Ashraf So one more thing I want to say in that story that I hear from Lisa, right? There’s a disjunct between our imagination of a problem or issue and the experience of confronting it.

Lisa Helps Beautiful. That’s beautiful, Nouman. Yeah.

Nouman Ashraf So one of the things that we try to do is to right size the intervention or the design. My advice to everyone on this call is the following … Our models, our approaches are like our dreams. They’re fleeting if we don’t capture them. My encouragement, whether you come to the program or not, and we hope you do, right, is actually to have a very low-resolution version of what your definition of the problem is. Down on paper and share that in as crass, as crude a form as possible with others to say, tell me what you see here. What am I missing?

Mary W. Rowe You know, it’s important for us to be listening about how these kinds of programs are delivered. And there’s a few people in the chat who were lamenting the focus on this particular program. You know just stay tuned folks because we’re going to profile a bunch of these. We need many of these, the University of Victoria is doing some. As I mentioned, Calgary, thank you, the person who chimed in who’s in the GSAT program. Good for you, I’m glad you’re in it in Calgary. You know we’re all trying to create these opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and for best practice. And part of CUI’s job is how do we connect whatever one school or one initiative is doing, what another community is doing, what another cohort is doing. Shorefast is doing a … there might be somebody on here on the chat who’s participating in the Shorefast Peer-to-Peer Learning cohort which is about local economies. Tamarack does certain kinds of things on this program. Social Innovation Canada does them. Community Foundations of Canada does them and all the … And you know, what I want is a whole bunch of us doing them. Because we’re never going to get the scale of intervention and creativity that we need until a whole lot of us are engaging in this and learning as much as we can from each other, but doing our own bit. And if that means you’ve got a learning circle or a study circle in your local library … CUI is doing round tables across the country with different stakeholders in key communities to inform the Summit agenda this year. And so I’ll be in Edmonton, I’ll in Whitehorse, I’ll be in Yellowknife, well, I won’t physically be in all those places, but I am physically in a number of them, Victoria, Vancouver, we’re in Calgary on Monday, we’re on Halifax at the end of the month. These are all opportunities for us to build that connective tissue and it’s really critical that we listen to one another and that we try, as you guys were saying at the beginning, right? What is it to fail faster? That we’re going to learn faster and fail faster. Jordan, if you had another thing … Since you’re at the moment the poster boy for this is the benefit of peer-to-peer learning and here’s how we solve challenges. What would be, what’s the next thing? Because I think that’s part of the ladder we’re building, right? You try this, you know, it’s a bit like pitch … We used to have these pitch contests in the tech sector. What’s the next venture? So Jordan, let me ask you that. What’s next thing you’d want to tackle?

Jordan Soggie Well, I still think there’s a lot of work left to do in the projects that I have, that I am tackling, but just kind of the thought from the last conversation that I just wanted to add is that if, with what you were saying, Mary, about focusing in on one problem, that I think the issue and challenge with that is that then it’s going to only attract people from that siloed area to see that problem. And I think that was one thing … I think moving forward, to answer your question, would be engaging with other groups that have invited more people to the table for the problems that we see and getting their perspective so that we can get more data and …

Mary W. Rowe We have to be more ambitious about that, about how we curate these conversations, right?

Nouman Ashraf Just one thought I had just reading some of the comments in the chat, it’s clear that people have had adverse and less than stellar experiences with different institutions, academia being no different. And I’m not here just to, you know, big up the School of Cities, although I am wearing my baseball cap today. I want to just say that an intersectional approach is one that actually never diminishes the humanities, humanities of individuals that are critiquing us. And amplifies their perspective. So the School of Cities is exactly that vision and Karen is exactly the leader. And I say this as someone who said like, who do we have here, you know, moving … And in the four years that I’ve had a privilege of working on various initiatives, right? I’m going to talk for example of situations where we had people in the Leading Urban Change Program that come from our Leading Social Justice Collective Initiative. We’ll see that we have a wide scope, but there’s specific things that actually are served by specific parts of the programmatic agenda.

Mary W. Rowe But Nouman, just let me just say that it wouldn’t be the first time that the rest of Canada would be mad at Toronto for suggesting that all things good are … And even, I want to just comment, Karen, when you went back at the very beginning and you did that plug about how cities are the incubators of solutions. And I just want to be clear that we’re not saying, “oh no, you have to be in a city to come up with a good idea.” So it always gets heard that way. And let’s be clear that we need distributed solutions. Lisa, your lovely story about having people come into your office may be more possible in a city of 80,000 than it is in a city of 450,000 or something. And that’s part of the ongoing conversations we need to be having about how we get to a place of sharing best practice. I was delighted to see Murtaza’s on from the University of Alberta. He’s setting a new program up. And one of the key things that Murtaza, and please listen to the CityTalk where Murtaza talks with me and Carolyn Weitzman about housing, because what he’s trying to do is have a different kind of conversation between government advocates and the housing sector because it’s highly polarized and there’s this tendency to just blame one side over the other. So let’s hope that this is what CityTalk is about, and all these urban change programs are about – is getting us to talk to one another. And as you say, what was your phrase, Nouman … Listen to the … help me …

Nouman Ashraf Hear like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.

Mary W. Rowe Hear like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong. So just, with the time remaining, go ahead, Lisa. I’ll just get closing comments from each of you in terms of what are the challenges that you’re anticipating we’re going to double down on. Pretty interesting time we’re in, Fall 2025. Go ahead, Lisa.

Lisa Helps I’ll answer that question in a second and I won’t forget it, but first, just in terms of this notion that there’s a divide between the private sector builders and the public sector builders … For BC Builds, and this is just really important, it is the public sector that finances, and every single one of our projects is being built by a private developer or private construction company. Every single one. And it is a match made in heaven. They know what they’re doing. They know how to be efficient, they know … And so – I think there are ways to look at examples where there already is that partnership. In terms of the challenges, I think, that are ahead of us in terms of solving urban challenges and being, I guess, urban leaders, two come to mind. One is remaining, and Mary, this is music to your ears, I think I’m parroting you back to yourself … but remaining relentlessly place-based. Every problem happens in a place whether it’s a city, whether it is a small town. So I think that’s key. Our solutions are always going to be rooted in and come from place at the same time as we’re looking around at others. And then the other is just, of course, finding ways to keep our hearts open when we hear someone say something that seems absolutely egregious to us … We should say, “tell me more,” not plug our ears and run away.

Mary W. Rowe Jordan, to you, what would you focus on this Fall?

Jordan Soggie I would say finding other sectors that have a weight into the problems that we are seeing, because I think there are other sectors that are being affected, like the workforce in general, in communities that we could pull them into helping to solve these problems. I think a lot of players that are being impacted and aren’t being brought the table to help come up with the solutions and I think that sessions like this and talks like this are so important to help draw attention to that.

Mary W. Rowe Remind us. And people are putting into the chat … thank you for other suggestions. And as I say, you know, stay tuned because we’re going to do more on this. Nouman and then Karen last, go ahead Nouman.

Nouman Ashraf I think it’s really about recognizing that your perspective matters. And for too long, I think we’ve focused on belonging and not enough on mattering. I think, it’s important to enable belonging, but that belonging has to help us find the fact that our perspective matters. I love Lisa’s point, I love Karen’s point, I love Jordan’s point about … they have to be … actually they have to be place-based assessments of what the needs are that are not being met.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah.

Nouman Ashraf That’s the solution. Right. So …

Mary W. Rowe So let’s keep our eyes, we’re going to run out of time, Nouman, so we’re going to stay focused on the specifics of place. Karen, last comment to you.

Karen Chapple This is Canada’s moment. I mean, we felt this energy this year for change. People are hungry for it. We know we can’t keep that status quo anymore. I get a little disappointed when I hear Carney talking about nation building because I want to hear him talking about city building. And place building.

Mary W. Rowe Yes, or well, or talk about place building. It doesn’t even have to be …. It can be rural, but the idea is that you start and address the challenge at the ground. So that’s what all … everybody here is in that business. Thank you for being part of CityTalk. I always say, when they go low, we go local. I appreciate the critique in the chat from … David Navi, nice to see you again on CityTalk … about outcomes. All of this can’t just be about projects. We appreciate that. It’s got to ladder up to something. And that’s part of all of our roles to figure out what the new narrative is and what the investment strategy needs to be. But in the meantime, we’re in the proof point business folks, that things can be better, that we can have solutions on the ground. So thank you for joining us for CityTalk. Great to see you, Lisa Nouman. Always fabulous Karen and Jordan …. Great to meet you, Jordan. I hadn’t met you before. Fabulous to have all of you on. We’re on again on the 25th of September, a couple weeks from now – tackling Canada’s housing crisis, particularly about the role of the federal government and particularly with its new emphasis on defense spending, it’s a complicated thing, but don’t shy away from these topics, folks. We need all ears and all eyes focusing on these topics. Thanks for joining us. Have a great weekend.