Vertical Resilience and Community Renewal
12:00pm to 1:00pm Eastern
Before the glass condominiums that crowd Toronto’s downtown skies rose, the city was already home to a veritable concrete jungle of apartment buildings.
Twelve hundred towers house nearly one million people today – with many providing affordable options in the city’s core, a place that is becoming more and prohibitively expensive. Built following the Second World War, however, these towers are far from beacons of sustainability and certainly not immune to disrepair.
Tower Renewal is a program to drive broad environmental, social, economic, and cultural change by improving Toronto’s concrete apartment towers and the neighbourhoods that surround them. Their vision is to work with residents to reinvigorate these important neighbourhoods, making them more liveable and energy efficient, while bringing new community amenities to the sites.
Toronto’s Tower Renewal program is a great example of the kind of project Cities for People and SiG are interested in exploring for our Social Innovation and Resilience in Cities Series. Using it as a case study, we will explore how communities can identify problems and opportunities together, how they can be part of decision-making processes, and how partnerships and attention to positive social and ecological resilience can bring life and long-term vitality to urban systems.
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About the Presenters
John Brodhead is the first Executive Director of Evergreen CityWorks. Prior to joining CityWorks, John was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Cabinet Affairs for Premier Dalton McGuinty and served in other roles in the Office of the Premier, including Executive Director of Communications and Senior Policy Advisor. John was also Vice President for Strategy and Communications for Metrolinx. Prior to joining the provincial government, John served in various capacities in the federal government, including working for the Ministers of Infrastructure and Communities and National Defence.
Graeme Stewart M.Arch OAA MRAIC CAHP is a registered architect and Associate with ERA Architects. Graeme has been involved in numerous urban design, cultural planning, conservation and architecture projects with particular focus on neighbourhood design and regional sustainability. Graeme was a key initiator of the Tower Renewal Project. Graeme is also the co-editor of Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies and a founding director of the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R), an urban research organization formed by ERA and planningAlliance in 2009. In 2010, he was recipient of an RAIC National Urban Design Award for his ongoing research and design work related to Tower Renewal, and in 2014 received the Jane Jacobs Prize.
