Cities Unmasked Lubna Alli, Victoria McCutcheon, Ali Sajid, and Brittany Livingston

In this episode, we focus our discussion around urban feminism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Join Victoria, Lubna, Brittany, and guest speaker Sydney Wilson, as they unpack the structural issues that prevent women from fully engaging with their city spaces and brainstorm how both municipal governments and city dwellers can better support women during the pandemic and beyond.

In this episode, join us as we discuss urban indigeneity and the city. Although most cities are indigenous, insofar as they are built on the lands of dispossessed first peoples, over the past few decades there has been an increasing trend of urban migration for indigenous peoples in Canada. As of the 2016 census, Indigenous peoples in Canada totaled a little over 1.6 million people, and Canada makes some attempt to celebrate this vibrant indigenous presence. But the parallels with so many other countries – not least Australia – are acute: urban aboriginal people in Canada, despite their traditional associations, are seen and treated, culturally and sometimes officially, as less “traditional” than their rural countrymen and women. In this episode, we explore these themes from a historical perspective with our guest, Marissa Campbell (Workshop and Engagement Lead, Canadian Roots Exchange). 

Politicians constantly pledge to make life more affordable for all, as if there has long been a consensus on what constitutes affordable housing in Canada. Yet more and more people are spending over 30 percent of their monthly incomes on housing according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada. With more people at home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, utilities such as heat, water and electricity, are also expected to rise by at least ten percent. Canada, like so many other places around the world, is creeping into housing unaffordability. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Paul Makdissi, professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, as we consider income inequality and unaffordability in our cities as they are exacerbated by the pandemic.

In theory, urban planners should be considering land use, transportation, housing, and the overall usefulness of public space as they make decisions for the 55% of the global population who live in cities. In practice, urban planners are not considering the city’s residents as they continue to allow developers to build up, but rather it is “the image that has to be planned” says Dr. Mihalis Kavaratzis, an Associate Professor of Marketing at the School of Business, University of Leicester. With global travel coming to a practical freeze, the model of quick and large financial returns that building for tourists enabled in our cities has rapidly become an unsustainable model of urban development, even for the most ardent capitalists. Join us as we consider how the pandemic is forcing urban planners to reconsider the model of city branding and building for tourists and instead centre residents’ long-time concerns of livable cities.

Queer lives are unrepresented and/or misrepresented in our thinking of urbanism. This episode focuses on what queer work and lives means for urbanism by listening to our guests’ work, we hope to consider how queer experiences in the city can help us build a more inclusive city after the pandemic. Dr. Catherine Nash has said that the “post-mo,” that’s post-modern, “generation is less interested in (or does not frequent as often), Toronto’s traditional gay Village and is utilizing alternative urban spaces in ways that rework the gendered and sexualized meanings of those locations and suggests transformative processes are underway for LGBT social, political and economic life in Toronto.” At the School of Cities, we know from our everyday work that Toronto is rapidly changing, for better and for worse. The lessons of shifting queer lifeforms that work across the city are often unseen and we hope to learn more about the implications of this for the city today, and how this can be mobilized to better urbanism today.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said about his government’s plan to send children back to school during the COVID-19 pandemic that “our children belong in the classroom, with their friends and teachers, learning.” According to a recent poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies, forty-one per cent of all respondents said they would be more worried about personally contracting COVID-19 if schools reopen; the CBC has reported that as a result of funding agreements between the province of Ontario and it’s school boards, classroom sizes will be maintained at pre-pandemic levels. This effectively means that you could see classrooms filled with grades 4, 5, 6, and 7. With amplified health concerns, and exacerbated concerns about the quality of education and classroom size from before the pandemic, join us and Austin Jafri, Joy Henderson, and Dr. Beyhan Farhadi as we discuss the debacle of education justice amidst the global pandemic.