C40 Reinventing Cities is an annual urban design competition inviting new visions for underutilized sites in cities across the globe.
Along with teammates Maya Jain, Thomas Heinrich, and Gabriel Townsend Darriau, I submitted an entry to the competition's student category.
View the proposal in English or French.
Design
Research
Writing
January – May 2021 (5 months, part-time)
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal & remote
Our proposal for the C40 Students Reinventing Cities competition advocates for the integration of systems thinking into cities’ ways of working and creating. It includes 6 guiding principles that are interrelated, complementary and non-exhaustive. The principles underpin a series of processes to bring to life the enabling, supportive and incentivizing qualities of a citizen-steered city-backed redevelopment process.
Project origins I learned of the launch of the student category from the C40 mailing list, which I was subscribed to because of my prior interest in 4000 St Patrick, the site of the professional category. I took an interest in the site for the student category because of its close proximity to where I was living at the time.
Our team came together around a shared desire to be creative during the Covid-19 lockdown and develop an urban design philosophy with inspiring, like-minded people.
Process Our team worked remotely for the duration of the project, meeting regularly to discuss research, trade notes, and develop our ideas.
We structured our proposal according to the guidelines of the competition (which called for a Panel, Action Plan, and Implementation Plan), but deviated in some places to ensure the final result reflected our personal conclusions and ideals.
For example, rather than adopting the 10 design principles outlined by C40, we came up with our own guiding principles, which were less specific and more geared towards inviting systems thinking into urban development.
Narrative We chose to animate the futures made possible by our proposal with narrative fiction, as this medium is uniquely poised to bring forth empathy, emotion, a variety of perspectives, and an imaginative process capable of zooming between micro and macro; past, present and future. The resulting anthology of short stories constitutes the bulk of our Action Plan.
Panel We chose to go with a collage aesthetic, as we felt it aligned well with our position that cities should augment and build on existing infrastructure in place of demolishing and building something entirely new.
Action Plan Each of us composed a short story.
I contributed the story “Finn & Flo,” which follows two residents of Value Collective as they find their way to the institution and explore their ambitions within its proposed structure. Value Collective was integrated as a component of our Implementation Plan.
Interspersed throughout the stories are informational boxes, which layer in related concepts, research, and references. Text is underlined wherever the content of the story corresponds with a box in the margins.
The colours in the background evoke our colour-coded principles.
Implementation Plan Our Implementation Plan lays out a series of actions and policy measures to catalyze a community-led redevelopment process, including programs and funding streams to help residents come together and realize their individual and collective visions.
Books Though we didn’t win the competition, we were happy with the results of our work and decided to circulate our proposal by printing and binding 20 copies in both French and English. Books were given away to friends and collaborators, and one was donated to Concordia University’s Fine Arts Reading Room.
