December 19, 2024
A word from the Partnership Director
Spatial injustice, climate disruption and urban health issues, including the homelessness crisis, call for profound and lasting changes in the way we define and recognize quality in architecture and in all disciplines of the built environment. We have opted for partnership research as a way out of silos and corporatist resistance. But where do we stand in this search for local, municipal and national strategies?
As we come to the end of the year, the first half of our 5-year partnership, we invite you to look back at the achievements of our last online convention. You can discover, or rediscover, the 14 introductory presentations to the roadmaps. We have updated all the pages of the Living Atlas of Quality research sites, and the slide carousels now allow you to enter more progressively, but also more deeply, into the work and reflections carried out on both sides in Canada. Our research opens with lists of concrete proposals.
We still have some way to go to formulate these proposals into a strategic list. To facilitate exchanges between sites, we have produced the summaries of the 4 sessions in text format, to highlight the salient ideas and proposals of the teams. In the process, many common threads are emerging between the research sites, and it is these intersections that we must now build on as we head towards the in-person convention, to be held at the University of Toronto from April 30 to May 2, 2025.
The steering committee is currently working on defining the objectives of the Toronto convention. These will include not only updated roadmaps, but above all a series of recommendations for national actions on the various issues we have identified as the most urgent or critical. We want the Toronto Convention 2025 to be the year of the creation of a national strategic plan for raising quality thresholds in the built environment.
The members of the steering committee join Dimitri and I in wishing you a pleasant visit and, above all, a happy holiday season!
Jean-Pierre Chupin, PhD, Professor, MOAQ Architect, MIRAC Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Mediations of Excellence, UdeM Coordinator of the SSHRC Research Partnership on the Quality of the Built Environment in Canada |