January 15 - Brian Doucet - Film Screening: Thinking Beyond the Market: A film about genuinely affordable housing
January 22 - George Massoud - Building from the Land
February 5 - Samantha Eby
February 26 - Angie Jim - Making a Home
March 19 - Dilip da Cunha - The Invention of Land: Where Colonization Begins
Brian Doucet, University of Waterloo
Thursday, January 15, 2026
5:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
Thinking Beyond the Market: A film about genuinely affordable housing takes you across Canada to learn about policies, programs and projects that are already happening and already having a positive impact on addressing the housing crisis. From using public land to build non-market housing in Kitchener and Whistler, and inspiring Indigenous-led projects in Vancouver, to strong tenant protections and rent control in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, the examples featured in this film demonstrate how many important solutions are making a difference in communities big and small! The film features interviews with more than 30 planners, policymakers, politicians, developers, residents and housing advocates from coast to coast. The film inspires and challenges us to think about both the root causes of the housing crisis and transformative solutions.
Hosted by Professor David Fortin with Sean Campbell & Associate Professor Adrian Blackwell
Dr Brian Doucet is an author, filmmaker, photographer, researcher, award-winning teacher and Associate Professor in Planning at the University of Waterloo. His work critically examines housing, gentrification, displacement, transportation and neighbourhood change. Born and raised in Toronto, he lived in the Netherlands from 2004 – 2017, where he received his PhD in geography from Utrecht University in 2010. Since returning to Canada in 2017, he has held a Canada Research Chair, been awarded six major SSHRC research grants and was a 2025 winner of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance Teaching Excellence Award. He is the co-author of the award-nominated book, Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto: a visual analysis of change, and a co-editor of the four volume book series Global Reflections on COVID-19 and Urban Inequalities.
George Massoud, Material Cultures, London, UK
Thursday, January 22, 2026
4:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
Material Cultures is an interdisciplinary, not-for-profit research, action and design organisation working to address the intersecting issues of climate and social justice in the built environment. Understanding buildings as ultimately drawn from the landscape, we argue for the reintegration of architecture and agriculture. We support regenerative approaches to growing and harvesting materials, fostering bioregional construction practices that operate within planetary boundaries. We challenge the systems, technologies, supply chains, regulations and materials that make up the construction industry, with the aim of transforming how we build and who we build for.
Hosted by Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream Jaliya Fonseka
George Massoud is an architect, educator and cultural worker. He is director at Material Cultures, a design and research organisation based in London. He is interested in how we can build futures of interdependence with the various ecologies that shape our built environment. This underlying philosophy is explored in the spaces he occupies as a practitioner: in the studio, in the classroom and in the community.
Samantha Eby, Emerging Practitioner, Waterloo Architecture
Thursday, February 5, 2026
4:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
Samantha Eby is a licensed architect and researcher based in Toronto. Through her work she explores the intersection of design, policy frameworks, and ownership models, focusing on their impact on housing projects. In 2024, she founded this—office, an architecture and spatial research practice committed to exploring new typologies and models of architecture through non-traditional collaborations and research. She is also the co-founder and the Executive Director of ReHousing, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting housing creation through applied research, consultation, and education. ReHousing’s work on multiplex zoning was recognized with the 2023 CMHC President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
4:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
What truly defines "homes for all" in our rapidly growing cities? In this talk, Angie Jim Osman, Partner at Allies and Morrison, explores how thoughtful design and density can nurture communities, championing sustainable, resilient neighbourhoods built for the long term. Drawing on Allies and Morrison’s deep experience with complex urban regeneration sites—from King’s Cross to Greenwich Peninsula in London—Angie will reveal how these foundational lessons are now being adapted to reshape Toronto.
The practice moves beyond mere verticality, advocating for mixed-use developments that weave together a family of building typologies with a robust, green network of public spaces. Through a selection of recent work, she will illustrate how intensified density can enhance, rather than detract from, the quality of community life. A key focus will be the vision for Beltline Yards in Toronto, where the local industrial vernacular is being reinterpreted into characterful buildings. By integrating dedicated maker spaces and varied landscapes, the project preserves the site's unique legacy while establishing a well-connected, enduring neighborhood for its future.
Hosted by Associate Professor Adrian Blackwell
A designer, urbanist and teacher, Angie brings over twenty years’ experience working on residential and mixed-use projects leading teams from feasibility through to construction. Angie is design lead on several of Allies and Morrison’s housing schemes and masterplans in London and is one of two Partners driving the practice’s work in Canada. Several of the projects she is leading in Toronto involve the regeneration of prominent urban sites into new, sustainable neighbourhoods such as Beltline Yards, an industrial site that will be transformed into a mixed-use transport-led community. Originally from Canada but now a seasoned Londoner, Angie obtained degrees in urban geography at McGill University and architecture at University of British Columbia, and her professional qualification at The Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
Dilip da Cunha, Columbia University
Thursday, March 19, 2026
4:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
We live in an all-consuming Ocean of Wetness, a wetness that is everywhere in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna, precipitating, evaporating, storming, seeping, soaking, transpiring, osmoting, freezing. We are wetness ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence. However, we do not learn that we live in an Ocean of Wetness. We learn instead that we live on an Earth surface called land that we take for granted as existent and place beyond all difference, assuming that all people experience it. In this talk, I present land as a product of design in an Ocean of Wetness that we fail to acknowledge. It is a design that deploys four design devices: the geometric surface, geometric line, hydrologic cycle, and language of landscape. Together they create and maintain an Earth surface that serves as the ground of observation and habitation. It also serves as the ground of a colonization that continues largely because this act of design passes unnoticed and unquestioned. What does it take to acknowledge land to be a product of design; to recognize that our real home is in an Ocean of Wetness that is everywhere rather than on an Earth surface with water somewhere? Does Ocean offer an appreciation of more fundamental difference in culture; and does it open fresh possibilities for design in the face of climate change that threatens land with destruction?
Hosted by Associate Professor Jane Mah Hutton
Dilip da Cunha is an architect who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). In 2019, his book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2017, Mathur and Da Cunha were awarded a Pew Fellowship Grant and in 2021, the Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architects in Residence Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 2020, da Cunha was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently working on a prequel to The Invention of Rivers titled
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