At the BE*SPOKE Festival in the Township of Centre Wellington, conversations about climate resilience, urban systems, and community leadership moved beyond abstract policy debates and into something more tangible. Organized by GreenLanes, the festival created space for municipalities, practitioners, and community leaders to engage deeply with the realities of climate change, and the choices communities must make in response. The Future Cities Institute (FCI) was proud to be part of that conversation through the work of FCI member and Academic Director Nadine Ibrahim, whose talk, “The Future Is Now, So What Are We Building?”, set the tone for the day.
Dr. Ibrahim delivered two fully booked sessions grounded in both evidence and action. Speaking with municipal staff and councillors from the Township of Centre Wellington and the County of Wellington, she offered a clear-eyed, data-driven look at how cities are already being reshaped by the climate crisis, through extreme heat, flooding, infrastructure strain, and compounding social impacts. Rather than framing climate change as a distant threat, her message emphasized that communities are already living with its consequences, and that responding effectively requires courage, collaboration, and informed decision-making.
That call carried through to the hands-on resilience workshops Dr. Ibrahim led using the LEGO® Serious Play® method. These sessions invited participants to move beyond traditional discussion formats and instead build shared representations of system shock, vulnerability, and recovery. Through model-building and dialogue, participants explored how community systems connect, and stress in one area can ripple across an entire community. The response was energetic and deeply engaged, reflecting an appetite for tools that help communities think and act together in new ways.
For FCI, these sessions reflected the Institute’s core approach to city-building work: pairing rigorous data with practical, participatory tools; bringing academic expertise directly into municipal decision-making; and creating learning environments that prioritize collaboration and action. BE*SPOKE offered a powerful example of progress happening when urgency, evidence, and shared ownership meet in practice.
Thanks again to the GreenLanes team for curating such a thoughtful gathering, to the Elora Centre for the Arts for hosting in a vibrant new community space, and to everyone who took part in the conversations. We also celebrate Dr. Ibrahim for representing FCI with clarity and impact, and for reminding us that the future is not something we wait for, but something we actively build together.