ADFF Toronto: Best in the World w/ Panel

Chiyi (she/her) is an urban planner and anti-displacement organizer practicing in Tkaronto’s Kensington-Chinatown neighbourhood. She is currently a visiting expert with the School of Cities’ as an Early Career Canadian Urban Leader. Chiyi is the managing director of the recently established Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.  Her goal is to reciprocate knowledge and wealth into community ownership.

She was the first staff and executive director of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust, where she acquired the organization’s first building acquisition, securing 12-units of deeply affordable residential units from further speculation.  Chiyi serves on the advisory board of Montreal Chinatown’s JIA Foundation, the steering committee of the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts and is a director of the Union Cooperative Initiative, a unionized cooperative incubating unionized worker cooperatives.

She co-developed “Planning and Designing for Community Power”, a graduate urban design course at the University of Toronto. She frequently supports groups from all corners of turtle island exploring community ownership and wealth building as an anti-displacement strategy for racial & economic justice.

Karen Kubey, Assistant Professor, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

Karen is an urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture in New York. Holding degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Kubey began her career as a designer of below-market housing. She has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and MacDowell, and has completed a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, Kubey convenes the American Institute of Architects Right-to-Housing Working Group.

@karenkubey, @UofTDaniels

Photo by Sharif Khalje.

Stefan Novakovic is a Toronto-based writer and editor specializing in architecture and urbanism. Stefan is a Senior Editor at Azure Magazine, and previously served as Associate Editor at Canadian Architect, and Assistant Editor at UrbanToronto.ca. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of publications, including Canadian Interiors, Designlines, Building Magazine, the New York Review of Architecture, the McGill International Review and Torontoist.

Stefan has also appeared as a speaker at the Architecture and Design Film Festival, Toronto’s Interior Design Show, the Ontario Association of Architects Conference, the University of Toronto Munk School’s Walter Gordon Symposium on Public Policy, and Architect@Work International. He has also presented original research at the 46th Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Conference. He is the winner of a Canadian National Magazine Award (B2B) and a Canadian Online Publishing Award.