Community for Belonging Reading Group - Cities: Challenges and Possibilities

In October, the Daniels Faculty continues its Community for Belonging Reading Group, an initiative launched in February 2023. The initiative focuses on raising awareness of the broad spectrum of identities within the Daniels Faculty community and provides a platform for engagement, interaction and discussion.

Each of the texts in the series is written by, about or for communities that have been historically underrepresented in architecture, design, visual studies and forestry, with the chosen titles meant to serve as springboards for intentional conversations about inclusion and belonging.

The theme for the October Reading Group is Cities: Challenges and Possibilities. The texts to be discussed are Margaret Helwig’s Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, and Messy Cities: Why we Can’t Plan Everything, an edited collection of essays, featuring Daniels Faculty contributors (Zahra Ebrahim, Chiyi Tam, Fadi Masoud, Tura Cousins Wison, Shane Laptiste, Daniel Rotsztain, and Lorne Cappe) and other University of Toronto members.

In Messy Cities, forty-three essays by a range of writers – including a handful affiliated with the Daniels Faculty, and many more affiliated with U of T broadly – illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities. With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home.

‘Helwig is a priest, human rights activist, poet, caregiver, friend, mother, Mother. And she is, most admirably, a reader- a reader of sacred texts, of a city, of law by turns incensing and nonsensical, and of a community frequently deemed illegible or illegitimate in their living because the living looks different. Reader to reader, Helwig asks us: How might we better live together?’

Books will be available to registered participants on a first come, first served basis for pick up at the Eberhard Zeidler Library circulation desk starting September 15, 2025. They hope that you will join the conversation about Cities: Challenges and Possibilities