Urban Affairs Forum | Shaping Public Spaces: Community Engagement

Eladia Smoke | KaaSheGaaBaaWeak

MArch | OAA | OAQ | MAA | FRAIC | LEED®AP

Principal Architect, Smoke Architecture Inc.

KaaSheGaaBaaWeak | Eladia Smoke is Anishinaabekwe from Obishikokaang | Lac Seul First Nation, with family roots in Alderville First Nation, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Eladia has worked in architecture since 2002, and founded Smoke Architecture as principal architect in 2014. She is the first Anishinabekwe architect in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, as well as the third Indigenous woman licensed as an architect in Canada. She taught as a Master Lecturer at Laurentian’s McEwen School of Architecture from 2016 to 2022. She serves as a founding member of RAIC’s Indigenous Task Force. Eladia represented Canada at the 2018 Venice Biennale Unceded exhibition as part of an international team of Indigenous designers and architects. Current professional work includes community-based and institutional projects working alongside Indigenous stakeholders, collaborating with First Nation communities, and listening closely to our Elders.

Daniel is a recognized leader and innovator in municipal civic engagement with extensive experience in process design and policy development. For five years, he served in the Chief Planner’s Office as the Stakeholder Engagement Lead for the City Planning Division, where he worked to improve the Division’s overall approach to public engagement and bring new, hard-to-reach voices into planning processes, including youth and newcomers. In September 2019, Daniel became the first Manager of Public Consultation for Toronto’s Parks, Forestry, and Recreation Division, supporting the capital projects branch. He and his team have been working to build an engagement practice from the ground up, ensuring that Toronto’s diverse communities are engaged in the development of Toronto’s parks and rec capital program, with a focus on centering the voices of people usually left out of traditional engagement processes. Since 2020, his team has engaged close to 180,000 Torontonians in this work. Daniel has spoken at conferences in Europe and North America, is a trained facilitator and Partnership Broker, and teaches a course on civic engagement at the University of Toronto. 

Zahra Ebrahim is the Co-Founder of Monumental. She is a public interest designer and strategist, and an established bridge builder across grassroots and institutional spaces. Her work has focused on community-led approaches to policy, infrastructure, and service design. Prior to Monumental, she built and led Doblin Canada, Deloitte’s Human-Centred Design practice. In her early career, Zahra led one of Canada’s first social design studios, working with communities to co-design towards better social outcomes, leading some of Canada’s most ambitious participatory infrastructure and policy programs. Zahra is currently an Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, and an Adjunct Professor at the Daniels School of Architecture. She has been recognized as a Next City Vanguard Civic Leader, Ascend Canada’s Mentor of the Year, one of “Tomorrow’s Titans” in Toronto Life magazine, one of WXN’s Top 100 Women in Canadian Business, and most recently recognized as one of the Urban Land Institute’s WLI Champions. Zahra is currently a Board member of the Toronto Arts Council, the Canadian Urban Institute, and Board Chair for Park People.

Elsa Lam, FRAIC, Hon. OAA, is editor of Canadian Architect magazine. She holds a doctorate in architectural history and theory from Columbia University, completed under the supervision of Kenneth Frampton and Vittoria di Palma. She previously studied architectural history at McGill University and architectural design at the University of Waterloo.

Lam is the co-editor of the book Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the present (Princeton Architectural Press and Canadian Architect, 2019). She has taught architectural writing at the University of Waterloo and at Toronto Metropolitan University, and has worked in the curatorial and research departments at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Lam’s volunteering includes current roles as Vice Chair of the Advisory Committee for Building Equality in Architecture Toronto (BEAT), and as Co-Chair of the RAIC’s Awards Advisory Committee.