Across the world, places once central to daily life have been left unused. As economies shift and populations shrink, homes, factories, public buildings, and sites are left behind. These forms of vacancy reflect recurring cycles of urban growth and decline, exposing social and spatial fractures within local life across multiple scales. At the same time, they prompt a reconsideration of how land is valued, designed, and inhabited. The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program seeks to reconsider these conditions and their histories, and to open a space for dialogue on new approaches to urban and rural development and their associated practices of land use.

The program will convene designers, municipal and urban officials, and researchers to explore and reimagine dialogues between real-world, ongoing projects and sites related to vacant land and buildings. Each summer (July to September) from 2026 to 2028, three CCA-WRI Research Fellows will engage with specific sites from recently completed or active research and/or design projects to see how the generation of vacant land, buildings, and other spatial conditions works across geographical contexts, urban and rural realities, political circumstances, and timeframes. On an annual basis, the program puts the three fellows into collaborative dialogue with the intent of creating an experimental space for thinking and active design.

Vacancy is a condition that encompasses both vacant buildings and vacant lands. While these two share commonalities, they relate to distinct social contexts and offer different possibilities for cities and rural locations. Vacant land harbours potential not only for human-centric ‘use’ but also as part of the land’s biocycle. These dynamics further link to disaster prevention, mitigating the heat island effect, enhancing urban sponge functionality, and improving soil health. Vacant buildings can also be viewed as material banks, enabling resource circulation within communities. Just as ‘share houses’ in Japan and ‘loft living’ in certain US urban contexts emerged over the past several decades, low rent has transformed risk into a new form of value creation and real estate speculation. These urban sites also offer new fields for designers. With the intensification of global warming, a combination of human-made and natural disasters have created vacancy as an increasingly shared societal condition that disregards national borders.

Within the program, the CCA Collection offers an open space for exploration. Researchers with active design projects that may not otherwise benefit from a historical perspective can turn their attention to, by way of example, OMA’s proposal for the development of Downsview Park, Gordon Matta Clark’s site-specific works, or Tadashi Kawamata’s photographic project that speculates on sites of precarious inhabitation in Montreal. These materials and other projects in the CCA Collection can spark ideas on how to engage with sites of intense urban and rural transition. The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program seeks to build an experimental research format that allows designers and researchers to ground ongoing projects in the CCA’s Collection by undertaking in-depth, historically informed research, and also collaborate and exchange with peer practitioner-academics from around the world—building a space in which theoretical exploration can move towards on-the-ground action.  

We welcome applications focused on specific sites that are actively contending with vacancy as a social, cultural, political, and spatial condition, and committed to a theoretical model that can inform design practice. This can be achieved through a range of approaches, particularly those that take vacancy as a broad, if highly situated, condition and experience across specific urban and rural locations, as well as processes of economic, demographic, and environmental change. These approaches include engaging with: 

• Vacancy as a spatial-cultural category  
• Vacant buildings and their political-spatial economies 
• Vacant land as a social and political construct  
• Histories of urban decision making premised on land availability
• Histories of land use and management 
• Industrialization as a driver of land use  
• Global warming as making land disposable and vacant 
• Landscape approaches to social phenomena such as demographic decline, taxation, zoning, etc. 
• Rural experiences of progressive and rapid demographic growth and decline  
• Rural adaptability to social and spatial change  
• Vacant buildings as urban/rural resources 
• Material cycle of vacant buildings (reuse/recycle/decomposition) 

The fellowship is open to practitioners (architects, landscape architects, urban planners, urban decision makers, cultural producers, artists) with substantial professional experience, as well as researchers holding a doctoral degree in relevant fields, and particularly applicants working at the intersection of practice and academia who can demonstrate a commitment to research, publishing, exhibiting, or a publicly accountable research practice. 

Research conducted for commercial purposes will not be eligible for funding. 

Fellows must be able to undertake their research project at the CCA in Montréal for one to three months between August and October. They are expected to present their work in progress publicly, and to engage in seminars, workshops, and exchanges with the CCA community.  

Fellowship Support: 

• Residency at the CCA in Montréal (1 to 3 months, between August and October)
• Additional financial support for travel and visa expenses 
• Private office and access to the CCA Collection
• Monthly stipend of CAD 5,000 (up to three months) 

The 2026 call for applications is now closed. The next call for applications will be launched at the beginning of September 2026.

The Advisory Committee for the 2026–2028 cycle of the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program consists of the following members: Maurice D. Cox (Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD), Mio Tsuneyama (Architect, studio mnm/ HOLES) , Giovanna Borasi (Director, CCA), and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA).

For questions regarding the program, please contact: studium@cca.qc.ca

For updates on the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program, please subscribe to the CCA newsletter

For more details about the Window Research Institute, visit this page.

Rayshad Dorsey
Washington University in St. Louis
Vacancy as Return: Rural–Urban Memoryscapes, Black Domesticity, and Community Agency

Hiʻilei Hobart and Jake Hobart
Yale University and independent creative director
Of No Use

Kent Mundle
University of Hong Kong
The Perpetual Violence of the Kathmandu Valley: Future-proof Infill Framework

Yusuke Yabutani
University of Toyama
Self-Renovation as Cultural Infrastructure: An Archive of Craftspeople’s Experiential Intelligence for the Reoccupation of Vacant Houses

2024
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2022