What resources does a city already have to support its own progress? Taking Montréal as a case study, this workshop explores the knowledge, relationships, and everyday practices that communities offer to support the making of the built environment. Led by architect Farida Abu-Bakare and her team at WXY, participants will work in small groups with tools that represent community priorities, municipal frameworks, and spatial trade-offs to collectively map Montréal, testing possibilities that arise when different kinds of knowledge come together.

In dialogue with our Main Galleries exhibition The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect, the workshop will examines how historical, social, and ecological conditions—and the people who understand them—shape urban development. Through collective discussion and hands-on exercises, participants will identify forms of community capital and explore what we might build together from what is already there.

The workshop is for adults and is free, but as places are limited, we recommend registering here.

Farida Abu-Bakare, OAA, FRAIC, is one of the three guest-curators of our upcoming Out of the Box exhibition series dedicated to the work of Gillian Hopwood and John Godwin, architects in post-independence Nigeria whose archive was recently donated to the CCA. She is a Principal and the Director of Global Practice at WXY architecture + urban design. Her curatorial work includes exhibitions and installations for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. She is a co-founder of the Black Architects and Interior Designers Association (BAIDA) and a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (FRAIC).