Toronto Roundtable: Architecture and the Right to Housing

What does the right to housing mean in practice, and how can architects and other urban professionals contribute? Architecture and the Right to Housing, a Pan-American program series organized by the University of Toronto’s Architecture and Housing Justice Lab from 2023 to 2025, convened leaders in the field for a daylong roundtable to share their responses.

Below is an excerpt from the gathering in Toronto, which took place at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto in March 2024.

Around the table were Luke Anderson, executive director of the StopGap Foundation; James K. Bird, Dënësųłinë́ Nation, Ph.D student in architecture, Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto; Cheryll Case, founder and executive director of Community in Public (formerly CP Planning); Chantal Cornu, property asset manager at Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust; Leilani Farha, global director of The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing; Marie McGregor Pitawanakwat, chair of the National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network; and Elizabeth McIsaac, president of the foundation Maytree.

They were joined by activist and policy advisor Emily Paradis, professors Adrian Blackwell and Michael Piper, and architects Paul Karakusevic, Janna Levitt, and Ya’el Santopinto, along with Architecture and Housing Justice Lab founding director Karen Kubey and research assistants Dima Ghazal and Kodi Ume-Onyido.

Untapped will publish edited transcripts from the program’s other roundtables in the coming months.


LEILANI FARHA: I’m a human rights lawyer and advocate. I’ve spent my entire career working on the right to housing and its implementation. I’m interested in the intersections of the right to housing and my work with architects. We’re natural allies for sure.

I’ve come up with four reasons why we should use the human rights framework and the right to housing framework: It is law. It is good law. It is universal law. And it is transformational law.

First: It is law. It appears in international treaties that governments around the world have signed, ratified, and committed to. They have legal obligations. And it’s in a plethora of treaties, not just one. It’s in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and more. That means it is legally binding, which creates obligations from the government.

Second, it’s good law. Human rights law centers people whose rights are most at risk. So it forces us to focus, for example, on Indigenous and racialized communities. It would create human well-being, reduce household debt. It would make people happier and more secure.

It’s also universal law. What I like about human rights law is that if we could get governments to commit to it, they’d all be driving toward a common goal. If you look around Canada right now, there’s a hodgepodge approach: This municipality is doing this, no zoning over here, money over there, evict or don’t evict. The human rights framework would lend some consistency across the board.

Last, it’s transformational. We live with certain dominant narratives that have really taken hold since the 1980s. Neoliberalism being the main one, which goes to Eric Tars and the idea of the commodification, or financialization, of housing. Human rights demands something else from our system.

EMILY PARADIS: The trouble with the term “rights” is that they can be understood as a colonial imposition themselves. In one understanding, rights are about relying on the state to confer or give us something, [which means we then] have to look to the state to uphold rights.

The potential of rights lies in the claiming of them socially and spatially by people on the ground, and also in the recognition that they are both inherent and collective.

Where do architects come in? At the level of progressive realization, architects have some influence to make those claims on to the state, but it has to go beyond the building level. It can’t be delivering the building that has the components of the right to housing. It has to be challenging the state to uphold those obligations.

Also, architects foster the collective and spatial rights claims of communities by creating spaces that convey worth, value, and equity, and that are collective in nature. There’s a dual role to play for architects.

ELIZABETH MCISAAC: I’m the president of Maytree, a private charitable foundation in Toronto. We’re focused on solutions to poverty using a human rights–based approach. We engage in the work directly, but we also do grant-making, and have supported a number of thought leaders on housing rights in Canada. We need [the right] leadership to get this work done.

We engaged directly with the City of Toronto to sketch out what the rules and responsibilities could occur in a municipal context. What we suggested wasn’t necessarily what was taken up, but the City Manager’s office distributed some of them across the city, including a Deputy Ombudsman, with responsibility for housing and housing as a human right, and a housing advisory committee.

I’d call these things “architectural” pieces: They have the potential to have an accountability locus. And at the municipal level, they [provide] the power of more persuasion. Persuasion doesn’t have legal heft, but it can do a lot of things.

The Deputy Ombudsman was appointed last summer. The Housing Rights Advisory Committee recently had its first meeting. I’m chairing that committee. It has representation from those communities who are most impacted by housing precarity and homelessness.

In the process of defining a working plan and how we hold the city to account, we need to work with other partners in the city. I’m inviting ideas because we’ve just started.

CHERYLL CASE: A human rights–based approach to planning is about shaping the context of the understanding of what’s happening in relation to what has happened before—knowing what’s happening now is not normal. It’s a series of decisions.

It’s also about prioritizing building socioeconomic solidarity between different communities. As planners and architects, we have access to a lot of very influential people. We can make sure that we bring them along to be in solidarity with people who are marginalized.

Through my work as a planner, I’ve found that there is a high degree of interest across socioeconomic groups to achieve the right to housing. What is lacking, however, is the infrastructure to allow them to really understand how to do so.

JAMES K. BIRD: My dissertation and my PhD work explores Indigenous housing by examining the use of language as an entry point to design. I’m using my [Dënesųłiné] language as a way to address housing. Through housing, we can then begin to at least look at an alternative typology.

I’ve done extensive research into why things are the way they are today, and it is a racist policy called the Indian Act. [Editor’s note: First passed in 1876, the Indian Act defines how the Canadian government interacts with Canada’s 614 First Nation bands and their members, and is still in force with amendments.]

We were given the [federal government’s] “Indian House” typology in the early 1950s. The idea was that the house’s [design] would make the savage more civilized: by dining in the dining room, sleeping in the bedroom. We were banned from using our ways of doing the domestic. On almost all reservations, [a version of these inadequate houses persist] today. Last year, two elders froze to death not outside but in their homes.

For thirty years before I went into architecture, I was a carpenter on reserves, building and repairing these houses. My particular nation, the Dëne Nation, is in northern Alberta. None of the materials [used for the houses on the reserves] was applicable in the north. They didn’t work. The building science didn’t equate to where we were located.

For me, I just speak about this condition. This is my whole concern. We’ll be looking into the typology, understanding ways forward.

The other thing I want to say is thank you for inviting me. Indigenous people need to be at these tables. We need them to be decision-makers and we also need them to hear what’s going on, so we can go back and inform our communities.

LUKE ANDERSON: Twenty-two years ago, I crashed on a mountain-biking trail I was riding with a good friend of mine, and sustained a spinal cord injury. In that split second, my life completely changed: I was introduced to a world that’s not well suited for somebody who uses mobility aids.

Over time I became very aware of barriers that were preventing me from accessing spaces I wanted to enjoy. I worked out of a downtown office space that had three steps separating the sidewalk level from the elevator lobby level. Every time I wanted to get in and out of that space, I needed someone to help me set up a big, heavy, folding aluminum ramp. Imagine what that would do to your independence. That was my reality for eight years, at least twice a day.

Whenever that ramp was left out, everybody loved using it—including parents pushing strollers, delivery people, and the elderly. There was a double set of doors and the ramp was typically set up on the left side. But nine and a half times out of ten, people, regardless of whether they were a part of one of the groups that I mentioned, would choose to use the ramp side. This was confirmation that when we put something in place to empower someone with a disability, we all end up benefitting from those implements.

The work I’m doing today, as executive director of the StopGap Foundation, and co-chair of the Accelerating Accessibility Coalition, is rooted in bringing our collective understanding about accessibility to a new level with forgiveness and understanding.

All of the stuff I’ve been talking about was the farthest thing off of my radar [when my accident happened]. So when we approach a business owner and get an answer along the lines of, “No, we don’t need a ramp because we don’t have any customers who use wheelchairs,” I can empathize. There’s an important need to bring people from where they’re at to a new place of knowing.

ADRIAN BLACKWELL: About two and a half years ago, with a number of other architects and architectural educators, I co-founded a group called Architects Against Housing Alienation.

We see alienation in a number of different ways. It’s an interesting word, because on one hand, it means to be separated from housing itself: Housing alienation is to be homeless. But there are also many other ways in which [we can understand housing alienation, including] people living in precarious housing, housing insecurity, overcrowding, and overpayment for housing, so people are house poor.

Alienation also refers to the exchange of things, the alienability of things. All of us believe it is the construction of housing as private property, and the exchangeability of private property, which makes housing unaffordable.

Finally, we think of alienation as a condition that is physical in space. It is the separation from real things, such as the natural world, the communities we inhabit, and even our own sense of creativity and ability to make our own housing and to participate in it as a creative space.

We reached out to people across the country to construct ten teams, each consisting of an activist, an architect, and an advocate. We thought that architects can’t solve this problem on their own and need to work with other experts in the field. Many of them are here in this room.

We presented the teams’ work at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture in an exhibition called “Not for Sale!” The work served as both ten demands for housing, and as ten detailed projects that worked out architectural solutions to these problems.

MARIE MCGREGOR PITAWANAKWAT: What brings me to the table? In a nutshell, the lived experience of homelessness. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would be homeless. Why? Because my original home community was Whitefish River First Nation and I grew up knowing—knowing—that we owned our own land; we didn’t have to buy it.

I’ve lived in thirty-nine different places in fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never thought about buying it. For that reason: We own it. So I rented, and when I’d come home I’d think, I’m home. I have the right to live on my homeland.

My parents gave me their old house. I got evicted from it by a jealous former sibling. Then I went out onto the land, and the first thing I did was put up a tent, because I knew I had the right to live on my homeland. I added onto it, and after taking a carpentry course, made it into a three-room tiny home.

The reserve’s band council found out about this and had me evicted. They didn’t want somebody [designing and building] things on their own.

Then I asked for membership in my mother’s home community, and was accepted. The band membership clerk said to me, “Welcome back home!” Those were the most powerful greeting messages I’ve heard in my life: Welcome back home.

Now I serve as the Chair of the National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network and also as a co-chair of the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network. How many other women are going through the same thing I did, but don’t have the voice or are too traumatized to say anything about it? This will happen again and again to other Indigenous women. What can I do to help?

CHANTAL CORNU: I’m [an architect and] the asset manager at the Neighborhood Land Trust, the charitable arm of the Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust, a community advocacy organization.

A land trust is something that holds land for a specific cause or purpose, and in our case it is affordable housing. We’ve built a small portfolio of properties, and secured funding to bring them up to a state of good repair.

As architects, we’ve developed tools to do those repairs in terms of materials, standards, and durability, looking at cost as well as longevity of materials. Then there’s the social procurement component: If we have all this money to do all this work, how do we not just spend it on materials? How do we keep that money as local as possible? What are the products we buy that have the most benefit to society on all levels?

We’re trying to do all of the things all at once. We’re in year three of our five-year plan, and we’re very busy. If you know any contractors or products that are local, you can refer them to us.

YA’EL SANTOPINTO: I’m a principal at ERA Architects. We do a lot of work with existing buildings, old and less old. So does our sister organization, the Tower Renewal Partnership, a nonprofit that gives a second life to our aging affordable housing stock. We really need to re-invest in it—and that just doesn’t mean in the stock, but also, in the communities.

A fire could displace a whole building overnight. But there are quieter, and in some ways, more insidious ways of losing housing, either through gentrification, mold, or conditions that we think are not acceptable. In some places in the world, this has been the solution: Older housing has got to go. Obviously that’s not possible [in Toronto]. We are at capacity.

How do we give second or third lives to the housing we have? Tower Renewal broadly looks at economic, social, and physical fabric pieces. I’ll talk mostly about physical fabric now.

There’s been a push around policy to improve carbon emissions in buildings, and that’s great. But what about the other pieces? What if we were to drive through comfort, quality, accessibility, and life safety, and actually say that carbon might be a happy by-product of that?

We soon realized, as architects asking these questions, that we were poorly equipped to answer what were actually financial, taxation, social, and policy questions. They are well beyond the scope of architecture. This is why we created that nonprofit, with a number of partners supporting and advising us.

JANNA LEVITT: One of [LGA Architectural Partners’] programs is the Alexandra Park regeneration. It represents a success story for the kind of housing, housing procurement, and outcomes that are possible with really knowledgeable public-sector clients.

We were hired to do the site’s townhouses after the master plan and site plan we completed. Toronto Community Housing (TCHC), [Canada’s largest social housing provider], had handed over control of about eighty percent of Alexandra Park to a developer. But we were hired to do the townhouses with TCHC, which was the key to success. Since we came in so late in the game, we said to TCHC, “Wait. We actually have to understand what’s going on in the community before we know how to design these townhouses effectively.”

We talked to them. There was great social infrastructure: a school, a community center, an outdoor pool, a library. But there was a lot of anxiety among the residents about gentrification and getting evicted. About not having the same community.

Together we came up with a strategy to make a market. It was a way to create a neutral place to provide funding and work for local residents. A place the community could visit that offered affordable food.

A lot of the commercial operations in the neighborhood were behind it. Anyone in the park could rent one of these market stalls in a container for ten dollars a month. It was supposed to last a couple of months, but it’s been going for about fifteen years.

We learned the community wanted beautiful brick detail like all the housing around them, so we incorporated it wherever we could. There was a fear of losing street culture: They were concerned about the introduction of roads. The site plan had no stoops, no places for hanging out, no gardens. Working closely with TCHC, we were able to manage the budget so we could introduce these things in the site plan. TCHC understood that the community needs to function well in order to be successful.

There are many other parts to this project. Overall, it’s an example of a great outcome that comes with a knowledgeable client.

MICHAEL PIPER: I’m an urban designer [and assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty] who is interested in how design thinking can contribute to policy change. I work on a project called ReHousing, a research initiative focused on converting single-family homes to multi-unit housing.

In 2018, the city [created] a group called Expanding Housing Options in Neighborhoods. They study how to create new housing and single-family neighborhoods. The argument being, of course, that a majority of our land supply is off-limits to new housing, which is a gross injustice for those seeking housing in our city that is becoming more and more expensive.

I taught a class with some of the group’s team and we collaborated on an exhibition [called “Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia”]. In conversations with them, one of the things we found was a gap in the policymaking: the geographic scale of what they were considering the city.

They were looking at the city center, thinking about how to densify there, while the majority of our low-rise neighborhoods are in the suburbs. It’s not a coincidence that a majority of our low-income residents now live there, outside the better-served areas.

In response to that geographic critique, we said, “Let’s look at the whole region and think about the different types of homes that exist there.” In that expanse of that geography, we identified thirteen of the most typical homes in the region.

With this, we studied four scales of renovation. We created low, medium, and high renovation-type projects. This is architecture as it could be taken on by a homeowner who is not super experienced. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. It’s about cost-effective approaches that are also pleasant. It’s not supposed to be bare minimum, but it’s also intentionally thoughtful about cost.

PAUL KARAKUSEVIC: I’m the founder of Karakusevic Carson Architects, based in London, [and architect, with ERA Architects, of the plan for Toronto’s Regent Park Phases 4 and 5]. What we’ve witnessed from our research, and from personal experience, is the power of working with residents and the local community, of which we’ve heard quite a lot today.

Historically, government, social, and state housing has been very top-down. It needs to be the reverse: ground up, resident-led, and enabled by the city or the state.

There’s been an over-reliance on the market over the last fifty years with the idea that the market will solve housing problems. We know that’s not fine.

More recently, when big housing estates have needed interventions, there’s been an easy fix: Go into partnership with the private sector to lead big transformational projects of unloved, under-maintained, slightly problematic states.

My provocation is that the public sector and the community can do it by themselves. Short of laying the bricks and putting up the frames, everything else can be done by the city or the state and their communities, and will achieve much better value.

As an example, I understand that in Toronto, developers will take a minimum of twenty-four percent [of a housing project’s cost] just to take a meeting. It then becomes quite awkward, because a quarter of the [funding] leaves with the private-sector partner.

That twenty-four percent pays for fifty to sixty percent of the affordable housing. And if that departs, then the quantum of affordability, the levels of rent, the percentage of market[-rate units] to [units with below-market], “social” [rents], is completely changed through that transaction.

So for me it’s all about keeping the decision-making and working with the residents. I sense that historically, Toronto has been a little bit top-down. I think that is changing, that there is now a lot of deep engagement and listening to residents. But just like London, there seems to be historical mistrust over the handling of public-housing estates. Hopefully these small steps can lead to better outcomes.


This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It is part of Untapped’s collaboration with Architecture and the Right to Housing, in which transcripts from the program’s roundtable discussions will be published to offer insights and candid conversations for your consideration.

The roundtable was organized by Kubey, founding director of the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab. Farha and Karakusevic gave keynote lectures in a related public program, moderated by Kubey.