Author and educator Lesley Lokko, founder of the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, has stated recently in a lecture, that ‘what you know is largely dependent on where you are’ adding that thus ‘one’s world view is shaped as is ‘one’s place within it’, and advocating that one may ‘live through imagination.’ During the pandemic many conferences and meetings have showcased the participation of African urbanists and architects, in part as a result of a new impetus, combined with...

Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such...

With regard to the main question of the 3rd ACHS Biennial Conference, "What does heritage change?" the convenors of this session propose ethnographic evidence of contradictory spheres of value by showing how encounters between official rhetorics of heritage and borderline/illegal ethics and objects produce social change. In particular, they explore, through an inclusive approach, the social and political constructions of heritage by questioning the aesthetic dichotomies of beauty/ugliness, pr...

Directed by Tom Fassaert and presented by Marc Jacobs. ___ Doel, a Belgian village near the Dutch border, is disappearing quickly and deliberately. Not because of the four old nuclear reactors on its territory, but because the Flemish government decided that the village might block projects for new docks for the Antwerp harbour, plans developed since the 1960s. In the 21st century this process of officially encouraged depopulation is coming to an end: 2500 inhabitants i...

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognized. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how, from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, con...

De l’ère du Maire Drapeau et de ses interventions autoritaires sur le tissu urbain de Montréal dans les années 1960 et 1970, à l’instauration d’une démocratie municipale dans les années 1980 sous l’administration Doré, la population est de plus en plus sollicitée dans les grands débats concernant la transformation du patrimoine urbain de Montréal (Drouin 2005). Notons l’instauration en 2002 de l’Office de consultation publique de Montréal, tribune où les citoyens peuvent donner leurs avis ...

Directed by Christine Walley and Chris Boebel Presented by Michelle Stefano When the steel mills began closing on Chicago's Southeast Side, residents could feel the American Dream slipping away. Decades later, the loss of the steel industry has left permanent scars. The documentary film, Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story, is named for the highway exit number for Chicago’s old steel mill neighbourhoods and captures the feeling of a region passed over. In poignant and some...

The 1970s witnessed a flourishing of living experiments in space, place and community sharing broad ambitions to bring about transformed human social and interpersonal conditions, to re-envision relationships between people and the environment and ecology of their habitats, and to reject a growing mainstream vision of people as passive consumers in favour of a role as creative and adventurous agents of their own destinies. While some expressions of these experiments were non-spatial or intend...

We propose a rich and colorful inaugural evening, in a mythical place: Dawson Hall, behind St James United Church (1887-1889, Alexander Francis Dunlop, arch.), known as the "Montreal Methodist Cathedral" - with 2000 seats, it was the largest Methodist church in Canada when it was built. Designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1996, it escaped demolition in 1980 when it was classified as a historic monument, and then escaped extinction thanks to an ambitious restoration project, in...

In recognition of the fact that Canadian practitioners, scholars, and students of architecture think, work, and act globally, this session invites submissions that are geographically unconstrained. The session welcomes case studies or analyses that illuminate how the transnational flow of ideas, people, and capital has changed the global built environment, including the multi-directional nature of exchanges between the so- called developing and...

The cultural landscapes of migration are an inextricable part of Canada’s urban, social and national identity. However, recent debates about immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and the visibility of cultural symbolisms raise controversial, often polarized public opinions. Policies of migration have accentuated divisive interpretations and legitimized isolation among multiple cultural communities, instead of promoting dialogue. This session...

Major parks have been part of the urban identity of Canadian cities for more than 150 years. From Pleasure Grounds to reformist and recreational parks as well as exhibition parks, parks have assumed different built forms over time and have had a wide range of vocations and uses. In recent years, a number of international publications have reflected on parks from the point of view of history, cultural diversity, good practices in terms of design...

This paper documents and describes a building typology that once dotted the shorelines of Lake Erie’s southern shore: the small, seasonal cottage. Known colloquially as the “worker’s cottage”, these modest structures are typically tiny, one-story light-framed buildings, uninsulated, built on piers, with stripped-down interior finishes. This humble spatial typology, which provides the most rudimentary, undressed type of interior spaces for a life that is lived largely outdoors, is found les...

We offer a unique experience for the closing dinner of this conference in Montreal, in the former U.S. pavilion of Expo'67 - the most popular of the exhibition, with 5.3 million visitors: the "geodesic dome" designed by architect Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) with the collaboration of Shoji Sadao. The self-supporting steel honeycomb structure, covered with a polymer skin, was burned down in 1976 and redeveloped in the 1990s, according to the plans of architect Éric Gauthier, into an envir...