Jennifer Keesmaat on the Future of Cities

Are our cities a reflection of the people who live in them? Are they built for people? As our economy starts to recover, will our cities? Or are these sprawling urban jungles built for a different time, retrofitted as our needs have changed?

Is now a good time to rethink the city?

Our guest this episode, Jennifer Keesmaat, is passionate about creating places where people flourish. She was Toronto’s chief planner for five years and has been named one of the “most powerful people in Canada” by MacLean’s and one of the “most influential” by Toronto Life. Currently, she’s the CEO of The Keesmaat Group, senior-level urbanists working to find solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

She joins us to talk about how our cities will emerge from the pandemic, and how the changes we’re seeing can be important lessons in how we navigate our communities. We talk population density, resiliency, planning, and sudden changes we’ve had to make. What changes should we keep? We also talk about how the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in our cities, especially for racialized and vulnerable communities.

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Jennifer Keesmaat

CEO, The Keesmaat Group; former chief city planner of Toronto