Panel Discussion: Toronto's Urban / Nature (Ab)uses

About artist Gillian Iles's , writer Rui Pimenta describes: "The dualities present in the exhibition speak to a world in division, while capturing a suspended moment in which outcomes are yet to be determined, and an opportunity for something different or better remains in the air."

To explore "a world in division," this panel discussion focuses on the fluidity of urban spaces in Toronto. Rapid development and expansion have resulted in uses/abuses of the environment and reduced the availability of free-use third spaces. This domination of nature and commodification of third spaces, leaves inhabitants with less leisure and places greater pressure on the unhoused. What opportunities exist to advocate for adaptive, sustainable approaches to managing these ever-evolving spaces?

Moderator: Shawn Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (2017), The Trouble With Brunch: Work Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (2014) and Full Frontal TO: Exploring Toronto’s Vernacular Architecture (2012). The updated and expanded edition of his first book, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, was published in 2024. He’s a Toronto Star columnist, civics instructor at University of Toronto, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College where he was also a 2011-2012 Southam Journalism Fellow. Shawn is a co-founder of Spacing, a magazine about Canadian cities and urban issues.

Panelists:

Jennifer Bonnell is a professor in the Department of History at York University, where she teaches courses in Canadian, environmental and public history. She is the author or co-editor of four books, including Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia (2023) and Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (2024, 2nd ed.). Her current book project, Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Honeybees, Environmental Change, and Beekeeper Advocacy in the Great Lakes Region, will be published by the University of Washington Press’s Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series.

Maggie Helwig (she/they) is a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, and is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, which was awarded the 2025 Toronto Book Award, and Girls Fall Down (2008), which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and chosen as the One Book Toronto in 2012. Helwig is a long-time social justice activist, and also an Anglican priest, and has been the rector of the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields since 2013.

Bryan Mark is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. He is an urban geographer who studies contemporary urban cultures. Mark is interested in consumption, neighbourhood gentrification, and the mediatization of place. His SSHRC-funded doctoral research examines the urban geographies of social media influencers and algorithmic content curation in Toronto. Mark's work has also traced the retail gentrification of Ossington Avenue in west downtown Toronto through a cultural and digital critique of an ice-cream boutique.

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Host or Publisher Koffler Centre of the Arts