Maggie Low & Keisha Maloney, University of British Colombia
As local governments recognise that they should be working towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, particularly as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is ratified around the world, the question of how urban planning process can enable reconciliation efforts in cities remain. This project aims to initiate the design of a transition from ineffective engagement towards reciprocal engagement process to illuminate how municipal planners should be engaging and consulting with First Peoples on urban interventions in the settler-colonial city of Toronto, Canada.
To meet this aim, the project objectives are to:
- ground truth displacement trends of First Nations from their land (now known as Toronto) through archival research
- employ a qualitative multi-method research process including archival research, the development of counter-cartographies, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups tha taim to bridge the divide between Indigenous planning principles and colonial planning institutions
- synthesize this multi-methods research projcess into an “Engagement Manifesto” for urban planners to cosult when initating urban interventions.
These objectives bolster the capacity of local governance actors to transition from their often-times tokenistic engagement processes, and towards equitable, welcoming, and future-focused engagement with First Peoples.
The key aim of the project is to offer municipal planners a greater sense of how to transition towards more reconciliatory and reciprocal urban planning engagement and consultation, the main output will be an “Engagement Manifesto”.
