T5 - Cross Country Check-up : The Pressing Issues of Canadian Urbanism

The center of the room is never fixed. Neither is the conversation.

This session runs as a fishbowl: a small circle of experts at the center, working through real problem statements out loud, while the wider room listens in and lines up its own questions. Every seat at the center carries a clock. When your time is up, you leave, and the seat sits empty until someone new claims it. The conversation belongs to whoever's willing to sit down.

Potential topics on the table: true resiliency, housing, transportation, and more. Register and add the topic you care about most. The room will build itself around what the group brings.

This isn't a panel that talks at you. It's a structure built to keep making room.

Speakers

Moderator : Eric Schertzer
Associate, Cities, Planning & Design, Arup

Eric is a versatile designer and passionate urbanist, fueled by curiosity and creativity. With a background in urban design and landscape architecture, he is committed to helping cities create vibrant public spaces and context-responsive urban strategies, particularly focusing on streets, public spaces, and urban districts. Eric is dedicated to developing design and planning solutions that aim to make our living and working environments safer, more connected, and dynamic.

Geeti Silwal
Americas Cities, Planning and Design Lead, Arup

Geeti Silwal is Arup’s Cities, Planning and Design Lead for the Americas. Geeti brings vision and design leadership that establishes the foundation of transformative changes for livable and sustainable environments in cities. She strongly believes that urban designers hold the responsibility to inspire integrated, multi-purpose design solutions of innovation and beauty that create healthy and inclusive cities. Building and revitalizing communities, she lays deep emphasis on placemaking, regenerative design, equitable accessibility, and social justice. Her experience covers a vast breadth of scales, including regional high-density transit-focused planning, downtown revitalization, waterfront redevelopments, urban mixed-use infill projects, research/innovation district planning, and public realm enhancement along heavily challenged infrastructure corridors.

Sylvain Ducas
OUQ Emeritus Member and CIP member

Sylvain Ducas has worked as an urban planner for more than 40 years, first as a consultant in the private sector for nearly 10 years. He worked for the City of Montreal, from 1987 to 2018, where he held various leadership positions in urban planning and urban project management and served as Director of Urban Planning for the City of Montréal from 2013 to 2018. Among his accomplishments, he oversaw the preparation of official urban planning documents such as master plans, urban policy frameworks, regional and sector plans, and led teams responsible for major urban development projects, including the MIL Campus project.

Since 2018, he has continued his career as a strategic advisor, both in Québec and in Latin America, providing expertise to public institutions and private firms in metropolitan planning, sustainable mobility, and urban project management. Since 2019, he has notably supported the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) in the development of major public transit plans and projects in the Montréal region.
Sylvain Ducas is an Emeritus Member of the Ordre des urbanistes du Québec (OUQ) and a member of the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP). He has also been a member of CanU from 2013 to 2018.

Nastaran Moradinejad
CSLA BCSLA AALA LEED AP
Director/Principal, PFS Studio

Nastaran Moradinejad is a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and a Director / Principal at PFS Studio where she is recognized for her communication and project management skills. She is also a versatile designer who brings her experience in both architecture and landscape architecture to her PFS Studio projects. Since joining the firm in 2006, Nastaran has contributed her expertise to a variety of projects with a wide range of design requirements from conceptual site specific design and detailing to large-scale planning. She takes a keen interest in ecological systems and innovative ways to integrate them with site design. Her interests are in multi-disciplinary, technical projects and projects requiring custom solutions to project requirements.
Nastaran has led PFS Studio teams to realize numerous complex, challenging projects in evolving urban contexts and is currently focused on managing some of the firm’s largest and most high-visibility projects in the public realm.