On Thursday, October 18, 2012, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design will present Risky Business: Financing the City. Part of the Daniels Fora series, this event will explore the role that financial actors and designers play in the cycles of boom and bust that characterize our cities, and how these actors conceptualize risk and speculation as a city-building tool.
Throughout history, the fortunes of cities, great and small, have been tied to the way they gain access to resources and manage risk. In the western tradition, church, state, and market forces have all, at one time, conspired to effect what gets built, how its gets built, and for whom. In the modern industrial city, this process has accelerated, with private capital increasingly driving the building of cities within a global network of competition and investment.
If our goal of managing risk in cities is to create resilient places that are ecologically, socially and economically sustainable, what questions and criteria might we bring to bear to achieve this end? With collaboration between real estate developers and architects/urban designers playing an ever-increasing role in both defining markets and city building, it is time to take a closer look at how these issues are playing out today in Toronto and beyond.
Risky Business: Financing the City will feature a highly distinguished group of speakers with experience in risk assessment, financial investment, and city-building. Each panelist will bring a different perspective to the table, contributing to a lively – and timely – discussion, moderated by Richard Sommer, Dean of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
Speakers include: David Arthur, Managing Partner, North American Real Estate Investments, Brookfield Asset Management, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Brookfield Real Estate Opportunity Fund I & II; Peter Clewes, Principal Architect, architectsAlliance; Ron Dembo, Founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, and founder and former CEO of Algorithmics Incorporated; and Ira Gluskin, President and Chief Investment Officer at Gluskin Sheff + Associates Inc.
The event takes place from 6:30pm to 8:00 pm at the Isabel Bader Theatre, located at 93 Charles Street West in Toronto.
This is a public event, and admission is free. Tickets are required however, and are available through: http://riskybusinessfora.eventbrite.com