Cities for Seven Generations: Recognizing, Reconciling and Reimagining our past, present, and future in Canadian urban centres

How do we make our cities better? A google search will return 2.6 billion results in half a second. A scan of those results reveals multiple ‘top 10’ lists—maybe an article on how to revitalize Main Street. These solutions lack systems-level interventions, which this research proposes is necessary to move beyond ‘top 10’ solutions that merely add a façade over inequitable systems and policy, and over infrastructure and resource-usage that damages our earth. This research focuses on disrupting how the interrelations of culture, race, gender, economics, and politics affect the level of benefit someone experiences in a system (e.g., city policy), and aims to challenge assumptions inherent in existing systems.

The current juncture of global social, economic, and environmental crises offers a unique opportunity to rethink how we live, and to reconsider the design of our urban centres. Previously, I reimagined a city block in Vancouver, designing a carbon-neutral women’s shelter and social enterprise that shared economic resources, social supports, and ‘green’ energy with an adjacent Longhouse. My current PhD research imagines the impact of this synergy at a city-wide scale—What if buildings included free social purpose space? What if adjacent structures shared green energy infrastructure? What if…?

This research will co-create a decision framework enmeshed within Indigenous worldviews to offer a way to reimagine our cities. This framework (“Cities for Seven Generations Model”) is based on four key social and worldview concepts: place, language, governance, and social cohesion. This research will focus on commonalities across multiple worldviews, and research alongside urban Indigenous communities to co-design localized adaptations. The Cities for Seven Generations Model prioritizes Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing while being compatible with western ones. It will inform cooperative, culturally-appropriate, and diverse approaches towards equitable decision making in city planning, governance, policy, and resource allocation.