Meet Naama Blonder

Urban planner, architect, and co-founder of Smart Density

Naama is fiercely independent, someone who should have been around 20 years ago when Toronto was at a crossroads of how it would manage rapid growth and development. She’s not only fun to talk to, but intelligent, creative, and realistic in her approach to “Smart Density.”

Watch what she does next – and over the long term – to shape this city, and the planning and architectural professions. Read on for her thoughts on how planners and architects communicate – and what we can be doing better at a time when affordable housing and climate resiliency are front and centre.

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Naama Blonder - urban planner, architect, co-founder of Smart Density in Toronto.

Lisa: You've done so much to enliven the public conversation about really important subjects in the city and make them relevant and interesting to all kinds of people, not just planners, like on the “missing middle,” which you've discussed in your own videos and webinars. How have you done this?

Naama: I moved here [to Toronto] eight years ago. And at first I thought I was saying things that are really, really obvious. For example, raising your kids in an apartment was a no-brainer. And then I slowly started realizing that there's a lot of stigma against that. At the same time, it's kind of a chicken and egg because maybe there's not a demand for it: people think that if they have kids, they have to move to the suburbs, or buy a house – but today, you can't really buy a house in the city, therefore you think you have to move to the suburbs.

I grew up in a really big four-bedroom apartment that was probably the size of a house, but it was in a building, in a kind of downtown. In Toronto, I just started saying things that were very, very obvious to me. Then I realized people are telling me how much this is needed, and how revolutionary it is to say these things in a city like Toronto.

Then I started recording these really short videos about things that we found interesting in our planning work – things like view corridors, a heritage tool the City has. And slowly these ideas gained momentum, after being very factual about them. It wasn't about my opinion, it wasn't about me taking the stage. I started stating things that are more about the social consequences of our planning tools. I gained the confidence that what I'm saying and the platform I’m using to say it is very responsive.

Lisa:  You’ve been in Toronto for eight years, and you have a good sense of the kinds of things we talk about and maybe even getting more comfortable talking about. What are your observations about how local city builders communicate their work to different audiences? And do you think they're doing some things well? Do you think there are things that need more work?

Naama: We can totally judge it from the outcomes. You are asking me how city builders communicate their work. Let me answer it from the other side. Before I started Smart Density, I worked at Urban Strategies. I went to the Mirvish redevelopment open house, and I think 600 people showed up – it was massive. And then they said, the mic is open for questions, and I saw how long the line was. We started hearing what people were concerned about.

[As they spoke] I realized there's this huge gap between what people know, and what people think they know, and what people are commenting on. With Mirvish, we were talking about this massive piece of land, steps away from the subway. And people are asking, why can’t it all be a park? Why can’t it be four storeys? Why do we need to change things in the Annex? I heard people saying it’s not appropriate to the context.

One of the things that I wanted to say is that in this case the context is not relevant to the location because it’s on a subway line. Maybe you're not in downtown Toronto per se, but this is a pretty central location. When you look at it from the sidelines, and you hear what people are saying, it’s clear that we don't communicate policy, values, missions very well, because you see the outcome, you see how it is reflected in our work and on the public perception. You see that something is missing if these are the things that people are commenting on.

Lisa: So, do you have any suggestions for what you think planners should be doing differently?

Naama: I think it starts at an earlier stage. When you get to the politicians and NIMBYs and all of that, it's probably too late.

I think it's a lot about how the government communicates. So, I'm just taking one thing as an example: I was at a council meeting in June, and people were objecting to a hotel in King West. And honestly, where else would you put a hotel? People were objecting to the height and the use, but the height and the use were as-of-right. The councillors started educating them, but essentially, it was a huge waste of time. For everyone.

And also, the media has a role in it. A lot of the time, the media and the councillors are fuelled by those voices, like they are just waiting for another developer to come in with an application they can use for their own political gain. I’m saying this is the broader context to it, that it starts with government and municipal players, but it's much more than that.

Lisa: It sounds like you're really talking a need for a broader cultural shift and a deeper understanding, or a different understanding, about how cities work and the role of planning in that.

Naama: Exactly. People love saying, for example, the character of the neighbourhood should take priority. But we're talking about a city that is going to house millions of people. It's not going to be a village.

Or the words we choose, for example: you hear certain words and they become this cultural stamp. Take shadows – it became this thing, it seemed legit at some point to talk about this, this tangible thing. So now when community members don't want any change, any new development near them, they use shadows. But this just become a thing we inherited from one development application to another to allow us to complain about it. So shadow, character, village – all of these words are just a disguise for the truth, which is that people don't want anything to change in their neighbourhood.

If you live in a house with a backyard that’s steps away from a subway station that cost everyone billions of dollars, you can actually dictate that others won't be able to live next to you. So much power, but we don't communicate even the basics, like that we have policy that not only encourages, but requires, a certain density of jobs and houses.

And when I say houses, I mean housing, transit, and so on. When people come in and object to that, and are writing these most beautiful letters saying “We are not NIMBYs, you know, but we were not consulted with and we are shocked that something was converted to affordable housing, this is not the right place to have intensification.” And they say, “It’s not about affordable housing or being NIMBYs, it’s about the shadow impacts.” And then we’re back to using the same words over and over to shut people out.

Lisa: In a more tangible sense, what kind of communication skills do you rely on the most in your practice?

Naama: What I really like are videos that are very informative. The fact that they are one-sided means that people can actually educate themselves. With a video, there's the potential to actually change minds, like about something coming from the architect and the developer, and especially when the setting is friendly.

In my videos, I talk a lot about general things, not about a specific site. So, my videos have the potential to change minds. It’s super visual. Other communication tools, like the report, are important, but are also a checkbox. Essentially, the reports that the City requires are not public-friendly in any way. Members of the public would not open a planning rationale and enjoy reading it.

Lisa: Is there anything in particular that you now know about how to communicate some of your planning or design ideas that you wish you had known earlier, when you were starting out?

Naama: I think we, as professionals, and especially when you hear architects talk… maybe at some point in architecture school, it does something to our brains. But it's like, we forgot how other people talk.

There are the simple, simple, simple things that we take for granted. I'll give an example. There was a beautiful model, showing what we called soft sites and future redevelopment. They built this model with glass, midrise buildings all along Bloor Street to show future redevelopment. The public came in and people were saying, “Oh my God, you bought all these properties. Now you're building all of these?” And that was not the intent.

We take for granted the tools we use in our community, between one professional and another. The public doesn't know how to read plans, while we’ve been doing it over a decade. People are super sensitive about it – and they should be. They look at a plan or a model and point to it and say, this is my home. Sometimes, unfortunately, it's quite shocking how much we forget that it's really hard for them to orient themselves in a plan, and even more so at a neighbourhood scale.

Lisa: I've seen that so many times, where people are staring at a line on a map, and they don't know what it means, they can't make sense of it. And it's something that the planner or the comms people have taken a lot of time to think about and then it just doesn't go over. What is the number one thing you think they’re doing wrong?

Naama: Architects are wearing their architect persona, you know. Now I'm the architect, so I need to use sophisticated words that people expect me to use, so ego is the result. You have an audience who understands nothing of what you just said.

I’m also amazed how much people don't read more than they do. I find that so often, people don't read their emails completely. If you ask people more than two things in an email, they won't always respond to all of the things you asked. We were talking about having a disclaimer on renderings and thought, let’s just put it in an intro so we won't have to repeat it so many times. But we have found that people won't always read the intro, so this disclaimer has to be on every rendering.

I think people don't read as much. That's why I love video so much, because it's more of an informal way of communicating. I'm not asking them to read anything, I'm asking them to listen and watch. And I think that's a very big difference. There’s a gap in knowledge between what we expect and what we enable. Canada is very much a leader in community engagement, but with this kind of empowerment, we’ve lost control. Because if we're giving members of the communities so much power that they actually can dictate and determine if something is going to be built too tall or whatever, they are making almost professional decisions without the professional tools. That's a problem. But I have found that video is a powerful way to educate audiences and it has so much potential to improve the planning process.

Lisa: Thank you, Naama!

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