Duane Elverum and Janet Moore: How can community-university partnerships reinvent the city and the classroom?

Duane Elverum and Janet Moore are the co-founders and co-directors of CityStudio, an experimentation and innovation hub for the City of Vancouver where staff, students and community members design and execute projects that improve the city.

CityStudio’s central mission is to innovate and experiment with the ways cities are co-created, while teaching students the skills needed to collaborate on real projects in Vancouver with city staff and community stakeholders.

These projects improve the city and enrich the neighbourhoods, making the city more livable, joyful and sustainable.  Projects relate to topics that include green economy, transportation, green buildings, clean water, clean air, climate leadership, local food, lighter footprint, access to nature and zero waste.

According to Elverum, the program has engaged more than 3,000 students, 100 faculty members and 60 Vancouver city staff with more than 75,000 hours of skills training and innovation.

Elverum and Moore came to Concordia to share their experiences as part of the speaker series, The Future of the University and the Future of Learning. Their presentation, “How can community-university partnerships re-invent the city and the classroom?” was organized by Concordia’s Office of Community Engagement.

Duane Elverum is CityStudio Co-Director and Co-Founder. Innovations in Education in Cities, Design and Sustainability, and an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Centre for Dialogue.

As a designer, sustainability educator and co-founder of CityStudio Vancouver, Duane Elverum aims to design innovations in education, cities and sustainability. CityStudio connects students directly to urban issues through co-creation of real-world projects with city staff on the ground.

He has taught at university for 19 years, first teaching at the UBC School of Architecture where he created and managed the design/build program, and recently holding the positions of assistant professor in Design, assistant dean for Foundation and academic advisor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

In addition to co-directing CityStudio, he is a visiting professor and associate with SFU’s Centre for Dialogue, as well as a past board director for the eatART Foundation and Modo the Car Coop. He juried Prefab 2020, an international architectural competition, as well as B.C. Hydro’s Invent the Future competition.

An offshore sailor, he has undertaken six offshore crossings of the North and South Pacific, most recently with OceanGybe’s Plastics Research Expedition. He has cycled extensively in the Alps and the Pyrenees.

Elverum holds a bachelor’s degree with honours in architecture from the University of British Columbia.

Source: CityStudio website

Janet Moore is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of CityStudio – an experimentation and innovation hub for the City of Vancouver where city staff, experts and students from six universities and colleges co-create projects that support city programs.

Moore is an associate professor and director of the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University (SFU). She has imagined, designed and facilitated intensive, interdisciplinary courses and programs that focus on dialogue, community engagement, group process, divergent thinking, and urban sustainability.

She has engaged deeply in a number of innovative sustainability education projects in Vancouver, including university engagement on sustainability curriculum at UBC where she completed her doctoral dissertation “Recreating the University from within: Sustainability and Transformation in Higher Education” with the Department of Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education. Her postdoctoral work focused on The Learning City Project at Great Northern Way Campus – an inter-institutional project working towards integrating real world issues into the university classroom.

Her interests include transdisciplinary higher education, transformative learning, social entrepreneurship, social innovation and organizational change in higher education. She is passionate about teaching and learning, facilitating dialogue and participatory processes. She keeps busy riding bikes, walking her dog Magic and being outside in Vancouver with her two kids.

Source: CityStudio website