Jason Keenan Prince, MUP, OUQ

Biography

Jason Prince, an urban planner, has two decades of experience in community economic development, pedestrian-oriented planning, and non-profit housing development. As a student at McGill University, Prince worked to establish Montreal’s first multi-university student housing cooperative, the Pink Triangle Student Housing Cooperative. After working in Cape Breton with a pioneer in community business and in Canada’s Arctic as a practitioner of CED, Prince returned to Montreal to act as executive support to the Fonds foncier communautaire Benny Farm, a non-profit community effort to buy and renovate over 300 apartments in inner-city Montreal with a view to creating Montreal’s first community land trust. Later, Prince helped structure a community-owned geo-thermal energy non-profit, Green Energy Benny Farm, serving three community housing projects at Benny Farm (Energie verte Benny Farm).

Between 2008 and 2013, Prince headed up a research-action project out of McGill University’s School of Urban Planning in collaboration with community groups concerned with the imminent impact of McGill’s new mega-hospital in their nieghbourhoods. The research action project also fought the business-as-usual replacement plan for the Turcot Interchange, one of the largest public infrastructure projects in North America, at the time.

Prince worked to shape Montreal’s first “community benefits agreement” signed with the MUHC in 2012, while working with coalitions at the local and regional levels to change how Montrealers move in their city, pushing for quieter, safer neighbourhoods andactively fighting provincial government plans for new inner-city highway intersection at the Turcot Yards.

Prince co-edited a bilingual book on the Turcot struggle, published just 3 days before public hearings began on this controversial project, in 2009: Montréal at the Crossroads: Superhighways, the Turcot and the Environment, published by Black Rose Books.

Prince’s second book, co-edited with Judith Dellheim, called Free Public Transport, And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators, was published in October 2017 by Black Rose Books, with financial support from CUPFA, just in time to influence municipal elections in Quebec. A second expanded edition will be published in the spring of 2018, with new chapters on France, Poland, China and Germany.

Prince currently teaches the social economy and public policy, part-time, at Concordia University’s School of Community and Public Affairs, while also coaching non-profit businesses as a social economy agent with PME MTL Centre Ville. Jason Prince has two children, aged 10 and 11.

Montréal at the Crossroads: Superhighways, the Turcot, and the Environment.  edited by Pierre Gauthier, Jochen Jaeger, and Jason Prince. Black Rose Books. Montreal, 2009. ISBN : 9781551643434

Book Review: https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/viewFile/347/293

Free Public Transport, And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators. Edited by Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince.  Black Rose Books. Montreal, 2017.

Newspaper review: http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/whither-montreal-transit-new-book-calls-on-municipal-parties-for-free-rides