Cities Alive: Climate Positive Design Workshop

At the 2024 Cities Alive Conference in Toronto, Climate Positive Design’s Pamela Conrad delivered a keynote address alongside Mayor Olivia Chow, highlighting the urgent role of design in addressing the climate crisis.

Following a technical lecture, Conrad led a hands-on Climate Positive Design Workshop in collaboration with Arup Toronto, engaging more than 40 professionals from landscape architecture, engineering, and planning. Using the Pathfinder app, participants were tasked with reimagining a site in an underserved community, focusing on reducing carbon impacts while enhancing ecological and social resilience. Despite their professional expertise, the exercise proved eye-opening: teams quantified the climate performance of their concepts in real time, uncovering new insights into the impact of their design decisions.

The outcomes—creative, inspiring, and highly practical—demonstrated how even experienced practitioners can expand their approach when given the tools to measure and prioritize climate-positive solutions. The workshop not only deepened professional understanding of decarbonization in practice, but also showcased the potential of design-led collaboration to drive meaningful climate action in communities.