Alec Balasescu and Jonathan Bleackley of Civic Renewal Lab and Jeremy Waller host a role playing and improv workshop that will explore Vancouver’s development, housing, and affordability policies.

Guided by the question, "for whom is the city built?" and borrowing from similar policy based theatre work, participants will be lead in acting out the impact of key housing policies and policy questions, with an interest towards helping residents understand the stakes, opinions and goals of the various players involved, and why finding solutions can be difficult.

Actors will be assigned diverse roles such as homeowner, renter, real estate agent, foreign investor, contractor banker. They will be provided with a current or proposed policy and be asked to act out the implications of that policy. The eventual goal of Improv-ing the City is to help participants better understand the complexity of the issues, what is causing the real estate crisis, and identify what policy changes Vancouver could adopt moving forward to address the problem.

This workshop session is one in a series of four Design Sundays, and can be experienced as such or as a standalone event.

Workshop Leaders

Alec (Alexandru) Balasescu, Ph.D. is an adjunct professor, urban studies, SFU is an anthropologist, writer, curator and author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills. Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (ZETA Books, 2007). He publishes extensively in international journals covering interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to urbanism, design, material culture and the body. His research has received support from the Center for German and European Studies, UC Berkeley; the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the British Library; the French Institute of Research in Iran; and the Open Society Institute.

Jonathan Bleackley, MES (Master of Environmental Studies) focuses on the intersection between public policy and public engagement, or how people come together to articulate, design and create the structures on which we collectively and individually build our world. He is also a keen environmentalist who has recently developed a secret fascination with economics theory. By day he conducts research and strategic engagement for NGOs and progressive political groups.

Jeremy Waller is a director, writer, dramaturge, and producer for the theatre. His work focuses on tensions between stylization and inexpressible reality, individual trauma and hegemony, ethnography and fiction. His created and directed works, The Dark Between, Trunk, and Trunk Oscillator have been produced across Canada and presented in international festivals, including the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver. He a founding member and the artistic director of Craning Neck Theatre, and associate artist at Theatre Conspiracy. Most recently he directed and co-devised Theatre Conspiracy's mixed reality piece Foreign Radical which won the Critics Choice for Innovation Jessie Award and was dramaturge on Conspiracy's Rio Tinto Alcan winning show Extraction. He is a member of Playwrights Guild of Canada.