Reza Pourvaziry's Speech at the 3rd Collingwood World Summit (CWS3)

The speech given by Reza Pourvaziry, Chair of UEF, Co-director of the World Urban Pavilion in Regent Park - Powered by Daniels, at the 3rd Collingwood World Summit (#CWS3).

Dear ladies, gentlemen and distinguished guests,

I appreciate you all for joining us at the 3rd Collingwood World Summit: Habitat in Towns. As many of you know we are in Urban October. Towns and small cities are important in the conversation about sustainable urban development and achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

I am pleased to address you all today from the World Urban Pavilion in Regent Park – Powered by Daniels. Known as the Pavilion, this is a space for you. A space for global knowledge exchange, sustainable urban development, and best practices. I hope you all leverage the Pavilion to share ideas, learn from each other, and achieve your sustainable urban development objectives.

I want to take this opportunity to deeply appreciate The Daniels Corporation to establish and support the Pavilion. I recently received some unfortunate news, that the founder of the Daniels Corporation, John H. Daniels recently passed last week. We will forever remember his name and his contributions to building something better for all. His name and his legacy is part of the Pavilions story. its history.

The Town of Collingwood has been a strong partner of the Urban Economy Forum and is not only leading this dialogue but also leading through actions. This global summit would not have been as successful without Collingwood and we hope to continue this wonderful and synergistic collaboration.

Step by step, we have worked together to put this global summit about towns and small cities on the map of important urban conferences across the globe. This year, the main theme is on Housing and Sustainable Finance.

This is an important conversation as we are now in the decade in action. As many of you know, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is one of the founders of the Pavilion. Their collaboration is important for the Pavilion and for us here today, because we are looking for those innovative approaches to sustainable urban development that are transformative. We look forward to hearing more from CMHC later today and we hope to create a pilot project in Collingwood to demonstrate how towns can lead the conversation for sustainable urban development and the SDGs.

We hope that throughout the conference, we can identify some key areas to establish pilot projects in towns and small cities. Understand the innovations, the challenges that need to be overcome and how we can implement these programs. We want to take these lessons to the Pavilion. I want to encourage you all to share your best practices with us. We have been working with Harvard University to identify, collect, assess, and catalogue ‘made in Canada’ urban innovations. This is part of the Pavilion’s analytical framework to help build Canada’s profile for urban SDGs.

Sustainable Housing is a critical topic in many of our towns and cities today. It is important that we work together to create a new initiative with new approaches to facilitate an urban transformation in our towns and small cities. But we must not forget the urban identify of our town that creates a feeling of closeness and home. Technology and urban growth and density is changing many things, but how can we blend these emerging challenges to create new solutions for habitat and housing. We must consider the contextual needs of our towns to maintain the urban fabric while also recognizing the need to identify creative solutions to generate financial resources. The future opportunities and the social and environmental impacts through urban and financial sustainability is significant. Central governments must acknowledge the importance of investing in our towns and small cities to facilitate sustainable growth. This can also help to leverage the private sector and other financial institutions to invest in our towns.

The Centralization of our current system inhibit the autonomy and authority of our localities. I hope this will also be discussed during the two-days

Towns also were required to absorb new people as they migrated from larger cities to towns. This also presents new opportunities for towns and small cities to generate a new tax basis and new economic opportunities. But towns must recognize this opportunity to encourage and embrace changes in our globe.

I wish you all a great two-days conferences, I know I will gain many insights and knowledge from our excellent and expert speakers from across the globe.

As a final note, I want to emphasize the importance to create a network of town leaders and establish a secretariat to lead and advocate the voice of town leaders at the national and the international stages. We must balance the distribution of opportunities between our metropolitan city centers and towns. This must even go all the way to the United Nations system.

We will launch our network of town leaders and we encourage the Mayors to join us in this conversation and help to form this mayoral network of towns. We look forward to finalizing this in the coming weeks.

Again, I appreciate the Town of Collingwood for all your great work and I hope to see you all in person for the next summit.