My Future Home Reports speak to the future of housing: community, justice, and sustainability

TORONTO, ONTARIO (November 1, 2022) Future Cities Canada, the national cross-sector initiative led by Evergreen and designed to accelerate innovation to transform cities, presents its 2022 report series on its My Future Home workshops. We will start with a summary report – More than Four Walls: Personal Perspectives on the Future of Housing. 

The My Future Home workshops engaged a total of 130 youth, newcomers and older adults over seven events to share their individual and lived experience and insights, a personal perspective often not integrated into housing policy decisions. They were asked to imagine their future, including an exploration of their aspirations and the needs that housing solutions will have to meet in the year 2040.

In the year 2040, what types of dwellings and environments will we call “home”? Will we all be living in smart homes with automated technologies that anticipate our every need? Or perhaps in communal housing where we have our own bedroom, but share a kitchen, living room, and outdoor space with a broader community of individuals? Or maybe we’ll be living in a completely new way – either underground or in outer space. These are just a few of the ideas we heard!

We also heard that the following factors are important to individuals:

• Long-term housing security and affordability;
• Proximity and access to community, community resources, and to green space;
• Control over their own space, a space which supports autonomy and independence; and
• A sense of physical and psychological safety and personal wellbeing.

From Lois Lindsay, Chief Program Officer, Evergreen: “When we think about housing, home and community in Canada, what can lived experience tell us about where we are now and where we should be going in the future? Are we headed in the right direction, or do we have to change course? These are some of the questions Evergreen posed when creating the My Future Home Forum workshop series. In this report, we are thrilled to share what we have learned.” 

After the release of the More than Four Walls summary, we will release seven more reports, each providing an overview of the insights gained from the seven individual events held as part of this work. We will start with the newcomers reports, followed by the youth reports, and will finish with the release of the older adults reports.

For more details and to register for reports, visit

https://futurecitiescanada.ca/portal/our-focus/my-future-home-session-reports/

The My Future Home sessions and report were funded by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Meridian Credit Union.