Bousfield Lecture Presented by Renée Gomes

Renée Gomes kicked off the 2024–2025 Bousfield Lecture Series with her talk, After the Condo Boom: Confronting a New Era of City Building in Toronto, exploring the shifting dynamics of urban development in the city. The lecture was hosted by the Department of Geography & Planning on March 31 at University College. Click here to view photos from the event.

Event Abstract

Toronto is contending with a housing crisis in the context of fiscal constraints, market and political uncertainty, and a rapidly changing legislative framework. Building on lessons learned from her experiences in both the public and private sectors, Renée Gomes will reflect on the uncomfortable truths, unintended consequences, and areas of opportunity to be addressed by the planning and development community if we are to rise to the challenge of sustaining Toronto as a livable city in an uncertain future.

About Renée Gomes

Renée Gomes is a Registered Professional Planner with over twenty years of city-building experience, including leadership positions in the public and private sectors. Her career includes developing regeneration frameworks for cities in England’s North West, and playing a key role in establishing inclusive, mixed-use communities in Toronto’s West Don Lands and East Bayfront districts. She has championed a range of initiatives to secure private-sector investment and advance master plan implementation across Toronto’s waterfront, and she has led numerous complex development initiatives in Greater Toronto Area, including establishing frameworks for the delivery of over 10 million square feet of mixed-use development and associated community benefits.

Renée is a past Board Director of Evergreen, a national non-profit, and the former Chair of Mission Advancement for the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto District Council. She has been a lecturer in the University of Toronto’s Program in Planning for over ten years. Her involvement in city-building initiatives across all sectors has broadened her perspective and strengthened her commitment to establishing commercially successful real estate projects that achieve public policy objectives.