December 2, 2025 by
Department of Geography & Planning
Joshua Barndt and Kuni Kamizaki delivered a joint Bousfield Lecture titled Community Land Trusts: Building Local Power for Systems Change, exploring how Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are growing across Canada as community-led responses to displacement and housing inequity, with a focus on the history, current challenges, and future potential of Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust.
Event Description
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are gaining momentum across Canada as community-led strategies for anti-displacement, affordable housing preservation, economic democracy, and racial justice. This transformative potential is promising, but less is understood about how CLTs can turn these possibilities into concrete practice, while navigating numerous contradictions and structural constraints.
This two-part lecture examines the history and future potential of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT)—Toronto’s first grassroots CLT, established in 2012 but which now stewards 86 community-owned properties—to reflect on its evolution, emergent challenges, and explore theoretical and practical ideas for how the CLT could further contribute to social and economic transformation.
View the Full Event Album
Part I – Possibilities of PNLT: On place, scale, and property
Drawing from his Metcalf Foundation Fellowship project, Kuni Kamizaki traces the historical genesis and development of PNLT. His talk focuses on three dimensions of action: 1) mobilizing the CLT for community-based planning and organizing; 2) redefining the meaning of scaling as political mobilization beyond asset growth; and 3) grappling with the entanglement with the property regime in the settler colonial context. Reflecting on these points, he discusses implications of PNLT’s experience for radical planning, calling for a more decolonizing approach to community land stewardship.
About Kuni Kamizaki
Kuni Kamizaki is an assistant professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at the University of British Columbia. He has undertaken community-engaged research to explore the potential of community land trusts (CLTs) to address displacement and pursue housing justice. He has been working closely with the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust in Toronto and the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust in Vancouver. In addition, he is currently working on a book project on the decline of global city Tokyo in the time of post-growth Japan.
Part II – Gaining Social Control over Land, Labour, and the Economy
Joshua Barndt, drawing on eleven years of leadership within PNLT, explores how CLTs can evolve from a constructive response to gentrification into catalysts for broader social transformation. He poses four guiding questions linking theory and practice: How can CLTs be grounded in concrete theories of social transformation? How can they scale to gain more social power over land, housing, labour, and the economy? How can they expand social power through social procurement, cooperative enterprise, and solidarity-economy partnerships? And what role do social and cultural practices play in transforming our relationships to land, home, and democratic institutions?
Together, these perspectives frame the CLT as a living experiment in shifting economic power from private accumulation to collective stewardship. The lecture invites planners, students, and community organizers to imagine how CLTs and allied movements might contribute to a post-capitalist transition to a more socially just world.