Overview
How can cities and citizens collaborate to solve our most complex challenges? What is the current state of civil discourse? Can we find common ground and make decisions together through facilitated deliberation? If so, which role can technology play?
Join the University of Toronto’s School of Cities on June 18th for a public discussion on these topics featuring two School of Cities Urbanists-in-Residence – 
Zahra Ebrahim 
(Monumental Projects) and 
Daniel Fusca
 (City of Toronto) – along with 
James MacDonald-Nelson
 (DemocracyNext) and 
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou 
(MIT Center for Constructive Communication) and with moderation by 
Seher Shafiq
.
Learn how communities worldwide are breaking through polarization to make collective decisions on our most pressing urban challenges with citizens' assemblies, sortition, and technology playing a key role. An essential conversation for anyone interested in learning about new pathways for meaningful civic engagement and the future of democracy in our cities.
____________________________________________
About the speakers
As the Head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, 
Dimitra 
Dimitrakopoulou
 leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design. By bringing deep expertise in participatory methods, qualitative analysis, and design research, she focuses on the design, prototyping, and advancement of social dialogue technologies and oversees the transfer of research methods, tools, and systems to practice and deployment.
Dimitra also holds a tenured Assistant Professor’s position (currently on leave) at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 – the European Union’s flagship initiative for Research & Innovation – Dimitra was a Marie Curie Global Fellow (joint visiting appointment at MIT and the University of Zurich, Switzerland) from 2019 to mid-2022, focusing on studying vaccine misinformation.
Zahra Ebrahim 
is the Co-Founder of Monumental. She is a public interest designer and strategist, and an established bridge builder across grassroots and institutional spaces. Her work has focused on community-led approaches to policy, infrastructure, and service design. Prior to Monumental, she built and led Doblin Canada, Deloitte’s Human-Centred Design practice. In her early career, Zahra led one of Canada’s first social design studios, working with communities to co-design towards better social outcomes, leading some of Canada’s most ambitious participatory infrastructure and policy programs.
Zahra is currently an Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, and an Adjunct Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design. She has been recognized as a Next City Vanguard Civic Leader, Ascend Canada’s Mentor of the Year, one of WXN’s Top 100 Women in Canadian Business, and most recently recognized as one of the Urban Land Institute’s WLI Champions. Zahra is currently a Board member of the Toronto Arts Council, and Chair Emeritus at Park People. Her forthcoming book, Messy Cities, is set for release from Coach House books in Summer 2025.
Daniel Fusca 
is an urban planner, process designer, and seasoned engagement strategist who has built his career on the belief that meaningful participation strengthens democracy and improves outcomes. A dedicated civil servant, Daniel is passionate about deliberative processes and the promise they hold for democratic renewal. Since establishing the Toronto Planning Review Panel in 2015—perhaps the first deliberative citizen’s assembly embedded in a municipal government in Canada—he has continued to innovate with engagement and deliberation across a range of contexts and scales.
Daniel is Manager of Public Consultation for Toronto’s Parks and Recreation Division, where he has built an engagement practice from the ground up.
Daniel is a trained facilitator and Partnership Broker, a frequent speaker at conferences across North America and Europe,
 and is currently an Adjunct Professor and Urbanist-in-Residence at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.
James MacDonald-Nelson 
is a designer with degrees in landscape architecture, urbanism, and global development studies. Having studied and worked in spatial practice for 10 years in Canada and Europe, James has a deep knowledge of how the built environment is transformed and managed - and how often citizens are left out of these processes.
As the Cities Programme Lead at DemocracyNext
, an international research & action institute, James is responsible for all things cities-related. This includes managing collaborations with cities around the world who have partnered with DemNext to broaden and deepen citizen participation and deliberation in urban planning decision-making processes - with Citizens’ Assemblies playing a central role.
 James also leads the area of research and speculative design for the physical conditions and infrastructure needed for a more deliberative democracy. 
James is from Ottawa, Canada and is based in Berlin, Germany.
____________________________________________
About the moderator
Seher Shafiq 
currently works at Mozilla Foundation - the non-profit behind Firefox - doing global community engagement for Mozilla's largest conference focused on AI and the future of technology. Prior to working at Mozilla Foundation, Seher spent ten years visioning, operationalizing, and mobilizing communities for numerous high-impact civic campaigns, with a special focus on elections. Seher is also an experienced writer, speaker, and consultant whose commentary has been featured in radio, print, and TV with CBC, TVO, Global News, CTV CP24, Toronto Star, Al Jazeera, and more. 
Information Source: School of Cities, University of Toronto | eventbrite

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Time:	Jun 18, 2025 (UTC-4) ENDED
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