Join Hey Neighbour Collective and Happy Cities for a dynamic conversation about the recently launched Building Social Connections toolkit.

Communities across Canada are growing fast. Cities are facing pressure to cut red tape and speed up housing approvals. But housing is also critical for wellbeing and quality of life. Planners and housing professionals have a critical opportunity to ensure that new homes not only meet supply and affordability goals—but also support the health and happiness of residents. Our new toolkit is packed with policy and design tools to ensure that new multi-unit housing provides more than just a roof overhead—a safe home where people of all walks of life can grow, meet neighbours, and feel a sense of belonging to their community.

This conversation will share:

• How planners, architects, and housing developers and operators can apply the design actions in the toolkit to ensure denser housing also supports community resilience and social connection.
• How design strategies in the toolkit can nurture wellbeing in housing for people of all ages, backgrounds, abilities, household sizes, and incomes.
• Opportunities for upcoming engagement with the project in fall 2024 and beyond.
   

Project background:

In the face of growing challenges—including an acute housing affordability crisis, extreme weather, social isolation, and an aging population—our social connections are one of the strongest resources we have to chart a more sustainable, resilient path forward.

Over 2023 and 2024, Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and researchers from Simon Fraser University worked together with five local municipalities and one First Nation to co-create new policies to encourage sociable multi-unit housing design. Building on the learnings from this project—and nearly a decade of prior research—we have published a new design toolkit of evidence-based strategies to nurture social wellbeing multi-unit housing. The design principles and actions equip policy makers, planners, designers, and community members to build and advocate for more socially connected, inclusive communities, drawing on long-term research and engagement with residents and housing industry actors—including city planners, architects, and market and non-market housing developers and operators.