Building Good

As Building Good wraps up its sixth season, we’re looking back at the big ideas shaping the future of construction. A few key themes kept emerging. First, sustainability still faces financial and regulatory roadblocks. Second, meaningful change needs community buy-in to succeed. Third, bold ideas are the skeleton keys to unlocking the construction industry’s biggest brain teasers. Co-hosts Jen Han...

For thousands of years, humans have built with wood. Today, mass timber is changing the way we design, build, and experience our spaces. It’s strong, fire-resistant, and capable of storing carbon, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional building materials. And beyond its structural benefits, wood also connects us to nature, improving well-being through biophilic design. Andre Lema, Busin...

Canada’s path to net zero hinges on electrification. As the world’s fourth-largest producer of hydroelectricity, we’re primed to take a global leadership role. With the provinces and territories at different stages of grid decarbonization, electrification doesn’t have to be “all or nothing” — regions with a longer way to go can take a phased approach, incorporating supplemental energy sources. But...

Climate change is polarizing. Between inflation, investor pressures, competitiveness, high interest, and economic sluggishness, climate change can seem like a far-off problem — just another thing to worry about. Sustainability often takes a back seat, becoming a “nice to have” instead of a “need to have.” But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Heather Taylor of EY Canada breaks down...

In Asia, bamboo has been used as a construction material for thousands of years. Prized for its availability, strength, and flexibility, it has over a thousand uses—including scaffolding during the construction of high rises in Hong Kong. So why has it been slow to be adopted by the global construction industry? It’s a sustainability advocate's dream: it sequesters carbon; provides wildlife habita...

What if your city wasn’t just a place to live, but a tool to keep you healthy? Dr. Avi Friedman, Professor of Architecture at McGill University, and Alexandra Pollock, landscape designer and urban planner, discuss how our cities impact our health—and how they can be redesigned for a better future. Avi and Alexandra dive into the concept of cities as “exercise machines,” where walkable streets, gre...

New York Times science journalist Emily Anthes, author of The Great Indoors, has spent a lot of time thinking about how buildings shape our lives, from mood to mortality. From designing hospitals that speed up recovery, to developing autism-friendly apartments, to rejigging offices to boost productivity — the interior of the built environment can be a crucial factor in determining human health and...

Because of the Indian Act, Indigenous communities have been blocked from accessing capital markets, which means they haven’t been able to invest in critical infrastructure projects happening in their territories. For the past ten years, First Nations Major Projects Coalition has been working to change that. FNMPC is a non-profit, Indigenous-led organization working to empower Indigenous communitie...

NIMBY. It’s a cursed acronym that can send chills down an urban planner's spine and jettison approved building permits into liminal space. It stands for “not in my backyard,” and it can stop even the mightiest projects in their tracks. Blamed for gentrification, urban sprawl, and a myriad of other evils, NIMBYs tend to oppose land use change. So, how does a NIMBY evolve into a YIMBY? (A “yes, in m...

Mushroom bricks sound like something straight out of science fiction or an 80’s arcade game featuring an intrepid pair of plumbing brothers. But mushroom bricks are more than just fantasy—they’re a biomimetic masterpiece. Biodegradable, eco-friendly, non-toxic, waterproof, fire-resistant, and grown from mycelium—the fuzzy white, green, or black germinated spores of a mushroom—mycelia is a material...

Urban planning is a constant negotiation between the bold dreams of the built environment and the delicate balance of the natural one. After all, we have a limited amount of space to terraform, and plants got here first. Urban growth is exploding: by 2060, the global building footprint is projected to double. But instead of wreaking havoc on biodiversity with every new development, interdisciplina...

Wood isn’t what it used to be. Virgin lumber is generally less dense and grown faster than wood that was harvested from natural old growth forests. But logging what’s left of those old growth forests isn’t a sustainable option, so why not reclaim old lumber when buildings are torn down? Until now that process was labour intensive and expensive, but Eric Law and Urban Machine have developed robots...

Buildings from around the world represent the culture they were built in. From gothic cathedrals in Europe to glittering glassy office towers. So why don’t we always think about local culture when we start designing? Why don’t we talk to the community and ask for the stories they grew up with, so they can tell us about their culture? That’s what Chris Cornelius, founder of Studio:Indigenous, does....

If you head downtown in any major Canadian city you will see a lot of construction, and it is mostly large residential towers that are going up. That means more people living there, but the roads stay the same size. More residents, more cars, more traffic. So we have to rethink how we use those roads, and how we get people on to more efficient modes of transport. The cheapest, easiest alternative...

Human nature makes the future a scary place. Scientists had predicted pandemics for decades, but the Covid-19 pandemic still felt like it came out of nowhere. Our tendency is to react to events, rather than get ourselves ready for likely eventualities. Markku Allison and Molly Connor have developed a free tool to help change our thinking and learn how to be ready for the future. They’re on the sho...

If job sites can be hostile environments for women and nonbinary people, how do we get them into construction in the first place, so they can change those workplaces? Nora Spencer founded Hope Renovations. They run a programme to bring women and nonbinary folks in the trades, which includes training on dealing with job sites and then they employ them in internships. They’re also a nonprofit provid...

When we’re starting a new, dream job, we can overlook some annoyances, thinking they might get better. As we get older, more experienced though, we might realise that annoyance was a red flag. That coworker’s “jokes” were actually a sign of an intolerant attitude, and that promotion you wanted is given to someone less qualified. You still love what you do, but would you tell a young person to go a...

Afdhel Aziz is a “recovering marketer”. His purpose used to be helping some of the biggest brands on the planet sell their products, and he did that by connecting them with “cool”. Now, he thinks that “cool” has been replaced with “good”. He’s even written a book about it: Good is the New Cool. He joins us to talk about how companies need to have a purpose beyond just making profits, because that...

Heading into downtown Toronto you see a forest of cranes and partly built condo towers. These buildings are providing new, much-needed housing… for a certain type of resident. They’re mostly small, with good amenities and high fees. So where will all the families live? Where do our low and fixed income neighbours move to? Cheryll Case is an urban planner who puts affordable housing and inclusion a...

Cities are phenomenally complex, living spaces that can generate an overwhelming amount of data, so collecting, managing and using that data is also phenomenally complex. There are huge pitfalls to avoid, privacy being the obvious one, and misuse by private entities another. Data is an incredibly valuable tool though, especially as we look to manage massive increases in electricity use. The “Smart...

What’s so scary about being the man who speaks up for women at work, especially when courage and accountability are traits that so many of us feel “make a man” in the first place? David G. Smith, PhD and W. Brad Johnson, PhD are “The Workplace Allies”, and they’ve drawn on their military and academic experience to write “Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace”, so we in...

Planning cities requires a lot of data. That data can be difficult to penetrate, and that’s where synthetic cities come in. Myrna Bittner and RWI Synthetics create complex visual models of cities that are used to experiment and model what might happen with new projects like transit, housing or even if every resident owned a guinea pig. If you’ve ever played SimCity you’ve probably got a pretty str...

Nature has been engineering for billions of years, so why do we think we can do better than her? Biomimicry is taking that ancient evolutionary design process and using it to build buildings and design systems. Jamie Miller is Director of Biomimicry at B&H Architects and he joins Jen to talk us through how we can go further than just minimising harm to the environment, we can have a positive impac...

Building Good is about making the built environment better. We’re a place for the conscientious construction worker, the innovative engineer and the environmentally conscious architect. We’re relaunching with a bigger and better show, and in this new season we’re looking at what buildings can learn from nature, whether smart cities are really that smart, and how men can do better on the constructi...

With a labour shortage that isn’t being solved with only Canadian workers the solution should be obvious: immigration. Canada’s immigration system has values built into it which make it hard to recruit tradespeople though, and when workers do make it to Canada their qualifications are often not recognised. So how do we fix it? Bill Ferreira has an idea of how we can make immigration work for every...