TEDx comes to Stratford to tackle "wicked" problem of housing
- Connor Luczka
- Nov 15, 2024
- 3 min read
CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
What’s worse, one solution or many solutions? Alan Kasperski posited it might be the latter when he took to the stage at Lazaridis Hall in the Tom Patterson Theatre on Nov. 7.
“Complex problems have many solutions,” Kasperski told the gathered crowd. “Wicked problems have so many solutions that we need to work on. … So, one of the things I want to leave you with is what is not a solution: doing nothing.”
Kasperski was on stage that night as the organizer of the first TEDx Stratford event.
In 1984, TED began as a conference where inspiring live speakers aimed to spark new ideas on technology, entertainment and design. Since then, the speaker series has grown to cover many other topics and has also inspired the TEDx series, which is similar in format but independently organized.
The latter has grown to be so popular that thousands are held each year across the globe, including in Stratford now.
The wicked problem Kasperski spoke about that night for Stratford’s inaugural event was one top of mind for many Canadians: housing.
Anneke Smith, founder and inaugural director of the Centre for Cities (C4C) at Windsor Law, was one of the speakers. She reiterated Kasperski’s assertion about wicked problems when she tackled in her speech one of the factors of Canada’s crisis, the housing-approvals process.
“If we’re going to fix the housing crisis that we’re in – and it’s a wicked crisis – we have to fix the housing-approvals process,” Smith said. “Yes, our housing system is broken and our cities are kind of broken, too. That’s the bad news. The good news is that fixing one of them will go a long way to fixing the other one.”
Smith joined Michael Moffat, senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor in the business, economics and public policy group at the Ivey Business School, and Paul Kalbfleisch, co-author of The Joy Experiments: Reimaging Mid-Sized Cities as a Tool to Heal Our Divided Society.
Kasperski told the Times he had watched and enjoyed the independent speaker series for a long time before he reached out to the organizers inquiring about creating a series in Stratford.
“There were some really creative things happening … in this community that I thought other places could learn from or would be inspired by,” Kasperski said about why he wanted to start the series.
“Those challenges that we all have, we all face them at the same time. So why reinvent the wheel? Why not try to learn, try to be as effective, as efficient as possible.”
Once Kasperski and the organizing team, which includes Geoff Love, Dan Mathieson and Craig Thompson, acquired a one-year licence from the organizing body, the team determined that housing should be its first topic, and that moving forward all topics should be focused on Stratford and Perth County, or other smaller communities akin to Stratford and Perth County.
Kasperski and his team hope that it will be a recurring series in Stratford, though it will be up to the TEDx office to decide if the first event was in keeping with the series. Each of the three 18-minute talks will be posted on the TEDx YouTube page in the coming months.
In addition to the three talks, Ryan Erb, executive director at United Way Perth-Huron, moderated a panel featuring the speakers afterward, where audience questions were fielded by each of them.
Additionally, interested students from Stratford District Secondary School assisted and will be involved in organizing a youth TEDx event in the spring, with more details to follow.
After the speakers finished, Kasperski told the crowd his hopes for not only the future of the series but the impact it has on the city.
“Hopefully you've heard something that inspired you. I hope something will motivate you to get involved because it's going to take all of us to solve wicked challenges,” Kasperski said.
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