Jonathan Lapalme

Jonathan Lapalme is a serial social entrepreneur, strategic designer, systems thinker and film director. With a master's degree in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons The New School for Design and a bachelor's degree in Cultural and Media Production from UQAM, Jonathan has been working for over 15 years on the design of processes and strategies related to various types of socio-ecological issues. In recent years, he has co-founded/activated several organizations and initiatives, including Dark Matter Labs Canada, Nouveaux Voisins, l'Office des règles et des normes (ORN), LICER, Entremise, H-MTL/Memento and many others. As a consultant and collaborator, he has contributed to a wide variety of practices and issues: heritage preservation, the housing crisis, the circular economy, urban biodiversity, street vending, Indigenous governance, regulatory modernization, participatory futurism, nature-based solutions and more. Jonathan has had the opportunity to familiarize himself with many cultural perspectives while studying and working on projects in over twenty countries around the world. His work earned him selection as one of Montreal's Visionaries to Watch by the McCord Museum in 2017, as well as Urbania magazine and Concordia University's The Institute for Urban Futures in 2016. His first short documentary, Uneven Growth NY, was shown for six months at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the MAK in Vienna.