What's Your Role in the Missing Middle?A Conversation on Citizen-Led Urbanism

On November 4, 2025, over 245 people gathered at INFORM and tuned in via livestream for Plot the Lot: Incremental, Communal, Citizen Developers, a sold-out talk organized by Smallworks that brought together thought-leaders in Vancouver’s housing, architecture, and urbanism communities to explore the evolving landscape of middle housing in our city.

The event marked a moment in time for small-scale, citizen-driven development in British Columbia. While much of the conversation around adding gentle density in the province has focused on roadblocks, uncertainties and hesitation, Plot the Lot carried an optimistic energy, positioning the “middle” as the new frontier of housing. It opened up a vital discussion on what’s possible when everyday citizens are empowered to redevelop existing lots, participating in the future of housing through an organic, incremental urbanism.

Moderated by Uytae Lee of About Here, the evening opened with a timely reflection on Burnaby’s recent rollback of its SSMUH zoning, which reversed the missing middle policy allowing up to four-storey developments amidst conflicting public stances. “This is the unique challenge of missing middle housing,” Lee remarked. “It’s not just about building housing supply. For younger folks, missing middle housing represents a kind of housing that actually feels attainable—one day."

"At the same time, to action the missing middle requires us to redevelop neighbourhoods that represent the Canadian dream for a whole previous generation,” Lee continued. “There are, admittedly, all sorts of questions—‘Would that scale?’ ‘Would that actually work?’—but the promise in citizen-led developments is that maybe this is how we can negotiate the shift from one ideal model of housing that was such a powerful narrative for so many people for decades into a newer one.”

It was followed by four distinct but interconnected perspectives on how the “missing middle” can be built not just as a policy, but as a shared urban ethos:

The Original Solution

Jake Fry, founder and owner of Smallworks, opened with The Original Solution, reflecting on Vancouver’s now 16-year-old laneway house program, the first of its kind in North America, as a quiet revolution in which housing is built by communities, not as commodities.

"We’ve built over 400 homes over the last 16 years," Fry shares. 'We’ve housed about 800-1,000 people, but we’ve only produced about 6% of all laneway houses. So this program has quietly produced housing for at least 21,000 people. And they’ve done it with lines of credit, a little bit of savings, mortgages that are cheaper than interest, and a little bit of family inheritance. This program has had a tremendous impact.”

Social Density

Marianne Amodio, principal of MA+HG, explored Social Density, illuminating the emotional potential of missing middle architecture to foster connected communities through iconic middle housing projects such as Tomo House and Union.

“So much of the work that everyone is doing here is not only about creating new forms of architecture that might be affordable or beautiful, but also about changing ideas around what we see as being our collective experience as a culture. The things that we believe to be true are actually a return to the way things used to be.”

Contextual Density

Shirley Shen, Co-Founder and Director of Haeccity Studio Architecture, discussed Contextual Density, confronting both the realities and the potential of the plex typology. Drawing from a project currently in development in an ethnoburb, Richmond, Shen explored how new tenure and financing models could reshape access to housing.

“When our own employees were looking at the rental rates and we realized that we could not afford to live in the project that we had just built,” Shen shared, “we knew something was wrong.”

Open-Source Housing

Michael Leckie, Founder and Principal of Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, presented Open-Source Housing, outlining the genesis of his Standardized Design Catalogue, developed for the BC Ministry of Housing, and its implications for democratizing the “middle.”

“What if we took the idea of the Vancouver Special and adapted it to allow for densification over time? It’s all achieved through a very standardized way of approaching design, floor plan, structure, infrastructure. We’re trying to create attainable architecture that has an architectural character and quality.”

“We’ve always believed the nature of housing is incremental—from the ground up, and shared between citizens, designers, and policy makers,” said Jake Fry, founder of Smallworks. “The conversation we propel at Plot the Lot is just one step toward a more participatory housing future.”