Application deadline: November 30, 2026
Montréal Québec H3H 2S6
Canada
The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program deepens its exploration of vacancy as a cyclical condition—holding the potential to regenerate lands, structures and social relations in tandem. Vacancy suggests not emptiness and erasure, but conditions of return, renewal, and evolution that can manifest histories of marginalization.
Building on the 2026 edition, this second iteration expands the geographies across which its first four projects questioned the assumed stasis of vacant lands and buildings. These ranged from real estate speculation, Indigenous land tenure and creative reappropriation in Honolulu; disinvestment and racial segregation in St. Louis; intentional vacancy, collective ownership and disaster mitigation in Nepal; and Toyama Prefecture in Japan, where abandoned rural homes have been filled with renewed craft traditions, practices, and pedagogies that create new places for living and forms of generational knowledge.
Applicants to the 2027 program are invited to explore vacancy as a condition that encompasses and exceeds vacant buildings and lands—one that can be actively maintained through policy, financial withdrawal, and environmental risk. We welcome projects focused on specific sites contending with vacancy as a social, cultural, political, and spatial condition, and committed to a theoretical model that can inform design practice. Approaches may engage with:
• Vacancy as an expression of the climate crisis
• Material cycles of design and planning that stem from demolition and land remediation
• Vacancy as intentional and planned for, particularly through urban and national policy-making
• Histories of vacancy across distinct cultural contexts, generating new understandings of why certain cultures deem it better not to build
• Vacancy as generated by extreme pollution, extraction, and environmental damage, including non-human reoccupation as a strategy of repair
Sited case studies can draw on prior research and show evidence of community involvement in decision making and planning. Projects can deepen ties to geographies engaged with in the first cycle, or address entirely distinct places.
The program convenes designers, municipal and urban officials, and researchers around real-world projects and sites related to vacant land and buildings. Each summer from 2026 to 2028, CCA-WRI Research Fellows engage with specific sites from recent or active research and/or design projects to examine how vacant land, buildings, and other spatial conditions are generated across geographical contexts, urban and rural realities, political circumstances, and timeframes.
The program offers an experimental research format in which designers and researchers can ground ongoing projects in the CCA Collection through in-depth, historically informed research, while exchanging with peer practitioner-academics from around the world and moving theoretical exploration towards on-the-ground action.
Researchers can turn, for example, to materials related to Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ notion of wasteland, Gianni Pettena’s works on occupation, environmental change, and duration, or photographs documenting land use, environmental transformation, and human impact. These include the CCA’s ten-year Olmsted project, dating back to 1988, documenting seventy-four sites designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and photographed by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James.
The fellowship is open to practitioners (architects, landscape architects, urban planners, urban decision makers, cultural producers, artists) with substantial professional experience, as well as researchers holding a doctoral degree in relevant fields, particularly those working at the intersection of practice and academia who can demonstrate a commitment to research, publishing, exhibiting, or a publicly accountable research practice.
CCA-WRI Fellows must undertake their research at the CCA in Montréal, present work in progress publicly, and engage in seminars, workshops, and exchanges with the CCA community. Residencies run for one to three months between July and October 2027 and include a private office, access to the CCA Collection, a monthly stipend of CAD 5,000 (up to three months), and additional support for travel and visa expenses.
Candidates are invited to submit an application describing how their research and expected outcomes can enrich how specific entities (design practitioners, city governments, neighbourhood associations, citizen committees, developers, and others) can act on vacancy. Previous applicants are encouraged to address how their research intersects with one or more of the five approaches above. Four fellowships are available for 2027.
The Advisory Committee for the 2026–2028 cycle consists of Maurice D. Cox (Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD), Mio Tsuneyama (Architect, studio mnm/HOLES), Giovanna Borasi (Director, CCA), and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA). The committee will meet in January 2027 to select candidates. Results will be communicated in February 2027.
The deadline for applications is November 30, 2026. You can consult the application Guidelines and Terms for more details on the requirements. For more details about the Window Research Institute, visit this page.
For updates on the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program and to stay in touch, subscribe to the CCA newsletter.
