Title:
Partner, The Good Future Co.
Organization’s Mission:
To design collaborative and future-ready places through innovative community engagement.
Recent Project:
Co-founded LobbyFest with Future Fit Cities, a festival that transformed downtown commercial-building lobbies into interactive public spaces.
Impact Highlight:
Instrumental in launching Beakerhead and Platform Innovation Centre.
Vision for Calgary:
“A city where creativity and community converge to shape vibrant, inclusive spaces.”
For more than a decade, Jasmine Palardy has worked to foster collaborative spaces that drive innovation and inclusivity in Calgary.
Born and raised in Calgary, Palardy worked in tech start-ups in Silicon Valley for several years before returning to Calgary in 2012.
One of her first acts upon her return to the city was to help found Beakerhead, Calgary’s annual multi-day Science, Technology, Engineer and Math (STEM) festival, which has grown into a cultural institution.
“When we launched Beakerhead [in 2013], it was this large-scale, tangible, visceral, fiery experience in the public realm, and it was a way of showing off our city’s alter ego to the world,” Palardy says.
Palardy’s drive to celebrate ingenuity and shape the future of our city in a different way further evolved when she worked with a team to lay the groundwork for Calgary’s Platform Innovation Centre, a hub designed to accelerate technological advancement and entrepreneurial ventures that opened in 2022.
“I’m a big believer in unlocking the imaginations of the people who make our cities great through interesting and collective ways,” Palardy says. “It all starts with creating the space for magical interactions between people to happen.”
In 2020, Palardy founded The Good Future Collective. The consulting firm specializes in bringing developers, designers, and community members together to create urban shared spaces of the future. Palardy points to 2023’s LobbyFest as an example of Good Future’s approach to community engagement and empowering citizens to think of themselves as city builders.
The three-day festival saw more than 60,000 Calgarians exposed to a range of interactive installations and events, hosted in Calgary’s downtown office tower lobbies, that asked them what they wanted the future of Calgary to be like.
“Our city is incredibly diverse, and so is the feedback and ideas around the potential of a given place within the city. Those are conversations that matter. And design engagement strategy that is done in more interactive and joyful ways can lead to better, more inclusive outcomes,” she says.
While her work mainly focuses on engaging Calgarians, Palardy’s influence extends beyond the city. As director of WRLDCTY, including the annual Global Forum event, Palardy facilitates international dialogues on urban development, bringing back global insights to inform Calgary projects.
