Milton Friesen
Milton Friesen was Program Director, Social Cities for Cardus from 2008 to 2020.
Bio last updated November 29th, 2022.
Articles by Milton Friesen
Tools of Science: Trusted or Busted?
By Milton Friesen
January 22, 2019
Putting algorithms to an accountability test doesn’t require junking them entirely, but it can help us catch out powerful interests more intent on abusing than using our data, argues Cardus Social Cities Director Milton Friesen.
But the potential of the tools to truly solve problems can be tainted when they are applied to less noble ends: giving powerful people a means to shrewdly take more from the weak, harvesting our family history curiosity by coaxing DNA from us that in turn becomes a data asset they can benefit from without us, and using our family and friend networks like a massive Amway promotional channel where we don’t even get the lousy cleaning spray There are important benefits we all realize through various tools like DNA testing and optimizing algorithms that help us navigate around emerging traffic jams
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Shopping's Pleasure Principle
Milton Friesen
December 17, 2018
Buying local doesn’t have to be driven by guilt, writes Milton Friesen, Cardus program director for social cities. It can meet the deep human need to actually the people on the other side of an exchange.
Imagine that you visit your local bookstore, owned and operated by someone who shares your love of books – something you know by having gone there many times and engaging in a human exchange with the owner, a common practice called a ‘conversation’ (ask someone born before 1990 about it) It’s more t...
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Poetry To Provoke A City
Milton Friesen
May 31, 2018
City managers rarely, if ever, consider haiku when approving high rise developments, but Cardus Social Cities Program Director Milton Friesen says getting serious about great urbanism means crafting our metropolises to be the domain of the poet as much as the planner.
Is this practical for us? For our communities? Does it matter in the context of professional planners, eager developers, or the upwardly mobile? Is poetry a souvenir, like a cowboy boot keychain you bring back from a Nashville visit? I don’t think poetry can design or build the city, but poets and p...
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The Shared Space of Faith And Science
Peter Stockland with Milton Friesen
February 23, 2018
Milton Friesen, program director of Cardus Social Cities, will deliver a lecture this evening at McMaster University’s Divinity College on Religion And Science: Conspiring Together For God. As Milton tells Convivium’s Peter Stockland, he intends it as a catalyst to a much broader and deeper conversation about the institutional responsibilities of faith and science in Canada’s common life.
What’s interesting is that many people such as (the late) Christopher Hitchens mock and deride religious beliefs, yet science itself has a public image problem when it denigrates religious belief and institutions and marginalizes them, then turns around and asks the public for support Yet the scienc...
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Harmony Of A Thousand Differences
Milton Friesen
June 5, 2017
As Canadians get set to revel in urban summer life, Convivium showcases remarks from the What Makes A Good City forum held last Thursday at Cardus Ottawa. Today, Milton Friesen examines the complexities that give the city the aura of a living organism.
What is a city? One of the reasons that the Death and Life of Great American Cities has remained so popular over the past 50 years was Jane Jacob's intuition that professional people have deeply misunderstood what a city is, and thus offer solutions that may do more harm than good If a city is too s...
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Building the Social City
Milton Friesen
March 21, 2017
The networks of relationships needed to make a community not only liveable but also sociable can be vast and complex. But as Milton Friesen writes, they can also be entered into, appreciated and drawn upon by something as simple and convivial as shared conversation over grits and fried catfish.
Chief among the privileges of leading the Cardus Social Cities program are the many opportunities to meet people who are doing significant work in communities and cities across Canada, the United States and around the world On Tuesday afternoon TrueCity Hamilton director, Dave Witt brought two colle...
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Is God Good For Cities?
Milton Friesen
January 30, 2017
Milton Friesen, Program Director for Social Cities at Cardus, shares the importance of strong social fabric and the contribution that religious communities make to the health of their cities.
Do religious communities make cities better places and if so, how does the social generation of common goods work? If my objective as a researcher is to understand the social landscape of the communities that make up our cities, I will inevitably encounter religious people and the institutions that ...
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The Long Chain of Care
Milton Friesen
November 28, 2016
Charitable organizations are one of the most important means we have of moving human intention to action at a scale that makes a difference – charities are a vital means of expressing the common good in organized form Finally, we need to increase our ability to reflect together philosophically on wh...
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Sustainable Cities and Social Capital: Common Dilemmas and Hopes
Milton Friesen
February 17, 2016
We need to spend more time and energy in answering that participant’s insightful question and its flipside – how do we protect, nurture, and grow the social fabric of our communities where it already exists? The workshop presenters provided answers to this question in their work: we need spaces desi...
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Giving is a Group Project
Milton Friesen
January 6, 2016
The Charitable Giving by Individuals report by Martin Turcotte of Statistics Canada is a comprehensive and important summary that makes use of the 2013 General Social Survey data to outline a picture of individual charitable giving in Canada Early research on the replacement cost for common good ser...
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Networks Need a Deeper Read
Milton Friesen
October 1, 2015
Cardus's Director of Social Cities weighs the newest book on networking and finds it wanting.
Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) and Lee Rainie (Director of Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center) make is that contemporary society is running on a new social operating system that has been enabled by what they call a triple revolution driven by so...
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Common Good & The Classroom
Milton Friesen, and Beth Green, Brian Dijkema
August 1, 2015
Even when closing schools seems an economic no-brainer, communities should fight back.
The Toronto District School Board comprises 560 schools that are attended by almost 290,000 students Rather than shutting down schools, good systems should be finding innovative ways to increase school choice in and out of the public system And once every three years, the wide variety of students mu...
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Law, Design, and the Human Habitat: Part II
Milton Friesen
May 13, 2015
By the end of the day, working amid the street noise, sun, and constant collegial exchanges, we had decided which streets would form the A level street network (best for pedestrian, exchange, and intensity), which would be the B level network (used for delivering freight and moving cars), what the l...
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Law, Design, and the Human Habitat: Part I
Milton Friesen
May 12, 2015
As teams we spent time debating, puzzling, and sketching how the SmartCode could guide a strongly human-centered design structure that would support long-term vitality for this part of Dallas over the coming years and decades ...
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3D Cities: Tower, Slum, and Sprawl
Milton Friesen
August 16, 2013
Wood suggested that there are really only three major options for the 200,000 or so people that arrive in cities around the world every day In each of the three categories of urban housing, the human factors involved in the design or informal evolution of those living spaces is critical ...
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Remembering How to Innovate
Milton Friesen
July 31, 2013
Are we turning enough to the deep well of human history? History has many social and cultural lessons to teach, and they may be more applicable to social innovation than we think The most interesting part of the story of Hans Neilson Hauge was that he was born in Norway in 1771, some distance in tim...
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Persistence, Underwritten by Hope
Milton Friesen
June 14, 2013
For those of you that resonate with these ideas and approaches, there is an October 7-11 event in Edmonton, Alberta called Accelerating Impact that will bring together great thinkers, community leaders, and neighbourhood champions—you can see more about it here One of the key ideas that framed the g...
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Dancing with Data: Fewer Sequins, Bigger Payoffs
Milton Friesen
April 10, 2013
It can, however, prove immensely useful if we understand some of the important features of the data landscape and it may, under the right kinds of analysis, help us sort out some of the puzzles we face Data and the analysis that makes sense of it has important differences in texture, purpose, and po...
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Disruptive Innovation or Passing Oddities?
Milton Friesen
March 11, 2013
It is possible that disruptive innovations like digital lending platforms, mobile banking, or the resurgence of credit unions are the guises which at least some deep disruptions will be wearing when they quietly stroll down the marble-lined halls of power For some time now I've been pondering whethe...
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Becoming Socially Incompetent
Milton Friesen
August 31, 2012
Here are a few things that can foster this re-weaving, in no particular order: hospitality (invite people over); common recreation (set up a neighbourhood baseball game); worship (connect to your tradition in an actual location); time in public places (parks, squares, festivals, concerts); embracing...
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Glorious Adaptation: Institutions that are Future Ready
Milton Friesen
August 24, 2012
Finally, there are adaptive institutions that "are geared to the flexible process of continuous search and modification which is the essence of planning at the higher levels of 'future-creative' planning, namely the levels of strategies and policies" (143) We need to do much more to advance our unde...
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Clear Cutting Social Landscapes
Milton Friesen
August 17, 2012
Are institutions today the old buildings of Robert Moses time? They seem to be less chic, awkward hold-overs from the prosaic past, and so one wonders if we are not in the midst of repeating within our social realm what we have done architecturally, ecologically, and culturally Standing in the middl...
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Writing Life
Milton Friesen
May 17, 2012
Convivium contributor Milton Friesen reflects on the beauty, gift, and service that writers and their books bring to the world.
However, I had little doubt, as I walked away from a lively and engaging hour spent contemplating books, that there is a profound service offered to us by people like Miriam Toews who dare to tangle with the intimidating triumvirate of the good, the true, and the beautiful, armed only with words. Yo...
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Mathematics and social architecture?
Milton Friesen
December 2, 2011
So what kind of rigour do we apply when we talk about social architecture? Are mathematics of use? What kind? What are the limits? What might we gain? Should we save the analytic work for the built environment and adopt something different for the human social factors? Many social science tools have...