To say that Luke Mari is unafraid of controversy would be an understatement. But it got personal when Mari and Aryze, the real-estate development firm in which he is a partner, began work on a townhouse project in their own neighborhood in Victoria, British Columbia. Certain neighbors did not take kindly to it. "We’d go to the park and people would say, 'How dare you play in this park when you’re trying to ruin our neighborhood!'" says Mari. “They spread our pictures on social media, accused us of being the embodiment of greed, and put up defamatory signs on telephone poles all in an effort to incite fear and anger against our company.”

When you talk to Mari, though, you quickly get the sense that greed doesn't rank on his list of motivations. Through his work in Victoria with Aryze, they have become one of the elegant waterfront city's most visible and provocative evangelists for walkable urban development, and for addressing the city's housing shortage by filling in existing neighborhoods with more homes.

This evangelist's mindset is the thing that's most obvious in even a short conversation with him: Mari wants to change how Victoria is built. He wants to change the rules. And Aryze is determined to make their case for new rules by pushing the boundaries of what they're allowed to build—and doing so in a very calculated effort to spark a civic conversation about what Victoria's future ought to look like.