Based on the experience of Canadian suburbanization, but ranging from North America’s wealthy gated communities to Europe’s high-rise-dominated suburbs, the exploding outskirts of Indian and Chinese cities to the slums and squatter settlements of Africa and Latin America, this project is the first to systematically take stock of worldwide suburban developments while analyzing their governance models, land use, infrastructure and suburban everyday life.

A comparative investigation of the globally-induced transformation of metropolitan governance systems in Toronto, Montreal, Paris and Frankfurt. The focus of this research project, is the urban region with its growing web of metropolitan governance. The emergence of collective action at the metropolitan level in Canada and Europe will be examined through infrastructure, public health, green space, and human security. (Photo Source: www.britannica.com)

This project explores the legacies of 20th century socialist urbanism in three cities – Berlin, Hanoi and Stockholm – and considers their impact on urban policy, spatial form and everyday life in the 21st century. Through an exploration of changes underway in districts in each of the case study cities, we will address three key questions: How is their socialist and modernist past discursively framed – as a problem or a possibility? In what way can urban politics be considered a confrontation with those legacies? What policy lessons could be applied to Canadian urban regions? (Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Photo source: Douglas Young).

A collaborative, international research project focusing on the various ‘entrepreneurial’ roles that trade unions have defined in the neoliberal period (1980s – current). Organized labour’s urban strategies may be qualified as entrepreneurial in the sense that unions are assuming an active role in the promotion and re-regulation of their respective sectors, a role which often entails the promotion of ‘high road’ employment practices that overlap with the shared concerns of local governments and locally-dependent firms in workforce development, increased inward investment and competitiveness-oriented social policy, and the interests local communities have in the expansion of employment opportunities and the provision of public services. This research project is structured as a comparative case study with five industry clusters (film industry, tourism, green building, child care, mass transit) being compared across two case cities (Toronto, New York City).

New, complex and contradictory landscapes of diverse social, infrastructural and political-economic characteristics have appeared within pre-existing urbanism. Despite their ubiquitous presence, suburban society, space and politics have been unduly sidelined in various bodies of research. The aim of this project is to provide a more holistic understanding of the city’s varied landscapes, everyday realities, and contemporary political infrastructures allowing us to grasp the fluidity and dynamism (and emerging contradictions) shaping present-day urban experiences.

This project compares diverse, low-income communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary, studying community-member experiences and their perceptions of the opportunities and barriers within public space and institutions, and articulating what needs to change in order to promote a more sustainable and equitable urban future.

Based on interdisciplinary research in cities around the world, this project examines the ways in which the local and the global constitute each other, approaching the global city as a process and product which is established through competing social forces operating at multiple scales. Uniquely, the research developed is being disseminated through a book, short documentary feature, series of photographs, and a music/sound CD.

This project brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines – fine arts, architecture, urban planning and policy studies, as well as numerous public and non-profit arts organizations – to share information and examine common problems facing Canada’s largest cities. The project investigates how creative practices can improve the quality of urban life and planning in Canada.

Urban governance of energy and water systems has long been based on assumptions of the traditional infrastructure model, which no longer apply. Considering the restructuring of urban infrastructures, this research project explores the emerging socio-technical regimes of infrastructure provision and investigates new forms of environmental governance and planning. Empirically, the study focuses on energy and water management in Toronto, Los Angeles and Berlin. (Photo Source: http://www.laofoundation.com/NRC.html)

This project has been completed.

The relationship between the city and its outlying region has been studied over several decades now, and has brought problems to the foreground that exist in both places but are experienced in different ways. This research project studies the relationship between affordable housing and health, and in particular the relationship between dis- and re-investment into the built environment and social health provision. (Photo Source: http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/abandonment-issues/)

This project has been completed.

This research project explores the political use and construction of spaces of urban nature in the metropolitan regions of Birmingham (UK) and Toronto (Canada). The project is specifically concerned with those greenbelts that have been deployed by urban planners as a basis upon which to enact different metropolitan projects and urban regional visions. By combining an analysis of greenbelt politics in Birmingham and Toronto we hope to gain significant comparative insights into the use of spaces of urban nature within very different socio-political contexts and time frames. (Birmingham, UK. Photo Source: Roger Keil)

This project has been completed.

The City Institute entered an international research and teaching community with the University of Bologna, the future Museum of the City of Bologna, and the University of Denver as part of their now joint International Center for Civic Engagement. The research will focus on the comparison of a few exemplary cities and their different experiences and transformations (such as Berlin, Bologna, Denver, Las Vegas, Toronto). (Photo Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1563011,00.html)

This project has been completed.

This is a joint initiative of York University and the City of Toronto to create two benchmark documents for the discussion on this subject and perhaps to prepare some future cooperation on the matter. This joint effort offers a great opportunity to create concrete working relationships between the City of Toronto and two emerging York research institutes, IRIS and CITY, on an important subject matter of urban environmental interest.

This project has been completed.

Immigration and urbanization settlement patterns in Toronto and Miami are moving away from the traditional inner city immigrant neighbourhoods to more peripheral, suburban locations. We will expand this perspective to the particular “in-between spaces”, which have now become ports of entry for many immigrants, particularly for those from non-European origin. (Photo Source: http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/posters/challenge/)

This project has been completed.

The report resulting from this research will not attempt to unravel the future of funding commitments to the environment and the ongoing research that is needed to better shape it. But it will work to situate the present environmental moment in Canada in relation to past such moments. (Photo Source: http://www.biodiversityproject.org/bdsprawl.htm)

This project has been completed.