Professor Roger Keil speaks to International Graduate College (IGK) Fellow Lisa Vollmer for the Center for Metropolitan Studies podcast series (November 2014).
“Critics of smart growth are not comparing apples to apples when it comes to housing costs. We need to consider the full cost of housing under different development scenarios.”
MCRI researchers Markus Moos, Pierre Filion, Roger Keil, and Alan Walks collaborate with University of Waterloo researchers Jeff Casello, Laura Johnson, and Maxwell Hartt to look at a range of factors that are responsible for escalating housing prices in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Check out the Huffington Post article here.
MCRI researchers at “Housing the Future: Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Next Generation.” The panel discussion held at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, launches Markus Moos’ new research project, Generationed City.
Edited by Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil |
In Suburban Governance: A Global View, editors Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil have assembled a groundbreaking set of essays by leading urban scholars that assess how governance regulates the creation of the world’s suburban spaces and everyday life within them. With contributors from ten countries on five continents, this collection covers the full breadth of contemporary developments in suburban governance. Examining the classic North American model of suburbia, contemporary alternatives in Europe and Latin America, and the emerging suburbanisms of Africa and Asia, Suburban Governance offers a strong analytical introduction to a vital topic in contemporary urban studies. Get your copy now from the University of Toronto Press.
“Cities over the world face complex and rapidly evolving challenges. Ranging from climate, to poverty, economic downturns and demographic shifts, cities now need to confront an unprecedented array of issues. Addressing them requires ingenuity and versatility, whether in policymaking, investment decisions or everyday livelihoods. At the Flexible City Symposium of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, we seek to re-think the city, in theory and practice to confront these challenges” (www.theflexiblecity.org).
“Urbanists share and repr
oduce three stereotypes about North American suburbs. First, many invoke a clichéd ideal: the desire to enjoy quiet privacy in a low-density residential environment near the urban fringe. Second, they assume that most suburbs have actually conformed to this ideal. Third, academics and planners alike agree on a stereotypical judgment: suburbs are to be deplored. This synthetic essay argues that residential patterns in postwar Toronto never conformed to these stereotypes: especially since the 1970s it has harboured a competing, more urbane popular ideal; its suburbs have been socially and physically diverse; and, recognizing diversity, local urbanists have made varied judgments. Suburban diversity has become systematized since the 1970s, so that a new local stereotype has emerged: that of the declining inner suburb. Toronto’s experience exemplifies that of one of the two main types of North American metro. It challenges stereotypes, while those stereotypes illuminate its particular character. Most generally, while polycentricity and dispersion have shaped its economic geography, the language of zones is still meaningful in interpreting its residential patterns. There may be a larger lesson there.”
“One way of thinking about the contemporary moment is that the goal is not to define or redefine suburbia, but instead to grapple with the ‘post-suburban’ moment, to understand how this place called suburbia has changed and what it has evolved into, even if we now acknowledge it was never quite what we thought it was. The idea of ‘post-suburbia’ is at the heart of Nick Phelps and Fulong Wu’s edited volume International Perspectives on Suburbanization: A Post-Suburban World?, and to their credit they grapple with historical, spatial and political-economic definitions of the term. Is the post-suburban about a new age of suburbanism, a new physical/economic space or a new set of networked actors and institutions?”
“Roger Keil’s Suburban Constellations sees Simone embracing Matthew Gandy over halal Chinese in a strip mall in Markham. It is a fabulously bold explosion of color from Keil who, along with Ute Lehrer and co-conspirators like Alan Mabin, has dutifully been attempting to provided structure, support and inspiration to global suburbanists the world over (in the interests of full disclosure, I too have benefited from their efforts, and will be part of one of the forthcoming collections). One of the first of many forthcoming products from the Global Suburbanisms project hosted at York (in post-suburban Toronto, naturally), Constellations is a structured bricolage of short essays, photos, brief snippets of larger empirical projects, suburban wanders and one very interesting report on a novel university–community ‘working group’ on suburban planning and community development.”
Tridel, Hullmark and Kirkor Architects/ Wikimedia Commons
“Most of us who are sometimes labeled “urbanists” believe the new age of the city is squarely upon us. Cities and urban neighborhoods once counted for dead are adding people, in some cases faster than the suburbs; at the same time, we’re seeing shortages of affordable housing in some of America’s largest and most vibrant cities. This is what Alan Eherenhalt dubs “the Great Inversion” a reversal of fortunes in which cities grow as suburbs decline. But a recent study indicates that the traditional suburban lifestyle continues to be widespread. The study, by Markus Moos of the University of Waterloo and Pablo Mendez of Carleton University, found that key features of suburban life not only remain commonplace in the suburbs but are often continued by high-income people even after they move to cities.” Keep Reading.
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