Graduate students mobilize research to benefit communities through United Way of York Region

When you’re a charitable organization in York Region seeking a research partner to inform your strategic directions and priorities, whom do you turn to? If you’re United Way of York Region (UWYR), you collaborate with York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit. This summer, three York University students will gain valuable experience through internships with UWYR’s Community […]

Professor Emeritus Jerome Durlak mentored many York students

Professor Emeritus Jerome (Jerry) Durlak, a mentor to many generations of York students in numerous programs, died on Friday, May 21, in Toronto. For more than 50 years, Prof. Durlak worked on applied research and development projects internationally. He introduced innovations ranging from hybrid corn in Costa Rica to agricultural television programs in Guatemala and […]

Researcher and City Institute director shifts the lens to suburbs around the globe

The suburbs have often been dismissed as cultureless wastelands of cookie-cutter housing and strip malls. But York environmental studies Professor Roger Keil, principal investigator of a major international research initiative, says there’s a lot more happening in suburbia than people think and researchers have ignored it for far too long. Most urban growth these days […]

York professor on Markham councillors' overtuning foodbelt protection proposal

Markham councillors are facing new questions on developer influence after voting by a razor-thin margin to kill the town’s foodbelt proposal, wrote the National Post May 15. Professor Jose Etcheverry has been involved in efforts to preserve the land: Debate ran late into the night at this week’s council meeting and drew a series of […]

"In-Between City" neighbourhoods face poor services and rough justice

Last week was not a good one to be living in the “in-between city”, the term urbanists use to describe areas wedged between the outer suburbs – with their sprawling residential neighbourhoods – and the downtown core of office towers, condos and cultural institutions, wrote Simon Black, a graduate student in the City Institute at […]

Professor Gail Fraser comments on conflict of interest in Canada's offshore oil and gas regulations

Newfoundland and Labrador’s natural resources minister is rejecting calls for the overhaul of the agency that regulates the province’s offshore oil industry, even as the United States moves to distance its regulator from the companies it oversees, wrote The Globe and Mail May 12: Scientists and environmentalists argue that the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum […]

CURL mixes academics and visual arts in ongoing discussion of cities

The Collaborative Urban Research Laboratory (CURL), under the auspices of the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society at York's Osgoode Hall Law School, has officially been launched, bringing together an unusual mix of the academic and creative, and adding a complex and layered perspective to discussions about cities. CURL provides an innovative and visual approach to discussions involving globalization and […]