During the on-going pandemic, humanity’s suffering has increased enormously. To date, 35 million people in the world have contracted the coronavirus, and more than 1 million have died. In the richest and most powerful country in the world, more than 7 million cases have been reported, with more than 200,000 deaths. While the more affluent […]
Ian Mosby and Sarah Rotz, Special to the Globe and Mail, published April 29, 2020 “The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods Chairman John H. Tyson wrote in an open letter published in the New 91ɫ Times earlier this week. And he’s not wrong. Over the past month, anyone following the news might have […]
For the first time in my career, issues surrounding waste management have now become part of mainstream discussion. Whether it be my neighbors asking me “Can this really be recycled?” to growing concerns surrounding single use plastics, people (both the public and policy makers alike), care now more than ever regarding what is happening to […]
Susan Morrissey Wyse began her PhD in 2019 with the Faculty of Environmental Studies (now Environmental and Urban Change). The focus of her PhD dissertation is on the social impacts of low-carbon energy initiatives. The aim of her research is to investigate the intersection of democracy and justice within low carbon and renewable energy transitions. […]
In an article in The Conversation on February 17, Professors Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly, and S. Harris Ali, stressed that “[o]utbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of cities,” noting that merging infectious disease has much to do with how and where we live, and that the ongoing coronavirus is an example of the close […]
The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus illustrates that we are connected globally like never before, yet responses to the virus are decidedly local and national, exposing new geopolitical fault lines and exacerbating material divides that make the difference between living and dying. To put it bluntly, “we are simply not all in this […]
From mid-March to late May, Professor Stefan Kipfer posted a series of short articles and photo essays on social media. Inspired by his daily walks and bicycle trips around Toronto, the images tried to make sense of the news about the coronavirus that started in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and became widespread around the world. In […]
How do we reimagine public spaces – such as parks, streets, beaches, schools, libraries, and other areas of communities – in a way that they will be liveable for people in a COVID-19 world? What are the issues around equal access and rights to public and social spaces as we begin to live in this […]
The shut-down of non-essential work in response to COVID-19 has decimated labour markets. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 20.5 million more workers lost their jobs in April, as official unemployment skyrocketed to 14.7%. It is the largest single-month increase in unemployment since the data series started in 1948. In Canada, the news […]
As many people work from home, and as many are suggesting a preference to work from home, perhaps permanently, are people leaving the city for the countryside to live in exurbia, where larger homes on larger lots give people access to natural greenspaces? Exurbia has long been an interest of Laura Taylor, with her first article […]