“On the surface, (the plan) may have given municipalities too much flexibility and enabled some of them to deviate less from the traditional path than the plan sought to and they needed to,” said Winfield. “You’ve got some strong responses in places like Markham. Toronto itself has stepped up. But in other places the response is somewhat weaker,” he said, after poring over the Star’s numbers. “Mississauga is quite striking. You clearly have leaders thinking in a more ambitious and creative way, and you have others who are basically wedded to the sprawl model and trying to respond to the province within that framework.”

Brampton, Winfield points out, pre-empted the growth plan by designating the entire area inside its city limits for urban expansion – including vast stretches of farmland – so it wouldn’t have to justify allowing new growth outside what’s termed the “urban boundary.”

Winfield said the province still needs to do a deeper analysis that looks at what’s happening across the GTA: not just the densities being planned, but also the population allocations and the kind of communities being planned.

He says it’s time to assess the impact of the province’s massive interventions in regional planning, including creating the Greenbelt – which made a huge swath a no-go zone for developers – and Places to Grow, which oversees what’s left.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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“SSHRC’s investment in humanities and social sciences research allows our scholars to substantially contribute to Canada’s knowledge base, to culture and to quality of life,” said Stan Shapson (right), 91ŃÇɫ’s vice-president research & innovation. “This basic research helps us to better understand the world while responding to the pressing social issues of our time.”

Forty-seven 91ŃÇÉ« faculty members received $4.4 million to fund their research projects through ’s Standard Research Grants program. 91ŃÇÉ« also received over $560,000 to support 17 projects funded through the:

• Research Development Initiatives competition
• Image, Text, Sound and Technology competition
• International Opportunities Fund
• Aid to Research Workshop competition

Graduate students and doctoral fellows also benefited from the announcements: 148 91ŃÇÉ« master’s and doctoral students have won over $5 million in scholarships and fellowships. More than 2,000 graduate and postdoctoral projects across Canada received funding.

Reflecting knowledge mobilization’s status as a core SSHRC priority, the competition also included special calls for Public Outreach Grants that support existing and ongoing projects that mobilize research results to a range of audiences beyond academia. Nine 91ŃÇÉ« projects were funded, securing over $1 million for the University.

In this category, 91ŃÇÉ« researchers enjoyed a 67 per cent success rate; in comparison, 2009 SSHRC applicants averaged a success rate of 33 per cent across all categories.

Through the Public Outreach Grants, 91ŃÇÉ« researchers will:

• Make literary research available to a broader community of researchers, students, teachers and educators, and policy makers in a sustainable way through the (ORION).
• Empower young mothers by exploring what they need to achieve economic, social, familial and personal wellness and prosperity.
• Share research conducted with marginalized youth with educators, community organizations and other stakeholders to help them understand the alienation and disengagement new migrants and ethno-racial minority youth experience as their families move from Toronto’s inner city and inner-suburban neighbourhoods to the outer suburbs, such as Peel, Brampton, Vaughan, Markham, Ajax and Pickering.
• Enhance microcredit program success for economic development through social performance ratings by making the information accessible and designing program evaluation instruments.
• Share new scholarship on the immigration of African American refugees from slavery to Canada with educators, community groups, libraries and government agencies, among others.
• Mobilize knowledge on the political economy of women’s rights—specifically, connections among macroeconomic policy, public policies that impact the paid and unpaid work of women, and women’s access to human rights—to local human rights organizations that focus on women.
• Provide experts in performance making, theatre design and green technology with a three-day opportunity to share practices, approaches and technological innovations.
• Mobilize the Aboriginal peoples of Canada’s disparate experiences with and knowledge of conservation by bringing together Aboriginal community representatives, academics, policy-makers, and conservation practitioners.
• Inform climate change policy and practice by making climate change research and evidence available to policy partners in four GTA municipalities (, , and ), and the .

“These awards also build upon 91ŃÇɫ’s amazing success earlier this year in SSHRC’s large-scale collaborative competitions,” said Shapson. “91ŃÇÉ« received $6 million through SSHRC’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) and Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) programs. Professors Roger Keil, Pat Armstrong and Carla Lipsig-Mumme are already collaborating with their international research teams to study global suburbanisms, long-term residential healthcare, and work in a warming world.”

“Their work, coupled with the projects funded through this announcement, addresses key social issues facing Canadian society while demonstrating our leadership in creating and sharing new knowledge across the social sciences and humanities.”

“Our government continues to invest in world-class research to improve Canadians’ quality of life and increase the supply of highly qualified graduates that Canada needs to be successful,” said the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry. “The social sciences and humanities show us how to harness and interpret innovation from a human perspective, which translates into benefits for society.”

has posted a complete list of funded projects on their website.

By Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

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“The suburbs have not received a lot of attention, so we’re trying to shift the lens, so to speak,” says Keil, director of the City Institute at 91ŃÇÉ« (CITY). “Urbanization is at the core of the growth and crisis of the global economy today. Yet, the crucial aspect of 21st-century urban development is suburbanization, which is defined as the combination of an increase in non-central city population and economic activity, as well as urban spatial expansion.”

Left: Suburbs being built in 91ŃÇÉ« Region. Photo by Roger Keil.

With $2.5 million in research funding through the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada’s program, Keil, along with some 43 researchers from around the globe, will study various aspects of what he likes to call the in-between city. Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century is “the first major research project that takes stock of worldwide suburban developments in a systematic way. By studying suburbs, we analyze recent forms of urbanization and emerging forms of urbanism across the world, but we also take into view the dilemmas of aging suburbanity,” he says. Canadian suburbanization and suburbanism trends will serve as a critical basis for understanding suburbanization in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia.

What makes suburbs so important to study is their abundant growth. In the 1800s, only about two per cent of the world’s population was urbanized. That increased to about 10 per cent in the 1900s and to almost 50 per cent in the early 2000s. The suburbs are changing and growing, and, in North America at least, they are becoming the place to be. “It’s a percentage increase but also a real increase because the world population has risen dramatically,” says Keil. “More and more people don’t live in dense urban centres anymore, they live in suburbs. So now we call it suburbanization instead of urbanization.” Canada is one of the most highly urbanized countries in the world and that includes the suburbs. When people immigrate to Canada, they often move straight to the suburbs, places like Brampton and Markham, bypassing cities like Toronto altogether.

Right: Roger Keil

The question then becomes, “When we see a suburb, how do we understand it? We want to create a different way of looking at things,” says Keil. “We also hope in the process…this information becomes useful to users of suburban spaces, where they consume and produce, as well as to developers.”

By examining the governance of suburbanization, researchers will get a better idea of how development is guided and regulated, and how state, market and civil society actors are involved. The seven-year project is comprised of many smaller studies of two to four years in length. The two prime anchors will be land – housing, shelter systems, real estate, greenbelts and megaprojects – and infrastructure, including transportation, water and social services.

Keil’s own keen interest is in greenbelts and the relationships between natural and social, urban and suburban. How, for instance, does water fit in? Where does it come from, a pipe, a lake, a well? What is the relationship of suburbanization to water? How is it used? “We need to develop alternatives and this is particularly true in environmental metabolism of waste disposal, water, smog. The energy use has increased…the environmental bads growing out of suburbs have outpaced suburbanization,” he says. “We all live in one environmental global space.” There is a need to understand that interconnectivity.

Left: Suburb of Kuisebmond in Namibia, Africa. Photo by Roger Keil.

In the process of studying suburbanization, researchers will be up against the traditional biases and ingrained way people think about the areas surrounding the city core, often as urban sprawl. “We need to break down and expand the way people look at the suburbs,” says Keil. There is not just one type of suburban development. There are the squatter settlements in Africa and Latin America, the expanding outskirts of India and China, the peripheral high-rise developments in Europe and Canada, and North America’s gated communities. With the different types of development come different social and cultural norms, land-use patterns and forms of transportation. “Through one lens we say these are all suburbanizations.” Until now, there has been “no serious attempt to bring all these phenomena together.”

This project will look at the differences between central cities and suburbs, as well as the diversity of suburban development. “Suburbs are very diverse ethnically, culturally and lifestyle-wise and the gender roles are not as traditional as 'Leave it to Beaver' may have led us to believe.” People around the world have negotiated the suburban realm in a variety of different ways.

New forms of suburbanization are being created all the time. There are copycat North American suburbs in Calcutta, for instance. Keil expects that suburbs around the world have different trajectories of where they’re going and he hopes that they can learn from one another. As it turns out, all cities and suburbs are not looking like Los Angeles or Chicago, as once thought. “We’re turning that upside down,” says Keil. “Conceptually, we want to rewrite the books. The suburbs can all be understood under a number of guidelines we want to develop. So there is a common lens we can look through despite the large variety of forms we see.”

In addition to the various studies, classes, workshops and conferences will held around the world. There will be a travelling multimedia exhibition at the end, a book series and a series of documentaries produced in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada. 91ŃÇɫ’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit will connect the research with policy-makers and community organizations over the span of the project.

Through this project, the suburbs may finally get a little respect.

For more information, visit the CITY Web site.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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