Global Suburbanisms: Governance Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century Archives | Research & Innovation

91��ɫ MES students explore shrinking cities in Germany

fmaquito — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 08:00:00 +0000

What do urban planners do when cities are shrinking, not growing? This is hard to imagine in a city like Toronto, where real estate is at a premium and construction cranes are a constant feature of the skyline. However, many German cities have been steadily shrinking in population size over the last three decades, resulting in thousands of empty buildings and an increase in demolitions rather than construction projects.

Right: A cooperatively owned high-rise building in Halle has a market at its base with three identical abandoned buildings behind it. Photo by Josh Neubauer

This summer, 13 master’s students from 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies travelled to Berlin and Leipzig to participate in a graduate urban planning course, co-taught by a team of 91��ɫ faculty members under the directorship of environmental studies Professor Ute Lehrer and urban studies coordinator Douglas Young, as well as CITY postdoctoral fellow Will Poppe. The students learned first-hand how German planners are responding to large-scale population decline in urbanized areas.

“This workshop gave me the opportunity to go to Europe for the first time, and Berlin simply blew me away,” says Nishanthan Balasubramaniam, a student in the Masters of Environmental Studies (MES) Planning Program. “I learned a lot about German planning and culture. This course abroad was an unforgettable experience.”

From June 24 to July 9, the students spoke with urban researchers, local planners, activists and residents. Through these conversations, along with many hours of exploring Leipzig, Berlin and Halle-Neustadt on foot and by bike, and taking hundreds of photographs, the students pieced together a picture of how East German cities are working to adapt to their shrinking populations and socio-economic challenges, and what these changes have meant for the everyday lives of residents.

Left: 91��ɫ planning students consult a map of Halle-Neustadt with local planners. Photo by Josh Neubauer

The students learned that many of the biggest changes are taking place in neighbourhoods that are visibly similar to parts of Toronto – demolitions are taking place in the clusters of pre-fabricated apartment towers on the edges of the city. These communities, like Toronto’s high-rise neighbourhoods, are often stigmatized even though many of their residents are relatively content. MES planning student Gwen Potter says residents are concerned about the way their community has been targeted for demolition. “From our conversations with local residents, we heard about their deep pride in their community,” says Potter.

Despite the challenges that population decline has created for residents and planners, it has also produced unexpected benefits in communities like Grünau. With fewer apartment blocks, there are now more open spaces, and the community is surrounded by lush meadows and forests. Throughout Leipzig, residents are making the best of the shrinking population by turning demolition sites into new green spaces. As they walked and biked through these neighbourhoods, the 91��ɫ planning students were struck by how differently plants and trees were integrated in the community than in Toronto’s manicured neighbourhoods. “I was introduced to a new way of discussing the urban landscape and the importance of urban ecology,” says MES planning student Christine Furtado, who sees the benefits of this practice.

For the students, the course provided an important international perspective where they learned about the contradictions of new developments at the periphery at the same time that population decline is occurring in the core city. With continued sprawl and decreasing populations, planners in many German cities now work with community members, property owners and developers to shape their urban spaces with a focus on quality rather than quantity. The students indicated they were inspired by the innovative approaches to community building that have emerged as a result of these collaborations and hope to carry these lessons into their future planning work in Canada.

Right: Population loss leaves room for an abundance of green space in Grünau, Leipzig. Photo by Josh Neubauer

During the course, the students also had the opportunity to learn about the challenges of suburban neighbourhoods and outlying tower districts all over the world. They observed a two-day conference on suburban governance organized as part of 91��ɫ’s Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded major collaborative research initiative (MCRI) – Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land & Infrastructure in the 21st Century, which brought together international researchers studying suburbanization processes around the world. The direct link between the themes of the workshop and the conference were an essential component of the learning experience in Leipzig.

As Lehrer says, “This course had a different approach than your normal planning workshop because it was trying to make a regular course part of an international research project. This innovative teaching approach allows both students and researchers to learn from each other in ways that are not possible in a regular classroom. It was a huge success and we hope to replicate it by taking students to Montpellier, France, next year and to Shanghai in 2014.”

Left: Large apartment buildings being demolished in the Grünau neighbourhood in outer Leipzig. Photo by Josh Neubauer

The 91��ɫ students also shared findings and research interests with a group of Polish architecture and sociology students conducting their own analysis of the Leipzig-Grünau housing estate, which added another important international dimension.

The MES students are now producing a final report, aimed at planners and policy-makers in Toronto and the GTA, that will draw on their research in Germany to make recommendations for how Toronto’s tower neighbourhoods might be transformed.

This graduate course was a component of the Global Suburbanisms project based at 91��ɫ’s CITY Institute under the direction of Professor Roger Keil. The course was made possible with generous financial support of 91��ɫ International and the German Academic Exchange Service and benefited from institutional, academic and personal support of Professor Sigrun Kabisch and Professor Dieter Rink, as well as other colleagues from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, a partner in 91��ɫ’s Global Suburbanisms project.

By 91��ɫ MES students Gwen Potter and Josh Neubauer, who travelled to Germany this summer

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

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Four researchers to offer fresh ideas at Saturday's 91��ɫ Circle event

fmaquito — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

From the ‘burbs to birds and from social justice to Olympic poetry, the next installment of the 91��ɫ Circle’s popular Lecture & Lunch series returns on Saturday, April 30. It promises plenty of new ideas for inquiring minds.

As with previous 91��ɫ Circle Lecture & Lunch events, organizers have planned a full day of inspiring lectures by some of the University’s leading thinkers. For full details, download a PDF of the 91��ɫ Circle schedule.

In her lecture, “The Bird Detective: Investigating the Private Lives of Birds”, 91��ɫ Professor Bridget Stutchbury (left), Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology, will explain why some birds readily divorce their partners, why females sneak out to have sex with neighbouring males and why some mothers sometimes desert their babies. Based on her book (2010), this lecture promises to raise the blinds on the secret lives of birds.

On a more serious note, Stutchbury will examine whether bird behaviour can help species adapt to the drastic changes humans are making to the environment. Since the 1980s, Stutchbury has studied the ecology and conservation of migratory songbirds. In addition to The Bird Detective, she is author of the book (2007) – a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

"The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African, and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade" is the intriguing title of the presentation by 91��ɫ history Professor Paul Lovejoy (right), Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History and director of the . In his lecture, Lovejoy will explore the pivotal role of Gustavus Vassa, better known by his African name, Olaudah Equiano (c. 1742-1797), in advancing the abolition of the British slave trade. Many scholars consider William Wilberforce (c. 1759-1833) and Thomas Clarkson (c. 1760-1846) to be the pioneers of the British abolitionist movement, but Lovejoy posits that it was Equiano who was the seminal influence in advocating the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those in slavery.

Lovejoy is a member of the executive committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project, co-edits African Economic History and Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents (SHADD), and is research professor and associate fellow of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.

Acclaimed Canadian poet and 91��ɫ Professor (left) will discuss her experiences as Canadian Athletes Now Fund’s first poet-in-residence during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games. In her lecture, which is aptly titled, "My Gold Medal Experience: Olympic Poetry", Uppal will describe how she celebrated with the Canadian athletes and their families by writing poetry about winter sports, the games, and the personalities and performances that captured a nation’s imagination.

How she designed and then “trained” for her position, how the athletes responded to daily poetry readings, and other initiatives she’s undertaken to bridge the sometimes separate worlds of sport and art, will all be addressed. In addition, Uppal will read a short selection of the some of the 50 poems written at the games and recently collected in the book Winter Sport: Poems (2010).

"A World of Suburbs? Finding the Heart of the Urban Century in the Periphery" with 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Roger Keil (right) will offer 91��ɫ Circle members insights into urbanization. The 21st century has been heralded as an urban century. Indeed, urbanization is now the most tangible shared experience of humanity. Keil will explore what is behind the story of the "urban revolution". He will uncover an important and perhaps astonishing truth: Most urban dwellers now live in the periphery. From the squatter settlements of the Global South to the wealthy gated communities of North America, from the tower block peripheries of Europe or Canada to the newly sprawling cities of Asia, a common theme emerges: where cities grow, they grow at the margins.

Keil is the director of the City Institute at 91��ɫ and professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Among his publications are In-Between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability (2010) and The Global Cities Reader (2006). Keil’s current research is on global suburbanism and regional governance. He is the co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and a co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action.

This free series includes two events annually – in the spring and fall each year – and provides opportunities for learning and networking in a relaxed environment.

Lecture & Lunch events are open to members of the 91��ɫ Circle and their guests, each of whom are offered a complimentary lunch sourced from 91��ɫ Region as part of the day.

The 91��ɫ Circle receives generous support from 91��ɫ's Alumni Office (program partner) and the Toronto Community News and Metroland Media Group 91��ɫ Region (print media sponsors).

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

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Filmmaker draws inspiration from work of Global Suburbanisms team

fmaquito — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:00:00 +0000

A United Way report last week highlighted a problem in Toronto: our city’s poor are increasingly concentrated in crumbling highrise towers, mostly in the inner suburbs, wrote :

The report addresses a subject that National Film Board filmmaker-in-residence Katerina Cizek has been studying for two years, while making films on a digital, interactive project called Highrise. Her films allow viewers to click in and around apartment towers in Toronto and around the world to hear the stories of residents. In the wake of the United Way report, EYE WEEKLY checked in with Cizek to get her thoughts on the state of our concrete vertical suburbs, and the need to rejuvenate them.

Q: What are the “Highrise” films, in a nutshell?

A: The original idea was to do something in Toronto, as a city. Not City Hall, but Toronto; to see how documentary can be part of city building. I’m not someone who studies the city—I’m not an urban planner, I’m not an architect—and I had certain assumptions about the city. The city I live in—Toronto—but also the urban experience in general. I think we are, or at least I was, at fault in thinking of the city as something that kind of happens to you, rather than as something we create and we constantly reinvent.

I got really inspired by this phenomenal world-class research that’s happening in our city—from David Hulchanski, ERA Architects and 91��ɫ’s —not only to engage in the city I live in but to start rethinking how we understand the city all over the world. What “urban” entails is not what we typically think: it’s actually at the edges, at the periphery, in the suburbs where some of the most complex, diverse, interesting and highly problematic things are happening. We need to understand these things in order to be able to do something about them. “Highrise” is, quite simply, a multi-year, multimedia documentary exploring the human experience in “vertical suburbs” around the world.

The Global Suburbanisms project is led by Professor Roger Keil in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, director of the City Institute, and funded by the (SSHRC). The National Film Board is a partner in the project.

The rest of the interview is available on .

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

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National Film Board doc offers glimpses into immigrants’ high-rise world

fmaquito — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Documentary is affiliated with 91��ɫ's Global Suburbanisms Project

Take a glimpse into someone’s life that is otherwise invisible to most, wrote in a story about the groundbreaking, web-based work Out My Window, by the National Film Board of Canada, that offers glimpses of lives within housing developments:

Zanillya Maria Farrell is a musician and the daughter of the recently deceased singer Bobby Farrell of the disco group Boney M. Many would label her part of the huge, immigrant community in a southeast corner of Amsterdam and stop there. But her story, although unique, symbolizes the dramatic changes happening in cities around the world.In the groundbreaking, Web-based work Out My Window by the National Film Board of Canada, Farrell’s story is one of 13 offering glimpses of lives within otherwise anonymous housing developments.

. . .

[Director Katerina] Cizek and [NFB producer Gerry] Flahive are also collaborating with academic research on how cities are changing, such as the multiyear at 91��ɫ’s City Institute, which looks at how cities have inverted: The suburbs are now the lower-income peripheries and the inner city is the wealthier urban core.

Many people in this changing suburban periphery “don’t have cars. They’re not stereotypically suburban. ... They are invisible, to some extent politically invisible. But they are also physically invisible because they are not living in Chinatown or Little Italy. They are living in these anonymous high-rise blocks,” Flahive says.

“And that’s a really good place for documentaries,” he adds. “The overall Highrise project is not about architecture and urban planning. Primarily, it’s about how people live. The attempt is to peel back some of those stereotypes.”

The individual segments for Out My Window were made by local photographers and crews, with Cizek often directing the segments from thousands of kilometres away in Toronto via Skype, e-mails and phone calls.

Yet, for all of its emphasis on technology, Cizek and Flahive are actually going for something far older: A non-linear way of telling the story of people’s lives in the lower-income high-rises, doing so in the way people in the real world perceive things, in small dollops of information, rather than regular, documentary-length stories.

The Global Suburbanisms Project is led by Professor Roger Keil in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and funded by the (SSHRC).

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

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91��ɫ anthropology prof wins prestigious North American award

fmaquito — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ anthropology Professor (PhD '07) has been named the recipient of Public Anthropology’s prestigious Eleanor Roosevelt Global Citizenship Award. Named to honour the former first lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt, the award celebrates her role as chair of the United Nations committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Left: Karl Schmid

The award recognizes Schmid's participation in Public Anthropology’s Community Action online project as well his wider activities in the public sphere. According to Robert Borofsky, director of the Center for Public Anthropology and a professor of anthropology at Hawaii Pacific University, less than one per cent of faculty teaching introductory anthropology courses across North America receive this award.

"Professor Schmid is to be commended for how he takes classroom knowledge and applies it to real-world challenges, thereby encouraging students to be responsible global citizens," says Borofsky. "In actively addressing important ethical concerns within anthropology, Professor Schmid is providing students with the thinking and writing skills needed for active citizenship. Congratulations to Professor Schmid, the Department of Anthropology and 91��ɫ on this honour."

Seven of Schmid's students .

Schmid’s research focuses on southern Egypt, especially Luxor, a city which is being rapidly transformed into a transnational tourism zone. Luxor (site of ancient Thebes) has been reconfigured as a World Heritage Site visited by more than five million tourists each year. Schmid documents how the rapid transformation of the city centre has been accomplished by tearing down dozens of public and residential buildings to recreate a 3,500-year-old "avenue of the sphinxes" between two major ancient Egyptian temples.

He is also a collaborator in supported by through the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives program. The project involves a team of international researchers conducting the first comprehensive, comparative analysis of urban expansion and the creation of suburbs in diverse locales around the world.

Among Schmid's recent publications is the article "Doing Ethnography of Tourist Enclaves: Boundaries, Ironies, and Insights" published in the journal Tourist Studies.

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

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

fmaquito — Tue, 18 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The suburbs have often been dismissed as cultureless wastelands of cookie-cutter housing and strip malls. But 91��ɫ 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 is suburban development and yet, until now, there has not been an encompassing study of suburbs around the world which examines their challenges and commonalities.

“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 91��ɫ (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 91��ɫ 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. 91��ɫ’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– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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