Urban Genome Project

University of Toronto researchers have started to look for ways to leverage the School of Cities to connect with colleagues across the university to approach urban issues from multiple angles.

There are a number of School of Cities initiatives in the works that will help to make those connections, including the Urban Genome Project, which brings together experts from disciplines like engineering, sociology and architecture to understand the way neighbourhoods change and develop using data, and the Urban Lab where students, faculty and industry partners can work together on solving urban problems.

The School of Cities will also be a hub for �鶹ֱ��app’s urban-focused scholars to collaborate and add new dimensions to their current research.

“We're all working on common problems that relate to our research areas and relate to the different experiences we've had in working in different parts of the city,” says Daniel Silver, an associate sociology professor at �鶹ֱ��app Scarborough and one of the leads of the Urban Genome Project.

“We talk about that a lot as an ideal of the University of Toronto but to create a place where it will be built into the basic self-understanding and organized principles – that's an exciting proposition.”

Marieme Lo, director of African studies and associate professor of African and women and gender studies, looks forward to collaborating with members of different faculties “to tackle complex challenges of urban transformation and development in the 21st century.”

Lo’s current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, looks at African women entrepreneurs across several cities and three continents. She says the School of Cities has exposed her to faculty members with shared research interests who can help her expand the scope of her work to include academics, activists, policymakers and entrepreneurs.

“It's exciting to see colleagues who are working on issues of globalization or urbanization, urban planning and economics, and others who would be really wonderful colleagues to work with on this long-standing project,” she says.

She is planning an international conference in Dakar, Senegal, in 2019. It's “an opportunity for students and colleagues to get a feel for the dynamics of urban transformations and the daily rhythm of a bustling African city,” says Lo.

Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor of civil engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, says her research into the environmental outcomes of large-scale infrastructure projects would greatly benefit from collaboration with other disciplines.

She cites rail infrastructure as an example.

“Colleagues in geography look at transportation as well as planning questions, but then there's also questions about people's quality and experience of life,” she says. “Is the new station near somebody's home? How does that improve their quality of life and equity across the city, or if it doesn't, where are the opportunities to do better?

“I think these are interdisciplinary questions that need answers from different perspectives.”

Read about the School of Cities announcement

Read about initiatives underway at the School of Cities

Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor in the department of geography & planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science, is researching buildings that have multiple uses – public and private. They include a building currently under construction that integrates a women and children’s homeless shelter with a condo building and Maple Leaf Gardens, which houses an athletic centre and a grocery store.

“Folks who understand the architecture side of this can provide insight on how in the future we might design these buildings differently, people from the business school can help with the economics of these types of arrangements,” he says. “People in engineering, public health and medicine who have extensive experience in implementation studies can try to evaluate, work and collaborate on how to understand the success of these types of initiatives.”

For a discipline like architecture, the School of Cities will not only allow the faculty to tap into the diverse knowledge that exists at the university, but it will also help expose other disciplines to the work of its architects and designers, says Liat Margolis, associate professor of landscape architecture at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

“Other faculties and scholars would find that a collaboration with us would be something they've never encountered before – the ability to visually map a place, to visualize natural systems and dynamics, to understand how that affects communities, and how a new future or a new place is materialized,” she says.

These collaborative research projects will explore urban issues within Toronto and the wider GTA, utilizing the expertise of urban scholars at the downtown Toronto campus, as well as �鶹ֱ��app Mississauga and �鶹ֱ��app Scarborough.

“We have the opportunity to look at Mississauga, a city that is younger than downtown Toronto, and see how you can evolve a city along slightly different lines and have different challenges and opportunities,” says Rhonda McEwen, associate professsor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information & Technology at �鶹ֱ��app Mississauga and an associate professor in the Faculty of Information.

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One of the big issues affecting most cities around the world is rising inequality. David Hulchanski, a professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, has found that the growing gap between rich and poor is driving lower-income residents to the edges of the city, and beyond to the suburbs and neighbouring municipalities.

“Geographic or spatial inequality is a very under-researched topic,” says Richard Florida, University Professor and director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at �鶹ֱ��app’s Rotman School of Management.

The School of Cities will provide an opportunity to look at the complex issue of inequality using resources from across the university.

“Once we place the city as a unit of inquiry, a subject of a school, then we begin to elevate those issues in the eyes of the public, experts and critical leaders,” he says. “We need to dissect the things that create prosperity, inequality, unity – our cities are really containers for economic growth and division, and that's hopefully what the school will do.”

Addressing issues like inequality means giving a voice to marginalized and underrepresented communities, says Eve Tuck, associate professor of critical race and Indigenous studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

“For the School of Cities to have integrity, it will need to prioritize the needs of Black communities, Indigenous communities, and immigrant communities of colour in this city, especially by addressing housing, policing, access to health care, and schooling,” she says.

This means not only providing communities with resources and expertise, but working in partnership to address the urban issues that affect them, says McEwen.

“Academics working in conjunction with members of the communities they research with – not just as research sites but as peers who work with us to evolve the research – is a different approach, a different philosophy to the research where we're talking about inclusion with the people who are on the ground living these experiences in our cities,” she says.

Like ‘a performance-enhancing drug’ for cities: �鶹ֱ��app's urban genome project

ullahnor — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 16:01:04 +0000

Like ‘a performance-enhancing drug’ for cities: �鶹ֱ��app's urban genome project

ullahnor Mon, 02/13/2017 - 11:01

Cutline

Mark Fox and Dan Silver hope to start unraveling the DNA of cities by researching the makeup of cities like Mumbai (photo by Vidur Malhotra via Flickr)

Jennifer Robinson

Author legacy

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

Global Lens

Connaught Fund

Urban Genome Project

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

�鶹ֱ��app Scarborough

Connaught Global Challenge Award

Subheadline

Mumbai and Toronto are on the short list for the first set of cities to study

What makes a city tick? Why does it grow the way it does? How is it like other cities and yet unique?

In essence, what is its DNA?

With its forward-pushing Urban Genome Project, the University of Toronto is trying to unravel the urban tangle, with its arterial transportation systems, its cultural and social networks and its sedimentary layers of history, to chart a better way forward for cities in the future.

Led by Mark Fox, �鶹ֱ��app’s distinguished professor of urban systems engineering, and researchers from diverse fields of management, geography, sociology, and architecture, the Urban Genome Project is one of three recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award. The $250,000 in funding from the Connaught Fund will be used by an interdisciplinary team, drawn from �鶹ֱ��app’s more than 200 experts in urban issues.

Like the Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced and mapped the complete human genetic blueprint to help solve thousands of diseases, Fox and his right-hand partner on the project, Dan Silver, an associate sociology professor at �鶹ֱ��app Scarborough, hope to pinpoint the ground zero of urban challenges and develop specialized solutions, kind of like “a performance enhancing drug” for cities.

New York City. Mumbai. London. Toronto. Lagos. Rio de Janeiro. All cities are different, from history to landscapes to languages spoken.

They’re also the same: economic powerhouses that fuel business, social change and cultural creativity, impacting the lives of the almost four billion people who call them home and everyone else as well.

And beyond the bright lights and teeming streets pulsing with excitement, their streets and neighbourhoods are also where some of the ugliest and most confounding problems of the world are playing out – from rising inequality to political turmoil and transportation gridlock.

“City problems are difficult problems. They’re difficult because they touch so many parts of the city, the people, the organizations that exist in it,” explains Fox, who has a background in artificial intelligence and robotics research.

“I like to think of cities – as a whole – as like a bunch of experiments,” he continues. “Each city itself is an experiment in creating an environment that can sustain that kind of intense, dynamic interaction, constantly creating it over and over again. We, as researchers, want to understand how each of those experiments plays out.”

With the world so dependent on the success of cities, his team wants to know how “if you slightly changed structures in cities,” they might grow and develop in more sustainable, resilient and adaptable ways, he says.

Cities, however, aren’t as abundant as lab rats or fruit flies, and no mayor is going to willingly hand over the keys for an experiment on this scale. Simply observing and cataloguing statistics, which they will also do, is not enough, Fox argues.

That’s why he and his team will eventually take their research and grow their own cities to test their ideas, using the latest advancements in sophisticated artificial intelligence programs. Think SimCity.

“You can really know a lot about cities, but how do you know you really understand them?” asks Silver. “You know you truly understand if you can grow one yourself, so to speak, in an artificial setting.”

But first they need to map the “urban genome” and decipher the unique strands of DNA each city has. These then guide the different pathways a city can develop.

Cities are “terribly complicated, complex systems,” where a seemingly simple change – like adding a high-rise tower or cutting public transportation services – can have rippling, unintended consequences across broad swathes of the overall city ecosystem.

“We always refer to hard things as, ‘It’s rocket science or it’s brain surgery.’ Well . . . rocket science is simple compared to this,” Fox says. “As an engineer, one of the first things we do is we try and simplify the problem. By design, we remove all the external complexities, whereas what makes cities interesting are those complexities!”

The two researchers, who gleefully finish each other’s sentences like childhood friends, may seem like odd teammates at first. But breaking down academic silos – and those that exist in cities among service departments – is the foundation upon which the project will succeed or fail, they argue.

This is crucial, Fox says, because resolving an urban problem is like playing a game of pick-up sticks. It is virtually impossible to remove a stick from the pile without disturbing another. The problem can’t be solved in isolation.

Think of a beautiful Bernini fountain in Rome. The city sanitation department decides it wants to close the fountain to save money. It’s no longer needed for its original purpose anyway –everyone has indoor plumbing and water at home.

But over centuries the fountain has become a gathering place where information is exchanged, and people make friends and meet future spouses. All the impacts of the fountain closure are not obvious.

If you’re a sanitation engineer or a sociologist sitting alone contemplating the closure “those [other perspectives] aren’t even going to come to you, and if they do, you’re not going to know how to even begin to grapple with them. The complexity of the object requires this complexity of points of view,” Silver says.

Fox and Silver see Mumbai and Toronto on the short list for the first set of cities to study. A global approach is necessary since all cities are interconnected.

“You can’t really understand yourself without looking at others,” Silver says.

Over time, they envision their project – and �鶹ֱ��app – as a critical global research hub where other institutions involved in similar studies like the London School of Economics and MIT can share data to build the ‘genome.’

Realizing the sweeping global ambition of the Urban Genome Project will take decades, Fox admits. And if they’re successful and crack the nut, there’s no guarantee city bureaucrats and politicians will listen.

“Politics always trumps reality,” he says, not the least bit dissuaded. “There are a lot of people who are not in any way persuaded by facts. There’s always going to be that issue.”

The application deadline for the next round of funding from the Connaught Global Challenge Award is June 1, 2017.

Urban Genome Project

�鶹ֱ��app’s School of Cities to take urban research and collaboration to new heights

Read about the School of Cities announcement

Read about initiatives underway at the School of Cities

Visit schoolofcities.com

Read more about the School of Cities

Like ‘a performance-enhancing drug’ for cities: �鶹ֱ��app's urban genome project

Read about the other Connaught Global Challenge winners