Every day, citizens of cities around the world deal with difficult issues like housing and affordability — which, in a notoriously high-rent city like Toronto, is on the minds of students and professionals alike. The University of Toronto’s newest institute for urban research, the Cities Centre, is a growing hub of faculty, professionals, and graduate students who have come together to discuss those issues that affect the lives of city-dwellers.
The Cities Centre, housed at 455 Spadina Avenue, was established in November 2007 with the mandate of encouraging interdisciplinary scholarly research on cities and urban policy issues. They focus on the quality of life in cities around the world, and attempt to improve communication between researchers and urban communities, and among researchers themselves.
Professor Alan Walks from the Department of Geography and UTM’s Program in Planning is a research associate at the Cities Centre. He conducts projects on urban social-spatial inequality.
“My big current project is examining the implications of automobility for Canadian cities, and for Canadian citizenship in general,” says Walks. “This includes an analysis of the effects of automobile dependence on mobility, the costs of automobility, and the effects on financial vulnerability, spatial mismatches between the location of labour, and jobs, and the implications of automobility for urban politics and policy.”
The impact of research extends far.
“My research has shed light on the processes producing urban inequality, and on the policies that might alleviate the effects of inequality, concentrated poverty, and hardship,” Walks explains. “I hope that my research continues to contribute to both policy debates regarding the best options for addressing inequality, and on our understanding of what produces inequality and poverty in the first place (including the processes behind what is known as ‘development’).”
Ron Buliung, an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at UTM, is a research associate at the Cities Centre who specializes in transportation geography.
“My work basically looks at the design, implementation, and use of transportation systems in terms of how these things play out today. And I’m also interested in the historical aspects of the development of the transportation systems in the GTA and elsewhere,” says Buliung.
“One issue is simply how do we facilitate, or enable, people to get around the city on a daily basis for their work and other activities. This is for people who want to walk, bike, take public transit, or drive. These are significant questions in the City of Toronto for the best way to move forward in building a transit system for the city.”
