Creating a teaching city - Oshawa’s urban lab
NRU
March 29, 2017
By Leah Wong
Academics, city councilors and staff are working to turn Oshawa into an urban laboratory, where new technologies, policies and practices will be developed to address complex urban issues.
Yesterday Oshawa development services committee recommended that council direct staff to enter into a memorandum of understanding with University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Durham College, University of Toronto’s civil engineering department and the Canadian Urban Institute to establish Oshawa as a centre for urban innovation. The MOU will serve as an umbrella agreement for the partnership, with specific projects, and their terms and funding, negotiated at a later date.
City manager Jag Sharma told NRU that this is an opportunity to leverage the post-secondary institutions and associated talent pool in Oshawa to address some of the issues facing the city in an innovative and effective way.
“Oshawa is blessed with a number of amenities that make it well positioned [for this initiative],” said Sharma. “We have a deep-water port, two 400-series highways, an airport, three post-secondary institutions and a number of private organizations we have fostered great relationships with.”
In a presentation to committee Monday, UOIT associate professor Dan Hoornweg said the idea of using a city as an urban laboratory is based on the teaching hospitals model used by the healthcare sector.
Hoornweg said the idea of creating a “teaching city” emerged during his time at the World Bank, where he was the lead advisor on sustainable cities. While he said the World Bank spent “a lot of money trying to get cities right,” he has yet to see a teaching city created.
“We have a vision [for Oshawa] to be a primary location for companies to develop and test new technologies and innovations for urban development,” said Hoornweg.
Oshawa is well-placed to become a teaching city-it is located within one of the largest urban regions in North America and, though it is a mid-sized municipality, it is dealing with a number of “big city” issues. Hoornweg noted that there are both mature and growing areas within the city that would facilitate a range of projects.
While researchers have no globally accepted definition of what constitutes “urban” the partners will develop projects that address issues Oshawa is facing. These could concern hard services-such as transportation, energy, water and waste-municipal regulation, policy or data management.
Once the MOU is signed, the partners will start to identify potential projects. Meanwhile, Sharma said there are a few initiatives underway that are consistent with the concept of a teaching city and which may become part of the broader collaboration.
City staff is currently working with UOIT to develop a diversity and inclusion strategy. Sharma noted that as the population in the north end of the city increases, there has been a shift in demographics with the community becoming more diverse than in the past.
“It’s important to us to ensure we have a good diversity and inclusion strategy as the demographic breakdown of Oshawa is changing,” said Sharma. “That is an example of something that is real time and
hard hitting for us.”
