U of T’s School of Cities looks to tackle problems of growing urban centres

With 64 per cent of the world’s population expected to live in urban centres by 2050, U of T is launching a hub for cross-discipline collaboration to make cities a better place to live.

Thestar.com
May 8, 2018
Gilbert Ngabo

From affordable housing to transit and environment, Toronto and cities around the world face some big challenges, and a new initiative at the University of Toronto wants to help address some of the toughest ones.

The School of Cities, set to launch on July 1, is touted as a platform for students and academics across disciplines to engage with city builders and urban policy-makers and generate practical solutions to day-to-day challenges.

“The way we see the opportunity for the School of Cities, it’s kind of like a big tent,” said Shauna Brail, director of U of T’s urban studies program. The university already has over 200 urban experts across its three campuses who are doing research in a range of disciplines such as public health, engineering and architecture. The School of Cities aims to bring them together for a “collision of ideas,” she said.

The new school will not be a degree-granting unit with its own faculty staff and students. Instead, Brail explained, it will serve as a hub for industry experts, governments and community partners to work together in addressing specific urban problems.

“If we’re discussing affordable housing, for instance, which is a huge challenge in Toronto, what does architecture contribute? What does public health or urban design or public arts contribute?” she said. “We’re really missing out on building a fuller picture by not bringing all those partners and individuals together.”

Brail said the creation of the school was partially inspired by recent estimates from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs that predict about 66 per cent of the world’s total population will live in urban centres by 2050 -- up from 54 per cent in 2014.

According to Statistics Canada 2016 numbers, the urban population in the Toronto region is growing at a pace of about 100,000 people every year. Such growth requires co-ordinated efforts to make city centres livable and sustainable, Brail said.

Plans are underway for the school to host a global cities summit at which the world’s leading urban thinkers will convene to discuss metropolitan issues. The university is also working on a number of international partnerships to extend the school’s outreach, including recently signed MOUs with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai, and the Pune Smart City Development Corporation, Brail added.

Urban planner Joe Berridge said the U of T initiative is similar to the LSE Cities, a centre at the London School of Economics that applies research and teaching projects to identify and solve issues in urban centres.

“I’ve been terribly envious of that program, and we don’t have that kind of thing in Toronto right now,” said Berridge, who has contributed to notable urban projects such as the Manchester Airport City plan, the Downtown Sudbury Master Plan and the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization project.

He believes the School of Cities has the potential to become an internationally-recognized hub for transforming cities and helping run them in a practical manner.

“There’s nowhere a city manager can learn what other cities are doing, in a learning environment,” he said of the role this school could play.

“I think what’s lacking in the city is an objective attempt to think at big city problems from a real analytical way. This combination of academics and practitioners could be a marvellous opportunity.”