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Downtown Montreal from Mont Royal

Adapting Urban Environments

About

Roughly half of the global population lives in urban areas, a number that is projected to increase to 70% by 2050. These urban areas are central to our transition towards sustainability — while they stand to bear the brunt of the environmental crisis, they offer great opportunity to shift to more sustainable trajectories.

The Adapting Urban Environments theme pursues critical research on urban sustainability across scales – from the neighbourhoods and cities we live in, to the national policies and global networks that inform and influence decision-making. Questions include what sustainable cities look like, how and at what scale we can best measure the impacts and benefits they provide to both residents and the natural environment, and how things like “smart cities” and “big data” can contribute to urban sustainability.

This research is generating solutions that improve the monitoring, planning and governance of urban sustainability. This is critical in the light of the many constraints on cities’ development and looming uncertainties about the future climate and economy.

Theme co-Leads

 Andrew Gonzalez, Kevin Manaugh, David Wachsmuth

Andrew Gonzalez

Biology

Kevin Manaugh

Geography, Bieler School of Environment

David Wachsmuth

Urban Planning

 

 

Research Projects

Curbcut: A platform for deep, dynamic, and intuitive exploration of urban sustainability

A screen capture of the Sus platform showing the active living potential of a Montreal neighbourhood.

Explore Curbcut here!

Urban governance, including decision making related to sustainability problems, must balance competing voices and visions over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Curbcut—an online platform for integrating sustainability data and enabling complex scenario modelling—addresses these challenges, transforming decision-making processes using a range of data sources integrated into meaningful relationships. Curbcut takes an interdisciplinary approach to urban sustainability by examining elements of the natural, built, and social environments and putting environmental and distributional justice as a key focus. The Curbcut team was recently awarded the Canadian Open Data Excellence Award by Geomatics Canada. Lead researchers: Kevin Manaugh, David Wachsmuth, Andrew Gonzalez.

  • Geographic versus institutional drivers of nitrogen footprints: A comparison of two urban universities. Environmental Research Letters, 2020. See open access paper
  • Research gaps in knowledge of the impact of urban growth on biodiversity. Nature Sustainability, 2020. See paper
  • From Transportation Equity to Transportation Justice: Within, Through, and Beyond the State. Journal of Planning Literature, 35(4), 440–459. Read more.