A thriving city is an economically vibrant and inclusive one. But how are economic resources prioritized, shared and managed? How are cities recovering from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? School of Cities research, programs and events look at how cities power the economic engines of our nations, and the impacts of the economy on all aspects of urban life.
Downtown Recovery
School of Cities collaborates with the Institute of Governmental Studies at University of California, Berkeley on the Downtown Recovery project, which is using mobile phone data to explore pandemic recovery trajectories across 63 North American cities. The project looks at visits over time to downtown areas to track rankings, patterns, and variables in the return to pre-pandemic levels of activity.

News, Media & Research
Karen Chapple in Bloomberg | Why Workers Aren’t Returning to North America’s Second Biggest Financial Center
Visualizing Downtown Recovery
Charting and mapping COVID-19 recovery trajectories across 62 North American cities and their downtowns
Enid Slack in Global News | Inflation, pandemic costs driving Ontario property tax hikes as upkeep backlogs grow
Volume 2: Issue 3 | Post-pandemic downtown recovery: Downtown is for people
By Karen Chapple, Richard Florida and Nathaniel Baum-Snow
The death of downtown? Let’s make sure that’s not Toronto’s story.
One by one, downtowns have come back to life from the dark days of the pandemic’s onset. But Canadian downtowns? Not so much. Karen Chapple discusses her research on downtown recovery.