Cities are laboratories for democracy. They house the people, institutions, and venues to spur vigorous discussion and debate, innovate technology to include new voices in decision-making, and deploy data to increase equity, efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Yet, socioeconomic inequalities increasingly divide cities, polarize communities, and marginalize vulnerable groups, creating new challenges for participatory democracy and institution-building.
Recent years have seen the explosion of urban data available across disciplines, from mobile phone traces, to social media interactions, to citizen science, to administrative data on health, housing, and more. Researchers and policymakers are only just beginning to capitalize on the availability of data to create new knowledge, design more rigorous policies, and empower communities. New data offers the opportunity to innovate ways of understanding human behaviour and interaction in cities, as well as to make activity at the margins more visible and thus empower the most vulnerable. Yet this means it is critical to foster collaborations around urban data beyond social sciences and the law – with humanists to raise challenging questions on ethics and self-expression, computer scientists and engineers to improve access and address algorithmic bias, and natural scientists to identify connections with the physical environment.
The School of Cities welcomes proposals that capitalize on innovative data sources to identify societal divides and/or suggest approaches to sustain democratic institutions. We are particularly interested in research that deploys underutilized urban datasets – from big data like user-generated geographic information to crowdsourced or community-generated knowledge – and unique approaches to linking data or mixing methods.
Contact
All inquiries about this program – including about applications, ongoing work, or future UCG timelines – should be directed to research.sofc@utoronto.ca.