The City Beats Blog invites experts affiliated with the School of Cities to publish essays, responses, and reflections in a variety of formats and at any stage in the development of new ideas or research.
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Urban Homelessness: Data & policy
The School of Cities hosted a multidisciplinary seminar on current research in urban homelessness, focusing on data and policy. The discussion considered spatial challenges with bylaws that restrict sleeping in parks and designing human-centred algorithms for homelessness services.
Mapping household GHG emissions in the Greater Golden Horseshoe
View maps and charts at both regional and neighbourhood scales
How Citizens’ Assemblies and Civic Innovation Are Shaping the Future of Cities
The School of Cities hosted a panel on democratic innovation, exploring how citizens and governments can collaborate on today’s toughest challenges. From citizens’ assemblies and youth engagement to technology that enhances dialogue, the discussion highlighted new ways to move beyond consultation toward genuine empowerment. The takeaway? Cities can tap into collective intelligence and build trust by giving people real power to shape decisions.
Suburbanization of Immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area
Maps and charts showing how immigrants have increasingly moved to the suburbs over the years
From parking spaces to living spaces
Maps and data showing how turning underutilized surface parking into homes makes financial sense
Transit-oriented communities and post-pandemic resilience
Maps, data, and modelling results of pandemic recovery of transit stations in Toronto
Exploring activity patterns in Toronto
Visualizing daily and hourly activity patterns in the Toronto region via charts, spatial statistics, and animated maps
Rightward shifts amongst visible minorities in the Greater Toronto Area
Visible minorities in the GTA have been shifting to the Conservatives
Keeping high-speed rail on track: Learning from other North American projects
The Canadian government’s February 2025 announcement of a high-speed rail project from Toronto to Quebec City—Alto—has the potential to transform travel and the economy. With an expected $80 billion price tag and many challenges ahead, this blog highlights three crucial decisions: station locations, whether to build new or upgrade existing lines, and securing funding for long-term success.
Changes in immigrant voting patterns in the Greater Toronto Area
Maps and charts showing political shifts in immigrant voting patterns in the GTA
Urban data visualization workshop at National Taiwan University
Summary of the workshop, maps we created, and links to learning material
Locating Labour in Municipal Operations
This blog highlights the invisible labour behind municipal infrastructure, focusing on workers in landscaping, garbage collection, and public works. It critiques their overlooked roles, leading to underfunding and inefficiency, and calls for more research and better planning to support these workers and improve maintenance.
Eight Ways to Enable Missing Middle Housing: New resources from the School of Cities
Supporting authors: Missing Middle (MM) is a form of medium-density development that can fit into lots formerly zoned for single-family housing. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), as part… Read more
Could Congestion Pricing Unlock a Better Toronto?
A look at how Toronto could benefit from congestion pricing, inspired by New York City’s new vehicle charge. This piece revisits Toronto’s 2017 toll proposal, estimates potential $500M in annual revenue, and explores how such a policy could reduce traffic, improve transit, and advance climate goals. With global examples showing success, the question remains: Is Toronto ready to try again?
What’s the poop on dogs and cities?
Which neighbourhoods in Toronto have more or less dogs and off-leash dog parks?
Gentle Density Across Canada
Tracking development of accessory dwelling units in Canadian cities
Evolving City
Tracking access to nature over time in Toronto via mapping the history and evolution of land cover
IMUCP 2024-25 India Blog
In October 2024, Professors Aditi Mehta and David Roberts travelled to Mumbai and Pune, India with 18 undergraduate students from University of Toronto and Ashoka University as part of the Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project (MUCP) course.
Canada’s High-Tech Startup Cities
Analyzing the geography of venture capital investment across metro areas
MUGS, Yellowknife 2024: Understanding the wildfires
In June 2024, a group of graduate students travelled to Yellowknife to study the impact of the 2023 wildfires in the context of the housing crisis and communications infrastructure.
How Reducing Air Pollution Could Extend Thousands Of Lives
Estimating how premature mortality is related to air pollution in Canadian metro areas
Metropolitan Mindset response paper: Dr. Alexandra Flynn
The School of Cities’ Metropolitan Mindset initiative, led by Don Iveson, Canadian Urban Leader, and Prof. Gabriel Eidelman, aims to improve urban governance across Canada through research, education, partnerships, and advocacy. In… Read more
Mapping Bike Share Trips In Toronto
Estimating and visualizing routes for every Bike Share trip in Toronto in 06/2024
Mapping Heat Vulnerability in Toronto
Measuring heat vulnerability and visualizing variation across the City of Toronto
Mapping Yellowknife
Five maps of Yellowknife, NT, Canada visualizing household GHG emissions, fiscal productivity, and access to green space
Zoning for Multi-Tenant Housing in Toronto
Mapping changes in zoning bylaws across the city
How Toronto’s downtowns stack up globally
Toronto’s downtown has come back from its lowest economic indicator during the pandemic but remains some 30 percent below where it was in 2019. To get a better sense of how Toronto’s downtown stacks up globally, Richard Florida et al. examined detailed data from a survey of 26,000 people in 53 cities.
Attracting activity to American downtowns: Understanding downtown recovery across the course of a week
The study looks into how cities recover during working hours (8 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday) compared to after-work hours (weeknights 6 PM to 8 AM and the entire weekend), as well as weekdays versus weekends.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Toronto’s parks: Why it matters
A blog post analyzing mobility data to track usage of indoor and outdoor recreation spaces in Toronto before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns
Metropolitan Mindset response paper: Dr. Anne Golden
Dr. Anne Golden responds to the Metropolitan Mindset playbook and answers the question “What are the prospects for cultivating a metropolitan mindset in the city-region(s) you know best?”
Reno-ductions: Loss of Gentle Density in Toronto
Tracking how often Toronto is losing dwelling units due to reno-ductions of small multi-family structures into single-family homes
The Geography of Toronto’s Outdoor Skating Rinks
Mapping and charting how proximity to outdoor skating rinks varies across the City of Toronto and for different groups of people
Why visitors matter to Toronto’s downtown recovery
Downtown Toronto is still struggling from the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many office buildings are only partly filled, and some are deserted; alarming numbers of storefronts are vacant. With… Read more
Tracking Gentle Density in Toronto
Visualizing 10+ years of building permit data to track the uptake of secondary suites and laneway housing in the City of Toronto. Updated January 2024.
Traffic violations on the King Street Transit Priority Corridor
Analyzing and visualizing traffic violations and traffic tickets on King Street in Toronto
Transportation Justice for Night and Evening Shift Workers
Night and evening shift workers play pivotal roles in our economy. This study maps the who, the how, and the where of shift workers in Canada.
Downtown Recovery & Transit Ridership Recovery
Charting the relationship between downtown recovery and transit ridership recovery
Mapping the 2023 Toronto Mayoral By-Election
Visualizing geographic patterns of electoral support for different candidates. Comparing election day results relative to advance voting.
Neighbourhood Abandonment in the American Rust Belt
Jason Hackworth & Data Viz Lead Jeff Allen examine the factors causing housing lots to be abandoned in American rust belt cities: deindustrialization, taxation & the pressures on Black-majority neighbourhoods.
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.
The Dark Side of the Miracle: Spectacular and Precarious Accumulation in an Urban Village under Siege (A Photo Essay)
This essay by Tony Lam uses an urban village renewal project in the southern city Guangzhou to analyze the politics of eviction, demolition, resistance, and gentrification in light of the region’s shift from low-value to high-tech industries.
Greenfield development does not equal sprawl. So what? We can do better.
In a recent blog, TMU researchers Frank Clayton and David Amborski argue for “orderly and comprehensively planned low-density development,” based on the contention that not all greenfield development is sprawl. But sprawl is only the development we don’t want. Karen Chapple and Rolf Pendall ask what about the development we do want?
Paving Over South Parkdale
A series of maps and air photos documenting the loss of a neighbourhood in Toronto
How to improve the lives of subsidized housing tenants – Professor Prentiss Dantzler partners with Toronto Community Housing
One of the common goals that brings together University of Toronto Sociology Professor Prentiss Dantzler and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) is to find ways to provide tenants with affordable places to live.
Revealing the Invisible: Countering Land Theft to Create Inclusive Cities
As a part of a panel discussion at the 3rd Urban Economy Forum in 2021, Prof. Karen Chapple proposed three ways to address land theft in the face of rising houselessness and displacement by borrowing from the Indigenous ways of knowing to redefine the modern concept of land ownership.
Toronto is a great city. It needs the School of Cities in order to stay that way.
When the University of Toronto offered Karen Chapple the job as the inaugural Director of the School of Cities, she hadn’t visited Toronto since 1996 – and border crossing restrictions made it impossible to visit. So she asked friends and colleagues on the West and East coasts what they thought.