Dense City

Today, we welcome Dr. Timothy Ross, who is a Scientist with the Bloorview Research Institute at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, Canada where he leads the Engagement & Planning for the Inclusive Communities Lab (or, the EPIC Lab). Tim is also an Assistant Professor (status) in the Department of Geography and Planning and the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the University of Toronto, as well as a Registered Professional Planner.

We’re talking about his paper, Engaging Disability Theory in Planning Practice. He encourages planners to embrace disability theory and the complexity of disability experiences and to work toward unsettling the normalcy of disabled people’s exclusion in planned environments.

Today, we welcome Dr. Katherine Einstein, Dr. David Glick, and Dr. Maxwell Palmer from Boston University. We discuss their book: Neighbourhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis; published in 2019. The book is premised on how local political inequalities can end up limiting the housing supply and contribute to the current housing crisis. Participatory institutions like local neighbourhood committees often notify neighbours themselves and solicit comments on proposed housing developments, taking an active role for better or worse.

On today's episode, we talk to Marco Zunino about his thesis “Urban agriculture: Exploring a multi-scalar and circular approach to food production and distribution in East London”. Marco discusses what is meant by urban agriculture, some background history on food production, and his case study research of East London. He provides tools for urban planners to integrate aspects of agriculture within the city at different scales. 

Today, we welcome Edward Pinto, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center to discuss their paper on How Government Policy Made Housing Expensive and Scarce, and How Unleashing Market Forces Can Address It, co-authored with Tobias Peter. Together they’ve co-authored a variety of reports on housing policy, specifically on the impact of federal policy on housing demand and homeownership, housing finance risks, and first-time home buyers. Their pieces have been published in policy journals and in the press, such as the Wall Street Journal, American Banker, and Business Insider.

Have you thought about the ways that your recreational pursuits have been influenced by colonization? Dr. Dan Henhawk discusses the history of colonization and recreation, the concept of Indigenous relationality, and how we can adapt to the changes in our environment by engaging in respectful and reciprocal relationships with the natural world.

This episode is based on a syllabus Dr. Henhawk created for the "Introduction to Outdoor and Land-Based Recreation" course at the University of Manitoba. If you are interested in exploring this course, or would like to follow-up with Dr. Henhawk, follow the link below:

Today, we welcome Dr. Alessandro Venerandi and Professor Sergio Porta. We discuss their article "Urban form and COVID-19 cases & deaths in Greater London: An urban morphometric approach" published in Urban Analytics and City Science in 2022. This article takes a finer-grained approach to infection spread, examining urban form and habitable space through several indicators, including floor area ratios, to answer the question of what neighbourhoods are truly conducive to virus spread.

Today, we welcome Dr. Tom Cohen and Mariam Almarwani. We discuss their article "Addressing the unjust treatment of pedestrians at signalized intersections," published in Transportation Research Procedia in 2022. The article is premised on the idea that pedestrians wait statistically longer than other road users at signalized intersections and that this is unconducive to walkability and an affront to justice.

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We welcome Dr. Ignacio Tiznado-Aitken, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute. We’re talking about his paper “Time poverty in transport research: A conceptual framework, standards, and profiles for achieving transport justice”. His co-authors include Dr. Matthew Palm and Professor Steven Farber. This paper connects the concept of time poverty to transportation to ask how pressed for time certain groups feel, especially when they spend a lot of time travelling to their destinations and what policies that can help alleviate this stress.

We welcome Heike Marquart and Juliane Schicketanz. Heike is a Research Associate at the Institute of Transport Research at the German Aerospace Centre in Berlin. Her research focuses include Urban Geography and Mobility, particularly mobility related to health, wellbeing and environmental stressors, using qualitative methods and wearable sensors. Juliane is a PhD student at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests include urban geography and its intersection with human health, as well as the sense of place of children.

We discuss their article: Experiences of safe and healthy walking and cycling in urban areas: The benefits of mobile methods for citizen-adapted urban planning ; published in Transportation Research Procedia in 2022. 

Follow Dense City on Twitter and Instagram @densecitypod

We welcome Rebecca Walker, who is a Ph.D. Candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research considers the intersection of housing, equity, and the environment in American cities.

We welcome Dr. Jill Grant, who is a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University’s School of Planning. She’s an urban planner whose research centers around improving the spaces that mean most to us. Her latest work studies development patterns in Canadian suburbs and the influence of the creative class in cities.

In this episode, we discuss her article "Path dependencies affecting suburban density, mix, and diversity in Halifax" published in The Canadian Geographer with co-authors Dr. Pierre Filion and Scott Low.

On today’s episode, We welcome Dr. Evan Mallen who is a researcher with Georgia Tech’s Urban Climate Lab where he focuses on urban heat island mitigation and the public health response. He is also an ORISE Fellow in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Climate and Health Program. 

We welcome Dr. Dhiraj Nainani who is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore. We talk about his dissertation entitled The Legal Geography of Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong’s ‘Last Ghetto’. Chungking Mansions is a ‘notorious’ building complex in the business district of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. It's notorious because of its historical association with criminality and its longstanding and continuous association with the city’s ethnic minority population, primarily South Asians and Africans.

We welcome Marcel Moran who is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. The paper focuses on the distribution of amenities at bus stops in San Francisco. Transit stops serve as crucial components of journeys for riders, but their condition is often left out of equity considerations. Marcel conducted a census of transit stops in SF to explore the equity within and between neighbourhoods.

We’re talking about his paper Are Shelters in Place?: Mapping the Distribution of Transit Amenities via a Bus-Stop Census of San Francisco. This paper was recently published in the Journal of Public Transportation.

We welcome Dr. Anne Harris, who is an associate professor in the School of Occupational and Public Health at Toronto Metropolitan University. Anne is an epidemiologist interested in patterns of disease and injuries in populations and is particularly committed to studying and improving the methods used to conduct this type of research. She is interested in developing new ways to study occupational and transportation risk relationships. This includes the linkage of large administrative datasets and population-based survey and cohort data.

We’re talking about her paper “Estimating walking and bicycling in Canada and their road collision fatality risks: The need for a national household travel survey” recently published in Preventive Medicine Reports with co-authors Michael Branion-Calles, Kay Teschke, Mieke Koehoorn, and Osvaldo Espin-Garcia.

We welcome Hannah Hook who is a Ph.D. student at Ghent University of Belgium. She is an urban geographer and EIT Urban Mobility Fellow focusing on daily travel behavior and the relationship between travel satisfaction and well-being. Her background is in Sustainable Cities and GIS Technology. Her research aims to understand the motivations for and attitudes toward daily travel, as this can identify opportunities for encouraging sustainable, healthy travel and improving the social equity of travel.

We’re talking about her paper entitled ‘Does undirected travel compensate for reduced travel during lockdown?’. This paper was recently published in Transportation Letters with her co-authors Jonas De Vos, Veronique Van Acker, and Frank Witlox.

We welcome Dr. Léa Ravensbergen, who is a post-doctoral fellow at TRAM or (Transportation research at McGill) in the School of Urban Planning. Her mixed-methods transport research is driven by an overarching concern for equity in the creation of healthy and sustainable cities. Her doctoral research on the gender gap in cycling won the 2019 American Association of Geographer’s Urban Geography PhD Dissertation award. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University where she conducted community-engaged research on older adults’ experiences using public transportation.

We’re talking about her paper entitled 'Toward feminist geographies of cycling'. This paper was published in Geography Compass in 2019 with co-authors Ron Buliung, and Nicole Laliberte.

We welcome Dr. Meghan Winters who is an associate professor in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University. She is an epidemiologist interested in the link between health, transportation, and city design. She is the founder and lead of the Cities, Health, and Active Transportation Lab at SFU (CHATR).

We’re talking about her paper entitled ‘COVID-19 street reallocation in mid-sized Canadian cities: socio-spatial equity patterns’ published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health with her co-author Jaimy Fischer.

We welcome Dr. Kelcie Ralph who is an assistant professor at Rutgers in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. In her research, Dr. Ralph works to identify and correct common misperceptions about travel behavior and safety to improve transportation planning outcomes. 

We’re talking about her paper entitled “Distracted by ‘distracted pedestrians”? Published in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives with co-author Ian Girardeau.

This study focuses on the framing of distracted walking, irons out some of the literature on what we know about it, how large a problem it actually is, and what measures we should be focusing on to keep pedestrians safe. As we’ll learn from Kelcie, what we know about distracted pedestrians highly influences how we try to address this issue.

On today’s episode, we welcome Dr. Samantha Biglieri (@s_biglieri) who is an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University. She is an urban planner, and her research uses critical approaches at the intersection of planning and health and wellbeing, making connections with practice to build inclusive and accessible communities.

On today’s episode, we welcome Dr. Brian Doucet who is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. He is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Change and Social Inclusion. He is interested in the lived experiences of urban change, gentrification, and displacement. His work seeks to use this knowledge to elevate marginalized voices in order to enhance debates and shape policy and planning.

We’re talking about his paper “Repeat photography and urban change” which is an examination of streetcar photographs of Toronto since the 1960s. This paper was recently published in the “City” Journal and has a forthcoming book on the topic to be published later this year with the University of Toronto Press with his co-author Michael Doucet.

On today’s episode, we welcome Dr. Lyana Patrick, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in the Faculty of Health Sciences. Her research focuses on indigenous health and justice, urban indigenous community planning, and institutional change through decolonizing education.

We discuss her paper “The power of connections: How a novel Canadian men’s wellness program is improving the health and well-being of Indigenous and non-Indigenous men”. This paper was published in the international indigenous policy journal. The other authors on this paper include Iloradanon Efimoff,* Viviane Josewski, Paul Gross, Sandy Lambert, and Vicki Smye.

On this episode, we’re chatting with Dr. Magdalena Ugarte who is an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University. Her research and teaching agendas are shaped by her journey across design, planning, and social policy over the past fifteen years, both as a scholar and as a practitioner. In her scholarship, she examines the role of planning, policy, and law in the marginalization of some communities, especially Indigenous peoples and immigrants. 

Today's guest is Alexander “AJ” Wray, who is a doctoral student in geography and environment at the University of Western Ontario, coordinating the Food Retail Environment Study for Health and Economic Resiliency (FRESHER) and ParkSeek projects for the Human Environments Analysis Lab. His research interests span the range of health, GIS, impact assessment, chronic disease prevention, and local policy. AJ recently received his Masters in Geography from Western and holds an undergraduate degree in planning and environmental assessment from the University of Waterloo. We discuss his Master's thesis entitled "Signs with a Side of Fries: The influence of outdoor advertising on retail food outlet purchases by adolescents."

Today’s guest is Dr. Troy Glover. He is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies and Director of the Healthy Communities Research Network at the University of Waterloo. His research explores the role of leisure in advancing or deterring community, primarily through the development of social capital and transformative placemaking. This expertise generally leads him to research topics such as community gardens, neighbourhood festivals, dog parks, playgrounds, tourism. Today, we’ll be chatting about his recent book chapter “Bringing Public Spaces to Life: The animation of public space” in the book “Companion to Public Space” By Vikas Mehta and Danilo Plazzo, published by Routledge in 2020.

Glover, T. D. (2020). BRINGING PUBLIC SPACES TO LIFE. Companion to Public Space. Routledge.

On today's episode, I’ll introduce the podcast, my intentions, and what to expect out of listening.