For the first time in history, more people throughout the globe and in Canada live in cities than in rural areas. Cities are becoming more prominent in policy discussions, in setting environmental standards and in shaping the day-to-day lives of their billions of inhabitants. Cities, for their part, are still learning how best to cope with these demographic shifts.
Helping us to understand how cities work, and to explore the innovations which might make them work better, is a new institute that will open this fall at the University of Toronto.
The idea for the cross-disciplinary Global Cities Institute started about six months ago, says newly appointed director Patricia McCarney. The institute will be housed in a new campus building that includes a state-of-the-art visualization theatre, and the anchor activity will be work surrounding the Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF), which was created in 2009. GCIF's goal is to create a standardized "authoritative compilation of validated, self-reported, worldwide urban data"—information which allows researchers to compare cities across a large number of metrics. Until GCIF, says McCarney, "there [was] no common platform for cities to have a set of indicators." GCIF was originally funded by the World Bank (which chose Toronto to be the home of this indicators work) and has grown rapidly; it now has 200 cities belonging to it worldwide.
With that growth, McCarney says, came the need to process the growing cache of data: "We decided that we were at a turning point—we started to think about visualization of the data, to build analytics around the data and to start to think about how to build research into the university and to start to think about how to improve city mangement and city governance." And so the Global Cities Institute was born.
Governance doesn't just mean governments: McCarney sees international agencies, banks "and increasingly also industry partners" as playing a role in the cities of the future.
As for its location in Toronto, McCarney says: "I work in cities around the world and they always look to Toronto as a successful city, they always look to Toronto as a demonstration of what is good in cities. Despite [the fact] that people complain—that we're slow, or whatever—we're still seen as having one of the best quality of life, high efficiency in services, creative talent, innovation. We're a great place to have an innovation."
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Patricia McCarney, Director, Global Cities Institute