Mission
Why we exist
Our Urban Futures is a growing platform for community-centred urban research, built to expand over time. Cities make decisions about how neighbourhoods work based on the data they have: how safe they are, how accessible, how healthy, how well-served. In too many neighbourhoods, particularly those with lower incomes and fewer political connections, that data doesn't exist. We're here to change that.
The problem
Conventional urban data collection is expensive, infrequent, and geographically biased toward places that already have resources and political visibility. The neighbourhoods where children walk to school on streets without sidewalks, where elderly residents navigate on foot because they have no other option, where air quality, noise, or heat make daily life harder than it needs to be — these places are largely invisible in the datasets that planners and decision-makers rely on. Decisions get made anyway. They just get made without the evidence.
Our approach
Our Urban Futures is the public home for a growing body of community-centred urban research. Each project on the platform produces findings through a Neighbourhood Evidence Observation Network (NEON) — a long-term, place-based study designed around the specific context of its community. Methods vary: sensors, audits, participatory mapping, interviews, or combinations. What stays constant across every project is a commitment to transparent data governance, resident consent, and keeping the communities participating in the research at the centre of how findings are used.
Who we are
Our Urban Futures is a research platform led by Dr. Carrie Mitchell at the CORE Planning Lab, University of Waterloo School of Planning, with funding from the Global Futures Fund. Our partners include Mobycon (Ottawa), the City of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and Acadia University.
No city should have to make decisions about its streets without knowing who is using them.
Our Urban Futures is produced by CORE Planning Lab. Learn more about our research, publications, and people at coreplanninglab.com →