Mapping the City

Mapping the city: how green space could make for happy kids

lanthierj — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 19:38:25 +0000

Mapping the city: how green space could make for happy kids

lanthierj Fri, 08/05/2016 - 15:38

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This map, created by Cosmin Marmureanu shows the amount of canopy cover within a 500m buffer around schools. Many of the areas where trees are not located near schools are also low-income neighbourhoods. (source: Toronto Open Data)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Cities

urban

Research & Innovation

Mapping the City

OISE

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by ��Ƶ students and faculty.

Read part one: how transit can fix access to jobs

Read part two: what Toronto's waterways can tell us

Read part three: smart transport data pave the way for a driverless future

Read part four: busting conventional wisdom on food deserts

In this fifth instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Cosmin Marmureanu and Professor Scott Davies.

Living in a concrete jungle like Toronto can be suffocating sometimes – the noise, traffic and pollution can seem inescapable. The city’s parks – big and small – serve as an oasis from the chaos.

Anyone who’s taken a quick stroll through a leafy park on their lunch break can attest to that.

It should come as no surprise then, that the correlation between health and proximity to nature has been studied numerous times. Not only can this closeness to green space make you feel healthier, one study even says you’ll feel richer with a few extra trees in your neighbourhood.

But can access to trees and parks make you a better student?

That’s what Cosmin Marmureanu, a PhD student at OISE, is trying to figure out. He’s working alongside Professor Scott Davies to map out the relationship between a school’s physical surroundings and student achievement.

Though it’s still early in the research process, Marmureanu says he has “found medium strength correlations between suspensions and expulsions and the amount of vegetation around the schools.”

As a summer student and research assistant for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Marmureanu has access to plenty of data on the location of trees and parkland and its proximity to schools. The school board has shown interest in his research and has published papers of their own on the benefits of bringing vegetation closer to schools and teaching kids about the environment.

“Greening is now a priority for them and the Ontario government in general,” says Marmureanu.

The challenge of putting this plan into practise is convincing school administration of why it’s important, he says.

“A lot of the time the grounds aren’t the first thing the principal is worried about – they’re worried about student achievement and school safety,” Marmureanu says. “It’s not something they necessarily think about – to get them to realize ‘hey, if you had a green space for students to each their lunch, [students] may be more relaxed and less aggressive as a result.’”

Davies says there are, of course, other factors at play – such as the quality of upkeep in the school, the reputation of the school and the neighbourhood it’s located in and whether or not students actually have access to the green space.

Marmureanu says he’s also look at how the ways students get to school affects their performance.

“If they’re spending 40 minutes in a subway tunnel – are these kids different from the kid that walks 15 minutes outside in fresh air in a densely vegetated neighbourhood?” he asks.

For Marmureanu, his interest in the topic is also personal. He grew up downtown – close to Spadina and Bloor, but moved further north to leafier Bathurst and Eglinton. The change “does make an impact,” he says.

Davies says the use of maps for education research is a relatively new idea, but a useful one.

“Mapping has the potential to tell a lot more stories,” he says.

And Marmureanu adds: “It sends a much stronger message than a pie chart or a graph.”

This cross-discipline pursuit is something Davies wants to continue fostering.

“I want to form a partnership with people across U of T who also have an interest in how geography and education overlap. For example, there are guys in engineering who are interested in air quality and how air quality in the city varies substantially – and we want to map that onto schools,” he says.

Mapping the city: Busting conventional wisdom on food deserts

krisha — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:15:52 +0000

Mapping the city: Busting conventional wisdom on food deserts

krisha Thu, 07/21/2016 - 13:15

Cutline

This map of Toronto, created by Michael Widener, shows the parts of Toronto that see a lot of activity between 10pm and 2am (the dark green areas) but where few supermarkets are open (black dots).

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Mapping the City

Cities

Research & Innovation

Food

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by ��Ƶ students and faculty.

Read part one: how transit can fix access to jobs

Read part two: what Toronto's waterways can tell us

Read part three: smart transport data pave the way for a driverless future

In the fourth instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Michael Widener.

The relationship between where we live and what we eat is complicated, says Michael Widener.

The assistant professor of geography and planning at ��Ƶ wants to debunk conventional wisdom about what is commonly called a “food desert” – neighbourhoods where there is limited access to healthy food. People who live in these “deserts” are thought to adopt unhealthy eating habits and will go on to have health problems associated with their diet.

“There are a number of problems that logic,” says Widener. “People don’t just sit in their homes all day. They move around the city – they go to work, they visit their family, they pick up their kids. They do all sorts of things, so representing a food desert as this simple spatial concept really isn’t all that accurate.”

Widener is working on a project for Toronto Public Health, highlighting some of the other factors that create access barriers between people and healthy food.

“What does the food accessibility landscape look like for people who are maybe not conventional shoppers?”

That’s what Widener is exploring, particularly regarding people who work irregular hours.

“There isn’t good availability for shift workers,” Widner says. “In particular for people who have a lot of time pressure – people who are working late at night, working two jobs – the ability to shop healthfully is even more difficult.”

Widener created a series of maps that look at access to healthy food at different times of the day. He found that very few healthy food retailers are open late at night, even in areas where there’s a lot of late-night activity (shown in dark green on the map).

Data for the maps were taken from the Transportation Tomorrow Survey – conducted by U of T’s Data Management Group.

These maps are a work in progress. The next phase of the project is set to tell a more detailed story about food access in Toronto – incorporating demographic data, information about people’s transportation habits, costs and daily routines.

It’ll look at different factors like whether “lower income folks have worse access during late night periods than higher income folks, people who are older, people who are working two jobs or have more kids,” says Widener.

He says this information would have been much harder to gather in the past.

“We’re getting more and more individual level data so we’re able to look at, in very high resolution, how people move around the city, whereas maybe 10 years ago we didn’t have that good of information.”

Mapping the city: smart transport data pave the way for a driverless future

lavende4 — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:38:02 +0000

Mapping the city: smart transport data pave the way for a driverless future

lavende4 Mon, 07/18/2016 - 10:38

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CVST map of the Greater Toronto area. The red, yellow and blue circles represent the number of data points in a specific location.

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Geography and Planning

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by ��Ƶ students and faculty.

In the third instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Alberto Leon-Garcia.

Read part one: how transit can fix access to jobs

Read part two: what Toronto's waterways can tell us

“It’s a map but it’s more of a platform to do smart things.”

That’s how Alberto Leon-Garcia, professor in electrical and computer engineering at the ��Ƶ, describes the Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation (CVST) project – an ambitious, interactive map of Toronto that gives you a real-time picture of how people get around the city.

“We took it upon ourselves to build a platform that would be able to, in a snapshot, tell us everything we needed to know about the transportation network,” says Leon-Garcia, who is the scientific director of CVST.

“There’s something like 4000 streams of data here,” says Leon-Garcia.

Everything from speeds in certain segments of the highway, bus locations, and bicycle rental occupancies, to different types of cameras is represented on the map.

The platform has many practical uses, says Leon-Garcia, like improving traffic flow, reducing travel times and providing traveller advisories.

The red, yellow and blue circles represent the number of data points in a specific location. Zoom in and you can see the specific points, like a fixed camera or even the view from a drone.

Leon-Garcia says the drones are used to show how a city could utilize the gadgets for effective traffic surveillance.

“You can see a lot further and you can pan – you can choose a direction – a lot better than fixed cameras,” he says.

“One of the things we’re exploring is the use of drones to gather real-time information about events in certain locations in the city,” says Leon-Garcia.

The drones could be used to share information with the city and services like police and paramedics, he says.

The most interesting application for the CVST map is its potential in a driverless-car future.

“As vehicles become autonomous, you’re going to need a control system that directs the flow of these autonomous vehicles across this map,” says Leon-Garcia.

There are also implications when those vehicles become powered by electricity.

“There’s the management of the movement of the vehicles themselves,” says Leon-Garcia, “but then there’s also the coordination with the power grid so there’s sufficient power where the vehicles go to be recharged.”

Maps like the CVST could also become a big environmental player.

“If you start looking at air quality, at putting sensors on energy consumption, if you start keeping track of the energy that’s used, this same map becomes a map of the carbon footprint in a region,” says Leon-Garcia.

He says tracking emissions is a step toward reducing them.

With support from Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation and the City of Toronto, Leon-Garcia sees CVST growing with the city.

“In terms of meeting the challenges of cities, the interplay between public transit, subway, buses, bicycles and vehicles, especially as the nature of vehicles changes, there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how things can evolve for the better – it’s exciting,” he says.

Mapping the city: How transit can fix access to jobs in Toronto

lavende4 — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 19:32:05 +0000

Mapping the city: How transit can fix access to jobs in Toronto lavende4 Tue, 07/12/2016 - 15:32

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A map created by Steven Farber, Jeff Allen and Maria Grandez shows the number of jobs reachable by public transit within a 45 minute trip from each neighbourhood in the GTA

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Geography and Planning

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by ��Ƶ students and faculty.

In the second instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Steven Farber.

Read the first part of the series here

Toronto is a sprawling city – one that keeps growing in all directions to accommodate the growing number of people who come to live here. But its vastness has made it hard to connect every part of the city with public transportation. That, in turn, has created inequalities in opportunity, especially between high and low income households.

Steven Farber, assistant professor of Geography and Planning at ��Ƶ, set out to find the link between transportation and opportunity by creating a series of maps with the help of U of T students Jeff Allen and Maria Grandez.

“I showed the levels of opportunities in terms of how easily people can access jobs in the city by the different modes of transportation,” he says.

People who have cars have greater access to a larger selection of jobs, Farber says. Those who do not have cars have a much smaller geographical area to find employment.

Those without cars who live in downtown Toronto or along the subway line, he says, can access 30 per cent of the jobs car owners can. The number gets even smaller when you move away from the city centre.

“As you get further and further out from there, the accessibility ratios really drop off really really quickly – down to 5 to10 per cent for much of the city and less than 5 per cent outside the city of Toronto,” Farber says.

“For now, car drivers have it made,” he says. “Even if you complain about traffic and congestion and slower trips – if you take the situation of drivers and compare it to transit users, they’re still way ahead of the game.”

The key to closing the gap in accessibility is in beefing up Toronto’s public transportation, says Farber.

“When we’re trying to use transit to address these accessibility differences, you have to think about which low income neighbourhoods need transit investment more,” he says.

“The map clearly shows there’s huge swathes of suburban Toronto – Scarborough, North Etobicoke, North York, that are really lacking in transit connectivity to jobs in the region.”

One of the maps Farber and his students created evaluates the effectiveness of some of the proposed transit expansions – including the Scarborough LRT and subway extension as well as the Eglinton Crosstown – to increase accessibility to opportunity for transit users. In the map (below), the dark outlines show the areas where a new transit line would heighten accessibility for transit users from below 30 per cent to above 30 percent of what car owners can access.

It holds particular significance as Toronto City Council votes on a long-term transit plan.

“What we found is that the Eglinton Crosstown has the largest impact on increasing accessibility – which really makes sense,” says Farber. “Any line that cuts through the middle of the city from end to end is going to have very very large impact on increasing accessibility.”

He says the Scarborough transit expansion will greatly benefit those who live along the proposed lines, but “will do almost nothing for people who are just offsite.”

“Really what we should be thinking about is how we’re going to fund more widespread transit expansion throughout the suburbs and especially try to hit neighbourhoods where bringing transit will improve the quality of life and participation levels of people living there,” says Farber.

He says the best way to do so is by improving on existing bus routes.

“We need to figure out how to make those routes more efficient and faster because we have the reach,” Farber says. “There are very few places in the city where there’s not a bus within 400 metres of someone’s house.”

Farber hopes to get this message across through his maps. He says displaying data in a visual way makes the information seem more personal to those who view it.

“I think it’s a hugely powerful medium for transmitting information and getting people to think about their surroundings and think about their city in a new way,” Farber says. “It really gets the neurons firing.”

Mapping the city: what Toronto’s waterways can tell us

lanthierj — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 19:48:56 +0000

Mapping the city: what Toronto’s waterways can tell us

lanthierj Fri, 07/08/2016 - 15:48

Cutline

This map of Toronto, created by Marcel Fortin, head of the Map and Data Library at U of T, shows the evolution of Toronto's shoreline and the Don River between 1857 and 1918

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

Subheadline

“The more we have freely available information, the more we can tell better stories and we can get a better understanding of the city”

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by ��Ƶ students and faculty.

In this first instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Marcel Fortin and Jennifer Bonnell.

Before Toronto grew upwards, with its towering condos and mass of skyscrapers, it grew southward.

A century and a half ago, the city’s waterfront touched the railroad tracks south of Front Street. Iconic buildings like the CN Tower and Air Canada Centre now stand where Lake Ontario once was. It took decades to extend the land to where it is today.

You can see how it all unfolded in a series of maps created by Marcel Fortin, head of the Map and Data Library at the ��Ƶ along with Jennifer Bonnell, a former doctoral student at U of T.

See the maps

The maps were originally used to track the history of the Don Watershed and Toronto’s waterways from 1857 into the 1900s. Bonnell has since written a book about the Don River called Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley.

The project used the wealth of historical maps of Toronto available at libraries and archives throughout the city – overlaying them with current maps using geographical information systems (GIS) software.

With the ability to compare Toronto’s waterfront over time, you can really see how dramatically it has changed, says Fortin.

“In some places you’ve got a shoreline that’s a kilometre away from where it was,” he says.

The maps also show a very different-looking Don River, full of bends and curves, meandering south into Lake Ontario. But in 1886, the city began an ambitious project to straighten a portion of it.

“They were hoping to use it as a shipping canal but it never materialized in that way,” says Fortin.

The mapping project came with more revelations about the history of the city’s physical environment.

“The most fascinating thing is the number of historical water features we’ve uncovered that don’t exist anymore in the city,” says Fortin of the numerous rivers and creeks that used to snake through the city.

“We’ve buried tons of these features and built over them in some cases,” he says.

Fortin says the Map and Data Library uploads all maps they create online so that they’re available for free to anyone who wants to use them.

“The more we have freely available information, the more we can tell better stories and we can get a better understanding of the city, the water and the industry and understand a little bit of how we got here,” he says.

The library’s maps have been used by students and faculty of a wide range of disciplines who in turn share data with the library to build on its current resources, says Fortin.

But it’s not just academics taking advantage of these maps. Fortin says the Don River maps have also been used by artists as inspiration for paintings and installations.

“Go beyond what your imagination can think about what you’re doing and be open to how it can be interpreted and used in different ways,” he says.

Read about the Don Valley Historical Mapping Project, view the data and the historical maps here: http://maps.library.utoronto.ca/dvhmp/index.html 