The University of Waterloo’s compass is pointing it in a clear direction — the future. As you read this, its Futures Framework is working hard to shape the forces that will define the 21st century. At the same time, Waterloo at 100 is exploring how the university should evolve to confront humanity's most pressing problems — today and in the years leading up to its centennial in 2057.
These are big, bold goals that demand a long, ambitious journey. And appropriately, Waterloo’s Environment Faculty is helping chart the way forward in this journey with new programs and research that will encourage innovative, creative thinking about the future, with a lens on cities in Canada and around the world.
Central to this is the faculty’s Future Cities initiative. Its director, Leia Minaker, explains why it is both necessary and timely. "We know the world is urbanizing more rapidly than at any time in history," she explains, adding that in 2008, for the first time ever, more than half of the planet's human population resided in cities. And that’s just the beginning. According to the United Nations, 75 per cent of humankind will be living in urban areas by 2050.
It’s no wonder, then, that most of the greatest challenges facing the world, including climate change, new technology, economic inequality, and political polarization "will be felt most in cities," Minaker says, adding: That’s why Waterloo "created programs to address these complex challenges.” This fall, the faculty began offering a diploma program in Future Cities, an option that will be available to all students in any field of study across UW. In the autumn of 2023, the Environment Faculty hopes to begin a Future Cities graduate program.
The stated goal in both programs is to develop talent that can solve the problems facing humanity utilizing futures thinking. If the university’s focus is on the future, the Environment Faculty’s initial focus is looking at that future through the lens of cities. And both of these programs dovetail with the five areas of major concern for Waterloo’s Futures Framework: societal, sustainable, health, technological and economic. "Cities are the contexts in which these futures will live out," Minaker says.
The new diploma program is designed for undergraduate students from any faculty at Waterloo. That approach is deliberate because, as Minaker explains, it will take many varied, disciplinary skills to address the challenges of the coming years. “The more we can understand from other people’s perspectives, the more creative our solutions will be.” Indeed, Waterloo will soon graduate students with degrees in a broad range of disciplines but who will take with them into their working lives a broad range of ideas about what future cities should look like.
Minaker hopes the same kind of cross-fertilization can take place in the forthcoming graduate program, which is aimed at mid-career professionals. Some of them may already be engaged in urban planning and policy making. Others could be working in public health, public housing, and social services. Because the course is designed to be flexible students could complete their degree in one, two or three years. After that, they’d embed the skills, ideas, and principles they’ve learned at Waterloo into their current work.
The vital job of re-imagining the world’s cities is also going on in individual research projects underway in the faculty. One of the first two academics to be awarded the Caivan Communities “Future Cities” Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mahyar Masoudi is an urban ecologist who will study climate change from an environmental justice perspective. Mashoudi is trying to better understand the relationship between the distribution of urban forests and urban heat islands and the heat-related health impacts on residents in 12 small-, medium- and large-sized cities in Southern Ontario. To be sure, the heat-waves and floods that have become far more common in this era of climate are disrupting communities across the province. But they often have a disproportionately hard impact on elderly, Indigenous, racialized and low-income members of society.
Masoudi hopes his research results in recommendations for policy changes that create Canadian cities that are not only more heat-resistant but healthy, sustainable and equitable. Considering that Canada’s climate is currently warming at double the rate of the rest of the world’s while this country is experiencing the highest population growth among G7 nations, his work could hardly be more relevant. And what he’s trying to achieve is fully in sync with the Environment Faculty’s Future Cities programs.
“What is the future we want?” Masoudi asks. “And what are the things we can do to make the future we envision happen?”
