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Roger Keil and Paul Maginn discuss the role suburbs play in helping cities fight against climate change: Yes, today’s suburban lifestyles are grossly unsustainable as a rule. At its most extreme, suburban settlement in ecologically sensitive areas is clearly reckless.But can we afford to caricature the suburbs and their inhabitants as dreamers living in a […]

Warsaw, Poland | Photo by Roger Keil After a decade of ground-breaking research, the Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) “Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century,” led by Principal Investigator Professor Roger Keil (Faculty of Environmental Studies) is wrapping up. The project was funded with $2.5 million by the Social Sciences and […]

MCRI Global Suburbanisms Principal Investigator Roger Keil will deliver this year's Sir Peter Hall Lecture in London, England. The lecture will take place June 5 at the University College London's Bartlett School of Planning with the theme “Metabolic Suburbia: Facing the connectivity of the extended urban world.” “Each year we invite a leading scholar or […]

Brampton- a suburb in transition or a city in waiting? A recent article in the Winter 2019 York University Magazine investigates Brampton's shifting suburban landscape and features interviews from Global Suburbanisms PI, Roger Keil, PhD student Murat Üçoğlu, and City Institute affiliate Sean Hertel. “Brampton,” says Keil, who has been researching the Greater Toronto Area’s […]

What is the current state of suburban scholarship? Lorenzo De Vidovich, former Global Suburbanisms visiting scholar and PhD student at the Politecnico di Milano explores this in his recent article "Suburban studies: State of the field and unsolved knots" now available online in Geography Compass. Click here to access the full article.  

  Urban policy and politics blog The New Spirit features the Global Suburbanisms book series and other publications that have come out of the MCRI. The book series, edited by Roger Keil and published by the University of Toronto Press, is the first major scholarly series to systematically examine worldwide developments in suburbanization and suburbanisms […]

Timeframe: Fall 2017@ 10 hrs/wk. Possibility of extension for Winter 2018 and Summer 2018 term. Title: MCRI “Global Suburbanisms” – Research Assistant Salary: $5000/term Job Description: This research assistantship is linked to the MCRI Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century research project (www.yorku.ca/suburbs). The MCRI Global Suburbanisms project is a multi-year […]

On Wednesday, April 12, 2017 we hosted our second Towards Suburbia seminar with sub/urban design scholar, Ellen Dunham-Jones with great success. Ellen Dunham-Jones shared new case studies and research on how retrofits of prototypical suburban property types throughout North America are helping suburbs address 21st century challenges they were never designed for. She drew on her database of over 1400 examples […]

On April 10, 2017 independent news and research website The Conversation  published a new article by Pierre Filion and Roger Keil entitled "Why suburban tensions and inequality will drive infrastructure innovation". Read the full article here.