An interdisciplinary hybrid instrument to explore suburban challenges in Canada

Abstract

While urban regions continue to grow, much of the urbanization that is occurring is better described as suburbanization. This is generating and will continue to generate immense pressure on our social and environmental systems. To address these challenges and exploit specific suburban opportunities, cities globally require a complete understanding of the complexity of how human and environmental systems are uniquely intertwined within suburban contexts. The Suburban Mobilities (SuMo) cluster at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) aims to address these academic and policy challenges, generating transformative, interdisciplinary, partnered research about suburban contexts that will allow communities to solve transportation challenges facing the suburbanized world in the twenty-first century. Among the multiple projects developed within the SuMo cluster, one highlight is the design of a multidimensional survey in Scarborough, an eastern suburb of Toronto, Canada. Multiple transportation, land use, pricing and census data sources have allowed us to characterize this area to date, and we wondered what information would be helpful to collect in a survey to fill data gaps that will enable a better and deeper characterization of transportation’s impacts on quality of life of people living in Scarborough. This article details the particularities of the Scarborough context, as well as the design process, sampling strategy, representativeness, main descriptive results, and ongoing work using the survey. Finally, reduced and aggregated survey data is available for the general public with respective documentation for ease of use.