News

Community development practitioners, policy makers, and community leaders gathered in London, Ontario for the 2019 Econous Conference. The conference highlighted how the new ideas that will be most transformational will be those that are created by and carried by communities. EconoUs2019 featured dynamic speakers, interactive storytelling and skill-building sessions, local and regional tours, a day for turning learning to action, and opportunities to network.

Ashleigh Weeden (PhD Candidate, School of Environmental Design & Rural Development) has been featured in a collection of researchers, journalists, academics and public figures in sharing insights on knowledge mobilization in advance of the 2019 Canadian federal election.

You can read her advice to researchers looking to share their work with policy makers on the iVote/jeVote website.

Jill Robertson is a MLA grad, and an active part of several landscape architecture associations, including the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation.  She is a Principal and Landscape Architect at DIALOG in Edmonton. Now Jill is recognized as a "Top 40 Under 40" in Edmonton. "Jill is named for the progressive ways she is shaping Edmonton's future through landscape architecture", said Dr. Robert Corry, Professor and MLA Program Co-ordinator.

From Thursday, August 8 to Sunday, August 11, 2019, a group of landscape architecture students from the University of Guelph participated in a field trip to New York City. During this time, these students had an opportunity to visit various parks and public spaces within this urban mecca. The trip included visiting significant historical and contemporary parks and green-scapes that have shaped NYC and have made an impact to the landscape architectural field in the city.

WexPOPS, a SEDRD created community gathering place that ‘popped up’ in the Wexford Heights Plaza in Scarborough this summer was mentioned in a recent Toronto Star article that discusses the value of converting parking space to park space with case studies from Toronto and San Francisco and announces a new parklet bylaw that the City of Toronto will be enacting this fall. 

We are pleased to welcome Steven Clarke as a new Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture, effective July 1, 2019.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Sara Epp and Dr. Silvia Sarapura as new assistant professors in Rural Planning and Development effective July 1^st and August 1^st respectively.

‘There is no single way of benefitting from technological change,’ said Winifredo Dagli, a Rural Studies PhD student, in his presentation at the European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation (EU-SPRI) last June 5, 2019 at the Centro Congressi Frentani in Rome, Italy.

How do rural communities creative livable communities for the 21st century? This was a key topic of discussion for rural geographers. The Ninth Quadrennial Conference of British, Canadian, and American Rural Geographers was hosted by Middlebury College and the University of Vermont in Burlington, USA.

As soon as word came that the 2019 International Comparative Rural Policy Studies (ICRPS) Summer Institute was going to be taking place in Rovaniemi, Finland, I knew I had to be there. Finland, and the Lapland region, have quickly become intriguing examples of the possibilities for building rural innovation ecosystems.