Mission
Why we exist
Our CIVIC Futures is a growing platform for community-centred urban research, built to expand over time. Cities make decisions about how neighbourhoods work based on the data they have: how safe they are, how accessible, how healthy, how well-served. In too many neighbourhoods, particularly those with lower incomes and fewer political connections, that data doesn't exist. We're here to change that.
The problem
Conventional urban data collection is expensive, infrequent, and biased toward places that already have resources and political visibility. The neighbourhoods that go unmeasured are often the ones that need attention most: where parents won't let their children walk or bike on their own because the risk of being hit by a driver feels too high, where elderly residents and people with limited mobility can't count on sidewalks being plowed in winter or on drivers stopping at crossings, where traffic noise and exhaust make daily life harder than it needs to be. These places are largely invisible in the datasets planners and decision-makers rely on. The decisions get made anyway — just without the evidence.
Our approach
Our CIVIC Futures is the public home for a growing body of community-centred urban research. Each project on the platform produces findings through a Neighbourhood Evidence Observation Network (NEON) — a long-term, place-based study designed around the specific context of its community. Methods vary: sensors, audits, participatory mapping, interviews, or combinations. What stays constant across every project is a commitment to transparent data governance, resident consent, and keeping the communities participating in the research at the centre of how findings are used.
CIVIC: London (CIVIC-NEON) — Goals
What the first project is trying to learn
CIVIC: London (CIVIC-NEON) measures pedestrian and cyclist activity and noise in underserved London, Ontario neighbourhoods using a network of AI-assisted traffic and noise sensors. The goal is to produce evidence the City and residents can actually use — and to build a replicable, community-centred model of urban sensing that future projects on the platform can adapt.
Who we are
Our CIVIC Futures is a research platform led by Dr. Carrie Mitchell at the University of Waterloo, with seed funding from the University of Waterloo's Global Futures Fund. Our CIVIC Futures collaborates with Nobel Laureate Professor Donna Strickland, Director of University of Waterloo's Global Environmental Measurement & Monitoring (GEMM) project.
No city should have to make decisions about its neighbourhoods without knowing how they are being used.
Our CIVIC Futures is produced by CORE Planning Lab. Learn more about our research, publications, and people at coreplanninglab.com →