Principal Investigator
Dr. Carrie Mitchell
Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo and director of the CORE Planning Lab, Carrie leads Our CIVIC Futures and its community-centred research agenda.
About & Team
A community-centred platform, not a research silo.
Our CIVIC Futures is the public face of community-centred urban research led by Dr. Carrie Mitchell at the University of Waterloo's School of Planning. We build evidence in partnership with the people who live in the neighbourhoods we study, and we publish what we find in language anyone can use.
Why "Our CIVIC Futures"
The name is deliberate. The futures of our cities are plural — different neighbourhoods experience them differently — and they belong to the people who live them, not only to the institutions that plan them or corporations that wish to extract from them. The platform exists so that the evidence produced inside the university actually leaves it.
How we work
- →Community first. Research questions start with residents, neighbourhood associations, city councillors, and community organizations. We work with city staff, not against them.
- →Open by default. Methods, instruments, and data are documented openly so others can build on the work.
- →Translation is the work. A finding that only lives in a journal article hasn't done its job. We write briefs, build dashboards, and talk to journalists.
- →Privacy by design. Our instruments count people, never identify them. Edge processing means images never leave the sensor.
The team
The people behind the platform
A small, interdisciplinary team of researchers, community partners, and field coordinators working across the University of Waterloo and partner organizations.
Project Coordinator
Eva Bortolussi
Coordinates day-to-day operations of CIVIC: London, keeping deployments, community partners, and research timelines moving in sync.
GIS & Data Specialist
Blake Iutzi
Leads spatial analysis and data infrastructure for CIVIC: London, turning sensor feeds into maps, dashboards, and open datasets the public and the City can actually use.