Department of Geography and Planning Faculty Publications

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    Canadian Suburbs Atlas
    (Queen's University with University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Council for Canadian Urbanism, 2023-06) Gordon, David L. A.; Herteg, Remus
    Canada is a nation where over two-thirds of he population lives in some form of suburb. It is important to monitor the locations of population growth within our nation as it has profound e!ects on our economic e!ectiveness, environmental sustainability, and our overall public health. This atlas updates the article “Suburban Nation? Estimating the size of Canada’s suburban population”, published in the Journal of Architecture and Planning Research (Gordon & Janzen 2013). The JAPR article was based upon 2006 census data, while this paper updates the research using the 2021 census data that was released late 2022. This atlas also replaces and updates the Council for Canadian Urbanism Working Paper #2, “Still Suburban: Growth in Canadian Suburbs, 2016-2016."
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    Planning for Play? A Systematic Literature Review
    (Journal of Planning Literature, 2023) Hartt, Maxwell; Claire Lee; Empey-Salisbury, Madison
    Play has well established physical and mental benefits for people of all ages. Urban spaces, such as parks, provide important public arenas in which to play. But to what extent do planners or planning scholarship focus on facilitating play? Our systematic literature review of 3,800 articles in nineteen academic planning journals, returned 126 articles related to play. We found that the planning for play literature is an emerging discourse overwhelmingly focused on children and the physical design of urban spaces in predominantly English-speaking nations. The study identifies gaps in the planning for play literature and outlines recommendations for future research.
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    “A marketplace of schools”: Race, power, and education reform in the Detroit region
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-05-12) Cohen, Dan
    Over the past several decades market-based systems have increasingly been used to govern the delivery of urban services. Drawing on insights from the geography of markets, this paper investigates how market-based policies such as interdistrict choice and charter school programs have reshaped publicly funded schooling in the Detroit region. Through doing so it explores how market systems are made to align with the interests of actors who advance market structures that rework (rather than challenge) existing patterns of wealth and racial power. As described in this paper, such market systems must be understood as shaped by the economic, political, and social contexts they emerge from, with Detroit’s regional context of segregation and anti-Black racism a key element guiding the creation of market institutions. Understanding markets in this manner allows insights into how the articulation of market logics with urban geographies shapes the lives of those who depend on urban services.
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    Promises and Profit in “Debt-Free” Higher Education: The Geographies of Income Share Agreements in the United States
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-06-07) Rosenman, Emily; Cohen, Dan; Baker, Tom; Arapko, Ksenia
    As student debt in the United States rose to $1.7 trillion in 2021, the value and accessibility of higher education has been a subject of fierce public debate. In this context, income share agreements (ISAs) are framed as an alternative to conventional student loans. ISAs entail investors paying a student’s tuition in exchange for a share of the student’s future income. As the use of ISAs increases, especially within U.S. vocational schools, there is evidence that ISAs have used predatory financial practices aimed at marginalized students. Motivated by the rapid growth of ISAs in the United States and the relative absence of geographic attention to them, this article discusses their nature and broader significance to geographic debates. Informed by gray literature, news articles, industry documents, and the scant academic writing on ISAs, we discuss the characteristics, histories, and geographies of ISAs before examining the roles and motivations of three involved constituencies: students, higher education institutions, and investment intermediaries. In doing so, we highlight how ISAs reorient who pays for education and when, what sort of education is paid for, and how private markets profit from higher education. We then highlight the broader significance of ISAs to geographical understandings of (1) the financialization of social reproduction, (2) geographies of education, and (3) digital capitalism. We argue that ISAs’ individuating logics and broader context of social reproductive crises are revealing of a wider trend toward private profit via predatory inclusion, accelerated by financial technologies.
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    Markets as Struggle: the Circulation and Construction of Charter School Markets in the United States
    (Agenda Publishing, 2020-03-26) Cohen, Dan
    This chapter explores how one market-based education reform promoted by RTTP, charter schools, has spread across the United States, as well as the place-specific politics that have shaped how charter school markets function differentially across state lines. In doing so, it speaks to some of the core themes of this collection by exploring the ways in which these (particular, not generic) markets have been instituted through laws, politics and governing bodies as well as contested through the mobilization of alternative logics specific to education. This is accomplished by drawing on a blend of Polanyian and cultural Marxist scholarship promoted by Burawoy (2003) as ‘sociological Marxism’ and to underscore how markets emerge as the outcome of geographically distinct struggles.