News

SEDRD graduate students and faculty are well represented in the latest issue of Y Magazine from the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. This issue of Y Magazine contains three contributions from SEDRD graduate students and faculty: 

Researchers, policymakers and practitioners recently gathered in Letterfrack, Ireland for the 2024 North Atlantic Forum. The Forum focused on sustainable livelihoods and sought to engage new ideas in rural development, policy practice, and the social economy. 

On 18 September 2024, five SEDRD graduate students set out to collect information from business owners in Seaforth, Ontario, to better understand the realities of attracting and retaining employees.

Farmland preservation is critical to the future of rural Ontario. The Connecting the Dots initiative is excited to share the first Rural Research Summary—Farmland Preservation and Urban Expansion in Ontario. This summary sheds light on the challenges and strategies associated with balancing farmland preservation amidst growing urban development pressures, providing implications and practical recommendations for policymakers, planners, and community stakeholders.

A team of University of Guelph and Toronto Metropolitan University students recently won the C40 Reinventing Cities competition for Toronto.

Congratulations to Ryan De Jong, a Master of Landscape Architecture graduate (MLA 2024) who was awarded an American Society of Landscape Architects Student Honor Award in the research category based on his thesis work entitled "Leveraging the Potential of Spontaneous Pavement Vegetation."

Four members of the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development shared rural research at the recent 74^th annual Canadian Association of Geographers national conference in St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. With a conference theme of Edges, students and faculty contributed research on rural health, rural economic development, northern veterinary service provision, and rural workforce development. Presentations shared at the conference included: 

Congratulations to Josh Barrett for successfully defending his PhD dissertation titled “A New Localism for Newfoundland and Labrador? An Exploratory Study of Rural Local Government Entrepreneurialism”. Josh's dissertation focuses on understanding how rural local governments can facilitate economic development in their communities in light of limited capacity and resources to do so.