The Fall 2013 issue of Edge magazine is all about cities. Research from across the University of Toronto was profiled, including a feature story on the Daniels Faculty's Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory, headed by Assistant Professor Liat Margolis.

Writes Jenny Hall:

Margolis is the director of an ambitious project situated on the roof of the Daniels building, where she and a multi-disciplinary team of professors, students and representatives from industry have constructed 33 test beds designed to hit upon the ideal recipe for optimizing green roofs in Toronto. The group is testing four variables: soil content, soil depth, amount of irrigation and type of plant.

“What you might design for Toronto,” she says, “is different from what you would design for Dallas,Texas.” And yet green roofs across north America are largely the same. For example, the dominant practice is to plant a species called Sedum. It comes in mats that are unrolled — like sod — for an instant green roof. Its drought-tolerance, says Margolis, may actually be a disadvantage when it comes to cooling. Sedum has evolved to hold onto as much water as it can, and it doesn’t evapotranspire during the day, which is exactly when the cooling effects of green roofs are needed. And because it’s a functional monoculture, made up of plants having a similar growth habit, when it’s struck by pests or disease, the whole roof dies.

Read the full article here.

Patricia McCarney, a professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of U of T's new Global Cities Institute (GCI), which is part of the Daniels Facutly, is also featured in an article that asks: "What do we need to do to make cities better?"

McCarney, who oversees the Global Cities Indicator Facility (GCIF) as the director of GCI, argues that cities need to "Harness the power of metrics in day-to-day decision-making: embrace indicators to accelerate the transition to intelligent, resilient cities."

GCIF has developed an unprecedented system to collect globally standardized data from cities around the world. When it was created in 2009, GCIF was working with 9 cities to build data on infrastructure, transportation, ageing, governance, finance, education, and safety, among other indicators of a city’s health. Today, a total of 252 cities across 80 countries are now GCIF members. The ability to collect and meaningfully compare information is a boon to researchers and policy makers, whose capacity to analyze data from different cities was previously limited due to different standards, definitions, and methods used to track and measure data throughout the world.