“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Who We Are
The City Community Research and Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative) exists to learn with, by, and from communities to produce scholarship, design innovative educational experiences, and advance social justice in urban settings.
Based in Tkaronto/Toronto – a vibrant, multicultural, and rapidly growing metropolis – our city provides a robust backdrop for exploring a wide range of city and community-building activities in the face of pressing challenges that range from the climate crisis to affordability to various forms of inequality. Through our teaching and research, we investigate, learn from, and aim to engage in shaping our collective urban futures with a focus on equity.
The Collaborative supports and elevates city-building through community partnerships, community-engaged scholarship, activist research, community organizing, and grassroots innovations.
The Collaborative is also a hub for urban studies and teaching within the Department of Geography & Planning and is an affiliated initiative of the School of Cities, both at the University of Toronto. While Toronto is our roots, we collaborate across various geographies with a goal of learning from the local while thinking across the global.
Aditi Mehta, co-director
Aditi Mehta has been an assistant professor of urban studies at the University of Toronto since 2018. Her research sits at the intersection of community development, environmental justice, and media studies. She investigates how people produce and disseminate knowledge about various urban crises through new media tools in order to influence policy in their neighbourhoods, either through meaningful public participation with local officials or via activism by organizing amongst themselves.
Aditi designs courses and research projects in collaboration with non-profit organizations for the purpose of social change. She was awarded the SSHRC Partnership Engagement Grant for her participatory action research
course, in which university students and members of the non-profit FOCUS Media Arts collaborated to conduct research about the Regent Park neighbourhood, Canada’s first mixed-income redevelopment.
Her research has been published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. In 2025, she was awarded the U of T-wide Cheryl E. Regehr Early Career Teaching Award. Aditi completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was awarded the Institute’s highest public service award for co-designing and publishing about MIT’s first course inside prison.
David Roberts, co-director
David Roberts joined the Urban Studies faculty at the University of Toronto in 2013. His research and teaching interests include the geographies of race and racialization, urban infrastructure planning, and the politics of public participation in urban knowledge production and policymaking. He has a particular interest in how members of communities historically marginalized from formal planning processes engage in city-building work by shaping and reshaping urban spaces, politics, and experiences.
David’s past grant-funded projects include ”Housing Unaccompanied and Separated Minors in the Greater Toronto Area” which focused on understanding and improving the experiences of youth refugee claimants in Toronto’s shelter system and ”Building Back Better from Below: Harnessing Innovations in Community Response and Intersectoral Collaboration for
Health and Food Justice Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic”, a collaborative study with teams in Toronto, São Paulo, and Brighton that looked at grassroots organizing in Black communities to address food and health inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. His current project, ”Assessing the Human Rights Promises of FIFA 2026 in Toronto, Ontario” is mapping and evaluating the impacts of FIFA’s recent focus on human rights in the planning for Toronto’s role in hosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup.
David received the University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Award in 2017 and the Faculty of Arts & Science Outstanding Teaching Award in 2023. His research has been published in Antipode, Environment and Planning C: Government and Public Policy, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the Journal of Urban Affairs, and elsewhere.