Places and Spaces

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This page is a portal to the Places and Spaces collaboratory, a private interactive space for researchers and case study practitioners from the sustainable development modelling project to collaboratively work on research tasks, share ideas and resources, and track their progress. This project will develop a tool for communities to assess alternative development pathways, framing these pathways with respect to levers (policy options, investment choices in social and physical infrastructure) and impacts (community wellbeing, resource consumption and financial viability). The 'engine' of this tool - which traces the complex relationships between levers and impacts - is an integrated systems simulation model of the community incorporating community-specific data and reflecting community-specific policies and scenarios. The tool uses a platform developed through decades of research and development in the area of socio-economic, natural resource and urban land use models, and will be brought to the community level by a team of experienced sustainability analysts, modellers and academics.

The model has a biophysical foundation in that it represents: population and demographics; buildings and urban form; physical infrastructure and services (transportation, water, waste, energy); social infrastructure and services (education, healthcare, recreation); and economic activity (labour, products and services) accounts for the financial states and activities of the public sector, private sector and households within the community and financial flows leaving and entering the community explicitly connects biophysical elements with financial accounting.

To enter the collaboratory, you can click on the image or the link above and enter your login details.  If you are experiencing issues logging in, contact Rob Newell at Rob.1newell@royalroads.ca.