Counter-Mapping Urban Heat Receives a SSHRC Insight Development Grant
The Toronto Climate Observatory has received a two-year Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for Counter-Mapping Urban Heat: Critical Design for Equitable Climate Informatics. The project is led by Robert Soden with co-investigator Laura Tozer of the University of Toronto Scarborough, in partnership with Sprout (formerly Climate Resilient Communities) and The 519.
Heat waves are among the deadliest climate hazards in Canada, and Toronto recorded more than 250 heat-related deaths between 2000 and 2020. These deaths fall disproportionately on older adults, people with chronic illnesses, people who are socially isolated, newcomers, and people in precarious housing. Cities have responded with a growing set of information products – heat vulnerability maps, alert systems, dashboards, and public health advisories – but these are generally designed by and for institutions rather than the communities most affected. Vulnerability maps built from census variables and surface temperatures locate risk in neighbourhoods and demographic categories, and leave out the housing conditions, social relationships, and institutional failures through which vulnerability is produced. Alerts advise people to stay cool and check on their neighbours, placing responsibility on individuals, when our own research on severe weather and the COVID-19 pandemic has found that vulnerable communities already rely on extensive forms of mutual support that existing information systems rarely recognize.
Over the next two years, the project will work with frontline community workers and residents in neighbourhoods including Downtown East, Rexdale, Jane-Finch, and St. James Town. It has three objectives: to document how heat-vulnerable communities experience extreme heat, what information they rely on, and what capacities they already have; to evaluate the heat maps, visualizations, and alerts currently distributed by the City of Toronto and community organizations for their relevance, accessibility, and usability; and to co-design alternatives that help people keep themselves and their neighbours safe during heat events. The methods draw on critical design, which uses designed artifacts to bring assumptions into view and to envision alternatives, alongside interviews, asset mapping, and data journey mapping. The project will produce a portfolio of design concepts – neighbourhood heat guides that draw on local knowledge of cooling resources and support networks, templates for community-based heat alerts through trusted channels, protocols for mutual check-ins during heat events – documented so that practitioners in other places can adapt them, and will conclude with a cross-community event to identify pathways for putting the results into practice.
The grant builds on the Reimagining Heat Information in Toronto workshop held with Sprout in March 2026, and on the TCO’s research on risk information and community response during crises. Learn more on our Our Work page.