Biography
Betsy Donald (betsy.donald@queensu.ca)
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Queen’s
University in Kingston, Ontario. She has degrees in history, environmental
studies, planning and geography from McGill, York and Toronto respectively.
She teaches and does research on the urban creative economy, with recent
publications in Economic
Geography, Environment
and Planning A, and Space
and Polity. She is also a Registered
Professional Planner and has consulted on a wide-range of public policy
issues for all levels of government. Her report, Competing
for Talent: implications for social and cultural policy in Canadian city-regions
was commissioned by Heritage Canada. Dr. Donald currently has two
SSHRC-funded research projects: one on creative class politics in Toronto
and Boston, and the other on the urban creative food economy. She has
received numerous awards for her research including the Governor
General's Gold Medal for Academic Excellence . As a Visiting Scholar
at Harvard
University's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston in the Kennedy School
of Government, Dr. Donald has been examining the politics of the new
economy in Boston.
Teaching Interests
Dr. Donald enjoys teaching and in recent years has offered the following
courses:
Gphy 227: Cities: Geography, Planning and Urban Life
Ggphy337: Regional Development Theory and Policy
Gphy 338: Urban Political Geography
Gphy 442: City-Regions in a Global Age
Gphy 882: Political-Geography of City Regions
She also enjoys working with post-doctoral, doctoral and masters students
and welcomes inquiries from interested new students.
Research
Cities and all their complexities fascinate me. My interests in cities
are multi-disciplinary, reaching from the basis of geography into political
science, economics, and social psychology, all in both present day and
historical contexts. My academic approach to cities in echoed in the following
passage from Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson in A Companion to the City
(2000:1):
It is no longer possible, if ever was, to look at the city from one perspective
-- be it cultural or economic. Instead cities need to be understood from
a variety of perspectives in the recognition that the cultural/social
constructs, and is constructed by, the political/economic and vice versa.
It is only when we adopt such a complex and textured reading of cities
that we will begin to be able to address the pressing social, economic,
and environmental questions faced by cities across the world.
I have chosen to focus primarily on North American cities as a way into
exploring these complexities. I strive to be analytically diverse in my
research, rooted, however, in theories of urban political economy. My
doctoral dissertation examined the economic challenges to, and political
responses of, Toronto's most recent governance restructuring. The thesis
addressed three central theoretical questions in contemporary urban political
economy: To what extent do global forces predetermine spatial-economic
outcomes at the city-region scale? To what extent are changes in urban
governance a product of local history and geography? To what extent is
governance change understood within the broader context of nation-state
restructuring? Drawing on insights from regulation and regime theory,
my thesis provided a framework for analyzing the link between economic
dynamics and institutions operating at the city-region scale. In 1999,
this work was instrumental in my receiving the Governor General's Gold
Medal for Academic Excellence.
Cities and the New Economy
Since completing my thesis, I have been developing two other areas of
research. The first is a direct extension of my doctoral work. I have
become interested in how the ‘new economy' is shaping, and being
shaped by, the way various actors view the city. I am particularly interested
in how the ‘creative class' (as Richard Florida defines it) thinks
about ‘quality of life'. How, for instance, are perceptions of quality
of life reshaping city form and politics? From a theoretical perspective,
I am interested in exploring whether the alleged shift away from a capital-centred
urban elite to a talent-centered urban elite is challenging our traditional
urban theories of elites, regimes, and growth machines. Also, how do newer
critical social theories inform traditional assumptions about who and
how the city is governed?
A Study of Toronto and Boston
To address these questions, I have begun to draw on empirical work in
Toronto and Boston, chosen because they share certain important historical,
social and economic characteristics. Both have witnessed a tremendous
transition in their economies, infrastructure investments, immigration
patterns, and social and spatial well-being, particularly over the past
twenty years. Both cities have largely completed their transition to a
knowledge-based economy and are considered leading North American cities
in this regard. Furthermore, despite the surprising commonalities between
them, no-one has yet compared these two regions more than anecdotally.
A study of the Kingston-city-region
http://geog.queensu.ca/Press%20Release/dynamic%20cities%20May%2006.pdf
In addition to this research, I have been conducting research on Kingston,
Ontario as part of a larger project that examines the social dynamics
of economic performance in Canadian city-regions. The SSHRC-MCRI $2.5
million project, headed by University of Toronto researchers David Wolfe
and Meric Gertler, comprises 22 Canadian co-investigators and 23 international
collaborators. The teams are exploring why certain cities attract and
retain creative and innovative thinkers and how this in turn creates social
inclusiveness, civic engagement, and a dynamic economy. Their research
focuses on three themes: the social dynamics of innovation, creativity
and social inclusion, and governance.
The Political and Cultural Economy of Food
The second area of research is in the political, ecological and cultural
economy of food. This work was part of a 5-year $2.5 million study funded
by SSHRC's Major Collaborative Research Initiative "Innovation Systems
and Economic Development: The Role of Local and Regional Clusters in Canada"
(see: www.utoronto.ca/isrn/clusters.htm).
My component of this project was inspired by past professional planning
work with agricultural organizations to preserve prime farmland in the
rapidly sprawling Greater Toronto Area and other parts of southern Ontario.
I am interested in why there appears to be a disconnect between, on the
one hand, what urban consumers are demanding in the way of specialty,
ethnic, local and organic foods, and on the other hand, the traditional
agri-food paradigm that operates in Ontario and most of North America.
My interest and role in the project is theoretically and empirically rooted
in the political ecology and regional innovation systems literature.
Since developing this area of research a few years ago, I am increasingly
realizing that food is a prism through which to explore many dimensions
of sustainability -- from local economic development to better ecological
practice to social stability and opportunity. Working in partnership with
Professor Alison Blay-Palmer of Wilfred Laurier University (former SSHRC
post-doctoral student under my supervision), we have been writing about
the urban creative food economy, the organic movement, food deserts and
the role of large retailers and distributors in the food system, among
other things. We are currently working on a book, Food Fears: from industrial
to sustainable agriculture, with a planned publication date in 2008.
Publications
B. Donald. 2009. "From
Kraft to Craft: innovation and creativity in Ontario's Food Economy" Working
paper published by the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, February 2009, ref. 2009-WPONT-001
B. Donald. 2009. "A
New Menu for Ontario's Food Economy" Policy insight, Martin Prosperity
Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, February
2009.
H. Hall and B. Donald. 2009. "Innovation
and Creativity on the Periphery: challenges and opportunities in Northern
Ontario" Working paper published by the Martin Prosperity Institute,
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, February 2009, ref.
2009-WPONT-002
Donald, B. 2009. “Contested notions of quality in a buyer-driven
commodity cluster: the case of food and wine in Canada” European
Planning Studies, in press.
Donald, B. 2008. “Food Systems Planning and Sustainable Cities
and Regions: the role of the firm in sustainable food capitalism”
Regional Studies, 42(9), pp. 1251-1262.
Donald, B. and A. Blay-Palmer. 2008. The Urban Creative Food Economy in
The Contemporary Canadian Metropolis, edited by C. Morgan, R. Dennis and
S. Shaw, Institute for the STudy of the Americas, Washington: Brookings
Institution Press, in press.
Blay-Palmer, A. and B. Donald. 2008. “Food Fears: making connections”,
in Food Fears: from industrial to sustainable food systems, Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 1-16.
B. Donald and A. Blay-Palmer. 2008. “Eating Organic in an Age of
Insecurity” in Food Fears: from industrial to sustainable food systems,
Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 109-120.
Blay-Palmer, A. and B. Donald. 2008. “Manufacturing Food Fear”
in Food Fears: from industrial to sustainable food systems, Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 121-132.
Donald, B. and A. Blay-Palmer 2007. “Eating
Organic in an Age of Insecurity”, Lien Social et Politique,
vol. 57, Spring, pp. 63-73.
Blay-Palmer, A. and B. Donald 2007. “Manufacturing
fear: The role of food processors and retailers in constructing alternative
food geographies". In M. Kneafsey, L. Holloway and D. Maye (eds.)
Constructing ‘Alternative’ Food Geographies: Representation
and Practice, Elsevier Press, forthcoming.
Blay-Palmer, A. and B. Donald. 2006. “A
Tale of Three Tomatoes: the rise of new food economies in Greater Toronto”
Economic Geography, vol. 82 (4), pp. 383-399.
Donald, B. and A. Blay-Palmer. 2006. “The
Urban Creative Food Economy: producing food for the urban elite or social
inclusion opportunity?” Environment and Planning A, October,
vol. 38 (10): 1901-1920.
Donald, B. 2006. “From
growth machine to ideas machine: the new politics of local economic development
in the knowledge-intensive city” in The Competitive City in
the New Economy, edited by Diane-GabrielleTremblay and Rémy Tremblay,
Montreal: University of Quebec Press, Political Economy Collection.
Donald, B. 2005. “The
politics of local economic development in Canada’s global cities:
new dependencies, new deals and a new politics of scale?” Space
& Polity, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 261-291, December.
Donald, B. D. Morrow with A. Athanasiu. 2003 Competing
for Talent: implications for social and cultural policy in Canadian city-regions
A report prepared for Strategic Research and Analysis (SRA) Strategic
Planning and Policy Coordination, Department of Canadian Heritage, May
14, 2003, 43 pages.
Donald, B. 2002. “Spinning
Toronto’s Golden Age: the making of a ‘city that worked’"
Environment and Planning A, vol. 34, no. 12, pp. 2127-2154.
Donald, B. 2002. “The
Permeable City: Toronto’s Spatial Shift at the Turn of the Millennium”
The Professional Geographer, vol. 54, no. 2, pages 190-203
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Dr.
Betsy J. Donald
Biography