Visionary Communities
Advancing Desired Neighbourhood Futures
Visionary Communities is a collaborative research project with the goal of enhancing community conditions for just sustainable futures.
Our team is intentionally transdisciplinary and includes researchers from sustainability, sociology, public health, urban planning, and information management as well as practitioners from two community development organizations, East Scarborough Storefront and Catalysts’ Circle.
Our research focuses on the Kingston-Galloway/Orton Park (KGO) neighbourhood of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada where researchers, community development practitioners, grassroots groups, and residents are exploring new ways to design, test, and iterate collaborative solutions that simultaneously advance local priorities, projects, and initiatives along with broader climate and sustainability goals.
Published in March 2025, our Embracing emergence article describes how taking a transdisciplinary knowledge co-production approach wove together academic expertise on sustainability with a community development practice – the Connected Community Approach – to shape the Visionary Communities project.
Our project design includes a set of activities that overlap and follow one another, enabling us to answer our research questions and, ultimately, meet our objectives.
Through a collaborative process we call Momentum Surfacing, we identified who’s rolling up their sleeves to support the community, and why.
Principles
- Do no harm
- Commit to and promote anti-racism, social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, reconciliation
- Collaborate reciprocally so all involved experience mutual benefit
- Adopt a community growth mindset where failure doesn’t exist- only opportunities for learning
- Respect, celebrate, and braid differences – worlds, worldviews, disciplines, lived experiences, desires
- Move at the pace of trust and community, and ground all planning and action in authentic relationships
- Embrace emergence by staying focused on our purpose and principles and adapting our actions as new situations, knowledge and learning get introduced
Theory of Change
We’ve simplified our theory of change into a visual form to whet your appetite for more…
