This project will focus on advancing ideas about how the Bay Area Restoration Council’s Let’s Talk Water tool—focused on the Chedoke Creek watershed as inspired by John Terpstra’s Daylighting Chedoke—can be used as a catalyst for conversation with Hamiltonians about our relationship with the watershed. Building upon ideas developed with CityLAB Semester in Residence students in Fall 2022, the project will advance ideas related to the following priorities: a) how might BARC engage with youth in local schools to plan outdoor education experiences in connection with Chedoke Creek; b) how might stories about people’s relationship with the watershed be gathered; c) how might BARC plan to engage directly with residents in Fall 2023 to co-create ideas for placemaking and daylighting of the creek.

Visit the Bay Area Restoration Council website 

Environment Hamilton has been a leading environmental non-profit organization in Hamilton for 20 years. As the City of Hamilton advances a new set of climate strategies and makes changes to systems processes in support of those strategies, Environment Hamilton is thinking about how to maximize these efforts and what the role of public engagement will be in the process. Environment Hamilton is seeking to understand whether there are examples from other similar communities that are engaging the public meaningfully on climate change responses, and what Hamilton can learn from these experiences. The hope from this exploration will be to bring ideas forward that Environment Hamilton can advocate for as the City creates new entities—such as a Climate Advisory Committee—to advance climate change work in Hamilton, with a focus on increasing citizen engagement with these processes.

Visit the Environment Hamilton website

Resident engagement and involvement in municipal decision-making and change processes is central to a healthy community. Deliberative democracy is a process by which citizens and residents engage in dialogue to discuss issues and provide input to governmental decision-making processes. There is not a high level of resident engagement in the City of Hamilton’s decision-making processes. Focused on this broad question, this project will explore ideas for increasing resident engagement with a focus on identifying creative ways that the City of Hamilton can make municipal budget processes more accessible to residents and thus encourage their engagement in budget decisions that impact the community. Examples of work could include mapping the current budget process, developing ideas for comparing budget tradeoffs, or developing a budget calculator. Outcomes of this work will be actively shared with City of Hamilton leadership with the idea of possibly developing public engagement tools that could be piloted for the 2024 budget process and/or beyond.

Visit the Hamilton Community Benefits Network website

 Extreme heat is already one of the most significant impacts of climate change experienced in Hamilton—a reality likely to grow in intensity as the years go on. While the City of Hamilton has a by-law that requires landlords to keep rental units at a certain warmth in the winter, no such by-law exists for capping the temperature of a rental unit in the summer. Working with Hamilton ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), this project will be focused on advocating for an extreme heat by-law to protect vulnerable tenants. Students will identify other municipalities in the United States and globally that have developed extreme heat by-laws in order to make recommendations on what a Hamilton by-law might look like and to identify how various stakeholders might be engaged in this process into Summer 2023 and beyond. 

Visit the Hamilton ACORN website

 Working with staff in the City of Hamilton’s recently created Climate Change Initiatives Office, and building upon the recent approval—in August 2022—of both a Community Energy and Emissions Plan and a Climate Change Impact Adaptation Plan, this project will focus on identifying actionable priorities that require deep relationship-building and community engagement with residents, neighbourhood groups, and Hamilton-based organizations. The goal of the work will be to identify possible projects to prioritize for collaborative community-engaged processes that could take shape within the Fall 2023 CityLAB Hamilton Semester in Residence program. 

Read about Hamilton’s Climate Action Strategy