GUELPH-WELLINGTON URBAN-RURAL

The Guelph-Wellington Rural-Urban Program (GWRUP) is a research-based urban-cultural program initiated in the Fall of 2011 by Cohabitation Strategies with the support of the Musagetes Foundation. This program aims to serve as a dynamic tool that can support the production of the immediate and future cultural agenda of the Musagetes Foundation, known to be firmly committed to the strengthening of socially engaged cultural practices and their inherent potential to positively transform the socio-spatial conditions of urban-rural regions.

The GWRUP was conceived as an action knowledge base able to raise crucial questions about the city’s urban, economic, political, environmental, social and artistic development, as well as to stimulate debate and production of critical cultural knowledge through the growth of new local associations between citizens, artists, activists, designers, grassroots groups, and local cultural, educational, political and social institutions. Together with the assistance of local and international researchers, different applications of scientific and participatory action research were used as tools for gathering in-depth knowledge about Guelph, its surroundings, and most importantly about the social relations that compose the ecology of the city. A number of activities were organized to extract, translate and produce local knowledge for, with and by citizens from various neighborhoods and diverse social and economic backgrounds. The research topics identified in these sessions revealed critical local issues such as, the downtown’s densification process, the lack of affordable housing, the living condition of migrant seasonal workers, the continuation of Guelph’s pioneering incursion in cooperativism and the controversies around food politics and the environment. In order to construct a relational understanding of the conditions that influence Guelph’s growth, through a broad transdisciplinary mediation of different forms of scientific and action research, the GWRUP developed its operative framework assembling methodologies that could give an insight of the connecting threads between the macro and micro conditioners, from the macroeconomic directions of Canada in relation to labor, agriculture and infrastructure, to the micro shifts in vacancy rates in a downtown block or the emerging food justice groups around town. These approach allowed the GWRUP to integrate academic understandings with popular knowledge and wisdom belonging to the people and the grassroots.

The research is structured by three interrelated research areas that comprise a number of sections that at the same time relate with and feed each other; (1) Local and global environmental, cultural, political, social and economic processes, (2) The political economy of food systems, and (3) Politics of space: social exclusion and inclusion through housing and urban development.