Prof. Kevin Manaugh, and Prof. David Wachsmuth co-led the development of an exploratory dashboard at McGill University with funding from the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative (MSSI) and the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF). This project began in 2017 and ended in 2022, where funds were used to support the research and development of this platform, which eventually became Curbcut.
The co-leads were interested in how urban governance, including decision making related to sustainability problems, must balance competing voices and visions over multiple spatial and temporal scales. They created an online platform to address this, integrating sustainability data and enabling complex scenario modelling – transforming decision-making processes using a range of data sources integrated into meaningful relationships. Curbcut took an interdisciplinary approach to urban sustainability by examining elements of the natural, built, and social environments and putting environmental and distributional justice as a key focus.
