Evelyne Brie: Measuring Inequality Differently

Meet Evelyne Brie, IVADO Professor and Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal.

For Evelyne Brie, measuring socioeconomic inequalities requires tracking them at two scales simultaneously: that of historical legacies shaping the trajectories of entire regions over decades, and that of the concrete disparities people experience in their neighbourhoods day to day. This dual focus structures her entire research program.

Specializing in advanced quantitative methods and computational social sciences, she examines the mechanisms through which certain historical events, the East-West division of Germany, the Conquest of New France, disrupted capital accumulation across multiple generations. Her argument: income, the conventional measure of inequality, fails to capture what transmitted, or untransmitted, capital explains about the gaps we observe today.

In parallel, she develops data collection and visualization tools to make these inequalities legible at the urban scale. Her participatory platform Tag ta Ville, launched in April 2026, invites citizens to map their neighbourhood experience by identifying areas they appreciate or find lacking. The premise is straightforward: “The real experts on a living environment are the people who live there.”

Data collected since launch reveal that two thirds of all reports are positive, a proportion that conventional municipal channels, limited to complaints, cannot capture. The tool also allows these perceptions to be overlaid with existing data on material deprivation and access to green infrastructure, whose distribution across Montreal measurably reflects income inequalities.

A second project, developed in partnership with UdeM, involves deploying sensor-equipped birdhouses across Montreal. These devices will collect real-time data on air quality, noise pollution, temperature and humidity at a geographic resolution finer than that of current government monitoring stations. An initial deployment is planned on the grounds of the former Montreal hippodrome.

Holder of a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Evelyne Brie spent two years as a data scientist in Berlin, at City Lab Berlin and the Open Data Informationsstelle, before taking up a position as assistant professor at Western University from 2022 to 2025.

It was in Berlin, collaborating directly with city services on planning and electoral redistricting tools, that she saw firsthand how well-translated data could change public decisions. A conviction that has stayed with her: “The data is there — but there is real work involved in translating it into a format the public can actually use.”