Resources

Building Our Urban Futures: Inside Canada’s Infrastructure and Real Estate Needs

Canada’s historical underinvestment in infrastructure has reached a critical crossroads. Despite increased investment in infrastructure in recent years, we still have a significant gap between our collective needs and current projections. The scope of this challenge is enormous.

This newly released report, Building Our Urban Futures: Inside Canada’s Infrastructure and Real Estate Needs, from Evergreen and Deloitte takes a long-term view and asks: what will be needed 50 years in the future? We estimate that between now and the year 2067, Canada will need between $11 trillion to $22 trillion in infrastructure investment just to maintain current standards of living, let alone make improvements.

It is now clear that we need to urgently strategize and act collaboratively so that we make choices now to rise to the challenges of our futures.

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A Guide to Using Scenarios: Foresight for Resilient Cities

To build resilient communities and be effective in a complex and ever-changing world, municipal staff, city builders and other decision-makers must look ahead to anticipate emerging trends, issues, opportunities, and threats. Strategic foresight is a field that enables them to do just that—it enhances people’s capacity to detect, respond to, and learn from patterns of change. Find out how to use a prominent strategic foresight tool called scenario development in A Guide to Using Scenarios.

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People, Places & Programs: The Untapped Value of Community Hubs

Spaces that support and connect communities play an essential role in providing public benefits and economic opportunities while instilling a sense of belonging for residents. When properly resourced and community-driven, hubs are invaluable to flourishing communities. But the impact of a community hub may not always be linear or quantifiable, so many of these hubs remain underfunded. Through twelve case studies from coast to coast to coast, this research demonstrates the great potential that is unlocked when community hubs are properly supported by funds, relationships and physical assets. These examples showcase the innovative toolkits, partnerships, and business models that help community hubs thrive.

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Getting to the Open Smart City

Smart cities are becoming an increasingly significant part of our world as our dependency and use of data and technology continues to rise.

Getting to the Open Smart City, a new report from Future Cities Canada and OpenNorth, explores the concept of “openness” within a smart city context. The report analyses how the use of open smart technologies and approaches can help cities achieve more accessible and equitable outcomes, and provides recommendations to how our cities can integrate openness into our data policies.

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Green Bank Financing to Accelerate Clean Energy Deployment in Canada through the Canadian Infrastructure Bank

This report finds that the creation of a Green Bank division within the new Canadian Infrastructure Bank can fill an institutional and finance gap in Canada and spark greater private investment in clean energy infrastructure.

The Green Bank model has been deployed around the world to accomplish similar goals, and has proven effective. Canada is well suited to adopting the Green Bank model because of its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals, its focus on “green infrastructure” investment, and its present lack of institutions dedicated to project finance for the broad deployment of commercially viable clean energy solutions. The new Infrastructure Bank would be an ideal institutional home for a Green Bank.

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Building Canada’s Low-Carbon Approach to Infrastructure Investments through Prioritization, Policy and Procurement

A proactive approach is required to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions across government decision-making. The purpose of this report is to provide recommendations for the federal and Ontario governments on the public policies that will drive clean innovation and growth, and provide guidance for investments in sustainable, low-carbon, resilient infrastructure that are aligned with compact, complete community design, provincial growth planning, and that provide economic and community benefits.

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Future Cities Canada Roadshow Report

From late 2017 to early 2018, Future Cities Canada worked with partners across the country to host a series of roundtable conversations and meetings with municipalities and communities. These meetings gathered insights about the opportunities and challenges facing cities and regions in order to collectively build a vision for equitable, regenerative and prosperous 21st century cities. These conversations from each city are captured in this final document.

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Future Cities Canada: A Systems Approach to Urban Innovation

Historically, cities have always been natural incubators for experimentation, change and progress. Today, our cities are on the brink of a new wave of innovation, driven by emerging practices related to governance and participation, a panoply of powerful new technologies, the availability of massive amounts of urban data, and novel sources and forms of capital investment. But the forces of inertia are also present in the form of established procedures, legacy mind-sets, and vested interests. To make progress, it is important that forward-looking people share a vision and language of change, take inspiration from successful models of change, and have a sense of where change can be achieved with the least resistance.

This brief report takes a modest step towards addressing these needs by sketching out a theory of change that could be used by Future Cities Canada to guide the partners as they design and develop this promising new coalition.

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How to be Smart(er) in Mid-Sized Cities in Ontario

It is increasingly clear that data and technology are becoming synonymous with city-building. This movement towards “smart cities” will continue to accelerate in the years to come, presenting a critical opportunity and challenge for leaders in communities of all sizes. This paper, written in partnership with Code for Canada, discusses the opportunities for data and technology in Canada’s mid-sized cities, with a particular focus on Ontario.

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Realizing Social and Economic Objectives through Infrastructure Planning and Investment

Municipal governments own almost 60% of Canada’s infrastructure. In Ontario, billions of dollars in investment are forthcoming from the provincial and federal governments over the next decade to assist with municipal infrastructure needs. In light of the scale of this investment, and growing interest in this topic in Ontario, this study was commissioned by Evergreen with three objectives:

• to explore how Ontario municipalities can use community benefits to maximize social and economic outcomes through better infrastructure planning and investment, in order to deliver greater value for people and communities;
• to address how community benefits can be aligned with or incorporated into Ontario’s municipal asset management program; and
• to provide preliminary thinking as to how community benefits can be evaluated.

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We Are Cities Action Agenda

The We Are Cities campaign, an initiative between Evergreen and McConnell Foundation’s Cities for People, engaged thousands of residents, asking them to imagine an agenda for the future of our cities. In the end, this Action Agenda was created to establish the five priority areas for action.

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Everyone Left – Smart City Maintenance and Continuity

Smart city projects are initially successful when innovators are dedicating their attention to specific sites, but what happens when innovators move on? A lack of attention can lead to things falling apart and experimental systems failing faster than expected.

This paper was written by Graeme Ross Kennedy and presents five lenses that outline technological risks and opportunities for building sustainable practices into smart city plans.

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How Local Governments Are(n’t) Engaging the Public in Smart City Initiatives

From the introduction of the automobile to the rise of the internet and now applications that facilitate a sharing economy, the form and function of cities have been shaped by technological innovation. In some instances, residents advocated for and welcomed this change; sometimes not. Sometimes this change has been positive; other times it has had negative impacts on health, prosperity, equity, and social cohesion. In Canadian democratic society, residents should have a role in choosing change, though from experience we know this does not always occur.

This research brief was written by Lindsay Toth and examines the Smart City Challenge submissions to understand local governments’ current approach to public engagement and their awareness of and response to key issues related to smart city initiatives.

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A Case for the Circular Economy in the Age of “Smart” Innovation

Cities are experiencing a new wave of innovation, driven by emerging practices in governance and participation, new technologies, the availability of data, and new sources and forms of capital investment. As governments modernize, can they catalyse circular economy (CE) efforts?

Examining the Canadian Smart Cities Challenge (SCC) applications, this research paper found that CE thinking was not at the forefront of Canadian municipalities and Indigenous communities who submitted proposals and offers suggestions for ways to enable circular economy thinking throughout the advancement of smart city technology.

This research brief was written by Vickey Simovic, and is an adaptation of a Masters Research Paper presented to Ryerson University for the Master of Planning in Urban Development, supervised by Dr. Pamela Robinson.

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Health and Data in the Canadian Urban Landscape

This report analyzes Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge applications with an eye to the health of cities and residents, revealing that resident health and well-being stood out as a central concern that multiple municipalities were looking to address in a variety of ways.

This research brief was written by Andrew Ramsaroop, and is an adaptation of a Masters Research Paper presented to Ryerson University for the Master of Planning in Urban Development, supervised by Dr. Pamela Robinson.

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