Our Work

Let’s Talk About Placemaking is a new magazine-like publication developed collaboratively by Canada’s Placemaking Community, the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI), PlacemakingUS, and a range of leading practitioners across Canada and internationally. It’s a visually rich resource that provides a comprehensive look at the value created by contemporary placemaking in Canada.

Making the Case for the Middle, in collaboration with mddl, explores the potential of middle housing to alleviate Alberta’s housing challenges, scale production and meet demand by 2030. Middle housing includes a range of housing types, including duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments, and live/work housing types. This project was made possible through a grant from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation.

Remaking Main Streets, dives deep into the possibilities of intensifying housing along Canada’s main streets, positioning this approach as feasible, financially viable, and desirable for communities and their residents. Canada has over 248,000 opportunities for housing intensification on main streets — But how do we unlock that potential?

A Jump Start: Providing Infrastructure for More Housing, estimates that the cost of housing-enabling infrastructure across Canada averages over $100,000 per new home. Considering Canada’s housing targets, the report suggests there are likely hundreds of billions of dollars required to fund the housing-enabling infrastructure needed across the country. This report offers solutions for municipalities seeking housing solutions.

Both/And: Integrating Natural Asset Management into Federal Housing Supply Policymaking by the Natural Asset Initiative and CUI asserts the importance of incorporating natural asset management (NAM) into Canada’s federal housing strategies. This approach promises not only to enhance community resilience to climate change, but also to elevate the quality of life for all Canadians.

A Living Capital: Investing in Downtown Ottawa for a Dynamic Future is an agenda for aligned action aimed to reimagine and rejuvenate Downtown Ottawa, making it more diverse, resilient, and vibrant for generations and challenges to come. The agenda was created by CUI for the Ottawa Board of Trade.

The Case for Conversions Guidebook is a compilation of three briefing documents circulated to interested parties in six Canadian cities: Halifax, Moncton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Regina, and Victoria. This Guidebook provides a summary of our findings from the Solutions Lab and serves as a collection of resources to support office-to-residential conversions across the country.

Charting the Path to Office Conversions in Canadian Cities builds upon the work of CUI’s Solutions Lab. The research findings and accompanying Supportive Toolkit invite every municipality in Canada looking to support office-to-residential conversions to choose, adapt, and reorient elements responsive to their own unique contexts. 

This report seeks to understand the impacts of significant infrastructure investments on the vitality of local communities. Focusing on Thorncliffe Park as a case study, CUI explores the impacts of Ontario Line construction on the vitality of establishments and identifies the mitigation supports needed to ensure their survival through the multi-year construction process.

The first State of Canada’s Cities report, which is now available, was released in Ottawa today at the State of Canada’s Cities Summit at the Shaw Centre encourages us all to be brave and thoughtful in applying what we learned through COVID-19. We need to quickly adopt and formalize what worked well. We also need to set aside old approaches that have not generated the anticipated benefits, despite our best intentions. Finally, it is imperative that we challenge ourselves to take the bold steps Canada needs to maximize every possibility that urban life promises.

OVERDUE: The Case for Canada’s Public Libraries is the product of three years of CUI’s engagement with Canada’s urban public libraries through the COVID-19 pandemic. The report, issued by the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) and Canadian Urban Libraries Council / Conseil des Bibliothèques Urbaines du Canada (CULC/CBUC) details the significance of public libraries for Canada’s post-pandemic recovery, competitiveness, and resilience.

Halifax Evolves features the key learnings from CUI x Halifax and profiles the contributions of people, organizations, and projects working to generate economic activity, support cultural inclusivity, and boost social connectivity in the Halifax Region. CUI worked in collaboration with Build Nova Scotia, Halifax Partnership and Halifax Public Libraries along with dozens of local organizations and leaders to highlight the city’s and region’s aspirations for a vibrant future.

MaaS is an integrated platform for transportation services combining multiple modes on one easy-to-use navigation and payment app. CUI and AECOM’s joint report examines the MaaS concept and outlines a framework for achieving acceptance and implementation in the Greater Toronto Area for the purpose of supporting better mobility access.

What if we could increase housing supply AND revitalize downtowns at the same time? Our report explores the opportunity that vacant and underutilized office space presents for increasing housing supply while making downtown districts across Canada vibrant, equitable, livable, and resilient.

Visualizing Density is a pilot project created by the Canadian Urban Institute to help planners, designers, elected officials, residents’ groups, and private sector builders design more complete communities and adapt existing ones over time. This work aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation about managing growth and building great communities in Ontario.

How do 400+ housing organizations, experts, and advocates feel about Canada’s National Housing Strategy? “What We Heard” compiles their observations and urgent suggestions to ensure the plan meets its targets and cuts homelessness in half.

This report is an invitation to discover Victoria, to dip in and out, visiting its corners and its main streets, to hear how the city is moving. It reflects what we heard and offers some of the best guidance Victoria can offer.

In Windsor, we heard diverse perspectives on what it’s like to live there, what people are concerned about, how they view the city and its institutions, and how they are coping with—and driving—change.

This technical report provides a scan of the ways eleven Canadian cities and urban regions structure their responses to affordable housing and to homelessness. Selected jurisdictions are Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Peel Region, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and the Halifax Region. This data was collected from public sources and, where possible, verified through interviews during 2021.

Unboxing Uptown is the result of a nine-month research and engagement project completed by the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) with the City of Brampton. Research for this project revealed that approaches to creating main streets in the context of new development are nascent and evolving. The City of Brampton has a unique opportunity to learn from and improve on this work.

This report presents three possible scenarios for Canada’s downtowns to provoke a sharp re-thinking, spur dialogue and inspire bold action. The report makes the case for why downtowns matter, and why the experience of COVID-19 presents a profound, radical opportunity to rethink and remake them.

Our report share findings drawn from the opinions of 180,000 Canadians, and reveals how urban leaders banded together to tackle their cities’ most pressing problems during the first 365 days of COVID.

Our new report shines a light on the impacts of COVID on Canada’s main streets, and offers dozens of targeted actions to strengthen local economies, neighbourhoods, and communities.

Research on the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadian cities over the first 100 days of the crisis shows that our experiences with the pandemic have depended largely on who we are, and where we live.

24 key housing indicators that provide insight into Toronto’s housing market and the considerable housing challenges that residents face under current and projected conditions