Fostering healthy, prosperous future cities and communities.​

From November 2 to 6, University of Waterloo students spent their lunch hours at World Cities Week 2026, hosted by FCI and Dr. Nadine Ibrahim, Turkstra Chair in Urban Engineering. On Tuesday, students took positions on some of the hardest questions in Canadian housing, from apartments in every neighbourhood to who should pay for services in new low-density developments, and several changed their minds as the discussion unfolded. Wednesday and Thursday turned to adaptive reuse: student teams proposed new uses for Kitchener’s former Charles Street Terminal, and Scott Higgins of HIP Developments showed how a former Cambridge factory became the Gaslight District. Students also built a model community out of LEGO, and Alon Eisenstein of the University of British Columbia closed the week with Friday’s Turkstra Talk.

On October 19, Ben Dachis, Vice President of Research and Outreach at Clean Prosperity and a member of FCI’s advisory board, sat in as FCI co-op students presented their work. For Tony Lin and Steven Men, it was a working session with an advisor who has been part of their project from the start. Their Growth Management Platform (GMP) shows cities how a growth decision ripples through development charges, property taxes, emissions and traffic. Dachis compared those trade-offs to a balloon: squeeze one side and the other bulges. He urged the team to build the structure first, add detail later, and share their work early, flagging assumptions so the people who hold better data can step in. The GMP is now close to a minimum viable product.

On October 1st, the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce hosted Vision 1 Million: Healthcare at the Delta Waterloo, where FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker presented the second update to the Vision 1 Million Scorecard. Produced by BestWR and FCI, the scorecard grades 28 metrics to assess whether Waterloo Region is ready to grow to one million residents. Minaker walked the room through what has improved, what is lagging, and what is holding steady. She then narrowed the field to three priorities: water, primary care, and child care. Progress on those three, she argued, would unlock progress across several other domains at once. She later joined Chamber President and CEO Ian McLean for a fireside chat. The next scorecard update arrives in January.