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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.

Preethi Raghuraman, a junior product manager at FCI, and Krishnam Jhalani, an FCI co-op student, joined Managing Director Eryn Stewart in Iqaluit for their first trip north. They met with the Nunavut Economic Development Association (NEDA), FCI's longtime partner on a tool to help Community Economic Development (CED) officers in Nunavut's 25 hamlets create and track their CED plans. Listening to NEDA reshaped the project. Long plans often end up on a shelf, staff change over time, and internet connectivity is limited, so the tool is shifting toward short visual summaries, progress tracking between plan cycles, spoken input, and private storage for each hamlet's documents. "Once we sat down with the people it's being built for," says Preethi, "it was clear the best version could only come from listening."

In September, CAIVAN began selling townhomes in Ottawa's west end for less than $300,000. On The Graham Richardson Show, co-founder and CEO Frank Cairo explained how. He pointed first to government relief on fees and taxes, including the expanded HST rebate and Ottawa's lower development charges, then to CAIVAN's own cost-cutting across manufacturing, land development, and home building. He was also candid about the limits. Without steady new supply for years to come, he said, prices could again climb beyond what buyers can afford. CAIVAN is the founding donor of the Future Cities Institute (FCI), which had no part in the project.

As Kitchener continues to grow, public service providers face the ongoing challenge of deciding where new infrastructure and programs are needed most. Over the summer term, University of Waterloo Faculty of Environment planning students Miki Zheng and Alexa R. partnered with Kitchener Public Library, FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker, and FCI Member Dr. Rob Feick to build an evidence-backed decision tool. Using ArcGIS overlay analysis, the team mapped three factors against each other: projected population growth, and deprivation measured two ways, once through the Canadian Index of Multiple Deprivation, and once through EQAO test scores. What came out of the project is a framework KPL can use to test locations, including options like the automated library lockers already running at local community centres.

When a 13-year-old girl stops riding her bike to school, the reasons usually extend far beyond the bike path. During their initial on-campus residency week for the Master of Future Cities (MFC) program, student teams analyzed municipal transportation data and developed practical strategies to address why women and young girls opt out of cycling networks. Using Waterloo as a primary case study, one team introduced "Bridging the Cycling Gap," mapping the transition into early adolescence through a fictional persona named Maya and proposing a gamified social app to reward riders for using municipal cycling routes.

At the AMO conference in Ottawa, municipal leaders and city staff connected with FCI to explore practical, data-backed solutions for their communities. From high-demand resources like the Development Charges Monitor and CivicInquire (an AI-powered homelessness policy platform led by FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker that recently secured SSHRC funding) to collaborative student partnerships, FCI demonstrated how research moves out of academia and directly into local council chambers. Through the i-Capstone program, municipalities of any size can partner with University of Waterloo student teams to tackle local infrastructure and policy challenges across one or two terms at zero cost.

What does excess heat from a data centre have to do with warming a local hospital? For University of Waterloo students in the WE Accelerate program, it is a practical answer to Waterloo Region's growing resource limits. On July 29, student teams presented data-backed concepts for a municipal design challenge framed by the Future Cities Institute and the Region of Waterloo. Focused on the water-energy-food nexus, student concepts delivered actionable interventions, from capturing data centre heat for hospital infrastructure to expanding urban tree canopies using Silva Cell stormwater systems.

Data that could strengthen homelessness policies across Canada is often fragmented and difficult for decision-makers to navigate. To address this gap, FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker has received SSHRC funding to advance CivicInquire, Canada's first intersectional, AI-powered platform dedicated to homelessness policy. By combining machine learning, web crawling, and key informant interviews, CivicInquire transforms disparate policy data into an interactive national database and visualization tool. The platform equips municipal leaders, planners, and community advocates with practical, evidence-backed insights to guide local decision-making.

Researchers and network partners connected with the Future Cities Institute have secured new SSHRC funding to advance data-backed climate resilience and municipal policy tools. Spanning municipal net-zero implementation, property-level flood risk intelligence, virtual reality disaster planning, and international cyclone adaptation, these newly funded initiatives demonstrate how academic research turns into usable, real-world tools for city builders.

University of Waterloo student Neil Simmons and his classmates took first place at Toronto's TransitData Challenge 2026 by developing TTC ScheduleWatch, an interactive tool that tracks streetcar delays stop by stop across 100,000 trips. Connected with FCI Mobility Cluster Lead Dr. Jeff Casello through FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker, the student team used live GPS data and neighbourhood demographics to highlight transit gaps and propose evidence-backed schedule improvements.