Practical Tools for Local Leaders: FCI at AMO 2026
Data tools built for local decisions
When municipal leaders and city staff gathered in Ottawa for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference, running August 16 to 19, conversations focused on practical challenges: managing growth, keeping communities livable, and making sense of complex local data. Representatives from the Future Cities Institute (FCI) spent time at their booth meeting directly with elected officials and municipal staff from across Ontario to share working tools and collaborative programs.
Delegates perused postcards detailing FCI's growing suite of open tools and dashboards designed to address pressing municipal issues. Two tools generated immediate focus from visitors. The first was the Development Charges Monitor, billed as a standardized, transparent view of development charges across Ontario municipalities. Because rates are notoriously difficult to compare across jurisdictions, the monitor puts public data at planners' fingertips, allowing users to filter by region, building or service type, population, and charge history. The second was CivicInquire, a national homelessness data platform led by FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker that recently received Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funding.
Unlocking student talent through i-Capstone
For smaller municipalities looking to expand their technical and analytical capacity, the booth highlighted a direct pathway to collaborative problem-solving through FCI's i-Capstone program. Through i-Capstone, interdisciplinary student teams from across faculties at the University of Waterloo spend one to two terms working directly on a municipality's specific challenge at zero cost to the local government.
By pairing student talent with real-world municipal constraints, FCI ensures communities of every size have access to data-backed city-building tools and fresh perspectives. Whether delivering transparent monitors or launching student capstone projects, the institute remains focused on providing usable solutions that land in council chambers rather than sitting on shelves.
Have a municipal challenge your team needs solved? Partner with FCI to launch an i-Capstone project or explore our suite of working tools at fciprojects.ca.
We work with municipalities on the hard, practical stuff: how communities grow, how they stay healthy and livable, [and] how research can actually land in a council chamber instead of sitting on a shelf."