News

The FCI x Brave Career Hackathon challenged student teams to build AI-powered tools for pressing urban systems problems in a single day, from zoning and data fragmentation to infrastructure capacity. Grounded in real problem statements from the City of Kitchener, the event produced a strong set of ideas from teams that worked quickly and thought carefully about the complexity of the challenges in front of them.

Ten FCI co-op students from across disciplines spent a week in focused sprint working on two tools designed to support Northern communities: one for grant writing, one for community economic development planning. The work addressed real administrative and capacity gaps that smaller Northern municipalities face, and the cross-disciplinary makeup of the team brought a range of perspectives to problems that benefit from exactly that kind of scrutiny.

FCI brought over 60 planning students together with the BUILD NOW: Waterloo Region leadership team for a hands-on design charrette focused on Canada's largest affordable home ownership initiative. Students pressure-tested real concepts and offered grounded feedback, many as members of the very demographic BUILD NOW is designed to serve. A strong example of what academia and industry can produce when they work in the same room, toward the same problem.

This video recap of FCI's BUILD NOW design charrette features Philip Mills and Scott Higgins on what it meant to have students as genuine collaborators, and FCI Director Dr. Leia Minaker on why applied, grounded engagement sits at the core of FCI's work. Over 60 planning students, many of them the demographic BUILD NOW is designed to serve, brought real ideas and challenged assumptions in a working session with the BUILD NOW: Waterloo Region leadership team.

Director Leia Minaker joined Philip Mills for a conversation on BUILD NOW: Waterloo Region, drawing on real examples in front of a room of practitioners and municipal leaders engaged in how cities grow and change. At the FCI booth, co-op students Aster Penney, Len Dizdar, and Weixi Zhou shared updates on two active projects, the Growth Management Tool and the newly updated Vision 1 Million Scorecard, fielding questions with confidence throughout the morning. It was a productive opportunity to connect with municipal staff and industry colleagues, and to hear firsthand what people are working on across the region.

FCI supported the Experience Ventures Ideathon, hosted by GHD in Waterloo and organized by Conestoga College. Students working across disciplines presented creative, well-developed ideas to a real industry panel, closing out a program designed to build entrepreneurial thinking through hands-on, structured experience. A strong showing from participants and a well-run event from the organizing team.

At the BE*SPOKE Festival in the Township of Centre Wellington, conversations about climate resilience, urban systems, and community leadership moved beyond abstract policy debates and into something more tangible. Organized by GreenLanes, the festival created space for municipalities, practitioners, and community leaders to engage deeply with the realities of climate change, and the choices communities must make in response. The Future Cities Institute was proud to be part of that conversation through the work of FCI member and Academic Director Nadine Ibrahim, whose talk, “The Future Is Now, So What Are We Building?”, set the tone for the day. 

The pace of change in Canada’s housing landscape is accelerating, but the systems that shape how housing gets built often fall behind. Approvals take years. Cost climbing. Entire segments of housing, especially family-sized, attainable ownership options, are increasingly absent from the market. Against this backdrop, the Future Cities Institute convened the Land Development Bootcamp as both a learning space and a signal: preparing the next generation of planners and practitioners requires confronting these realities head-on. 

As Waterloo Region continues to plan for long-term population growth, one question looms large: are the systems that support daily life ready for what comes next? In January, the Future Cities Institute (FCI), alongside BESTWR, released an updated Vision 1 Million Scorecard, offering a data-driven snapshot of how prepared the region is to grow toward a population of one million residents in the coming decades. By framing the analysis this way, the tool invites decision-makers to think proactively rather than reactively, highlighting where current trajectories may fall short and where strategic intervention could have the greatest impact. 

The Future Cities Institute hosted a panel on BUILD NOW: Waterloo Region, bringing together Philip Mills, Michelle Lee, Michael Maxwell, and Mayor Dorothy McCabe for an honest conversation about what it takes to deliver missing middle housing at scale. The discussion covered the role of cross-sector partnership, the real costs of slow approvals processes, and what it means for planners to be genuine problem-solvers. A grounded exchange that connected lived experience on the ground with the people working to understand and shape it.