It’s past time for 21st-century city-building
‘If you only look at the tree and not the forest, you are not going to capture the economic value that exists. Housing is extremely important, it is the engine of city building. However, it isn't the complete picture,’ says Martin Canning, Executive Director, Community Innovation at Evergreen. / SUBMITTED PHOTO
Canada's cities are sitting on an untapped engine of economic growth. It’s called urban innovation.
If governments, researchers, and the private sector learn to treat city building the way the world's most competitive economies treat advanced manufacturing, it could potentially add “billions of dollars” to the economy according to Martin Canning, Executive Director, Community Innovation at Evergreen.
“In any manufacturing context, if you think of any of the most successful companies today, they realize they work within a system of systems, they work within an ecosystem,” he told Means & Ways. One example is housing, a centrepiece of the federal government’s economic agenda but insufficient on its own. “If you only look at the tree and not the forest, you are not going to capture the economic value that exists. Housing is extremely important, it is the engine of city building. However, it isn't the complete picture.”
Canada needs 3.5 million additional housing units by 2030 to meet its affordable housing goals, CMHC estimates. Those millions of homes make up cities, Canning said, and consideration for mobility, transit, energy systems, public space and the innovation ecosystems that attract and retain talent are crucial.
Ursula Eicker, founding co-director of the Next-Gen Cities Institute, told Means & Ways the economic growth agenda and the sustainability agenda is another example of where collaboration between the public and private sectors, academia and non profits is needed.
‘We're all trying to break silos,’ says Ursula Eicker, founding co-director of the Next-Gen Cities Institute.
She is particularly focused on the building sector, where she said the scale of the required transformation demands a strategic, portfolio-level approach rather than the project-by-project thinking that still dominates most municipal decision-making.
Both Canning and Eicker identified access to data as a foundational barrier to scaling urban innovation. Eicker pointed to the difficulty researchers face when trying to obtain information from private real estate owners, municipal governments and utilities.
Some jurisdictions are beginning to open up, she said, for example energy data trusts in New Brunswick and a utility-run initiative in Saint John she described as a “plugin lab” — a first step toward giving innovators the information they need before developing solutions to infrastructure, housing and climate issues.
Eicker called for a national-scale digital twin — a comprehensive model of Canada's entire building stock and infrastructure network that could allow governments to simulate the impact of policy choices before committing to them.
So ‘last-century’
“That way, we can really predict what will happen if we tackle certain sectors or certain types of infrastructure first, and build these models to really come up with a much more informed decision-making tool — rather than going project by project,” she said, noting that municipalities are still largely operating that way today.
She described immersive digital tools that allow residents to walk through virtual models of proposed developments and directly manipulate variables — a significant leap beyond the status quo of presenting paper plans at public consultations.
“Everything I've seen otherwise in public consultation, where you basically talk in front of a commission with some paper plans — that's so last century,” she said. “We really need to move towards novel forms of having people actively involved in the changes that are happening on the ground.”
Canning said urban innovation test beds are one example of where systems-level thinking becomes actionable — contained, operational environments where new technologies can be trialed under real-world conditions, with real consequences.
At Evergreen’s Brick Works, which sits at the mouth of Toronto's Don Valley ravine system, those conditions include exposure to serious flooding. The campus experienced significant damage during unprecedented flash floods in 2024, costing the municipality millions. The range of technologies now being tested on the campus in response includes sensors that shift elevators to upper floors during flood events, AI-driven drone assessments of complex floodplain landscapes, permeable “sponge ground” building materials, and AI applications that model optimal water flow and grading across the site.
Evergreen also partnered with the cities of Calgary, Lethbridge and Halifax on an initiative called AI for the Resilient City, using artificial intelligence to predict and map urban heat island effects — a growing climate adaptation challenge for municipalities across the country.
On the question of intellectual property, a potential sticking point when public institutions collaborate with private companies, Eicker and Canning described flexible models that prioritize scaling solutions.
“There are all kinds of models possible,” Eicker said. “Either the company we are collaborating with has the full IP and then can go to market, or there can be shared IP that needs to be negotiated in every individual project. But typically, it's not a roadblock — because we of course want the solutions to scale, and we recognize that unless the private sector gets in, it won't scale.”
Canning noted that the IP question looks different depending on where a technology sits on the development spectrum. At Evergreen, companies are typically further along — near or at early commercialization — and are testing use cases rather than conducting early-stage research.
When asked whether the federal government should be doing more to convene and coordinate Canada's urban innovation ecosystem Canning said, “There is room for a national urban summit in Canada, to engage directly, possibly hosted by the Government of Canada in partnership with organizations that value the realm of broad city building.”
Eicker echoed the call for a more integrated approach, noting that siloed government structures — where urban planners, data managers and infrastructure operators often don't speak to one another — mirror the broader fragmentation that test beds are designed to overcome.
“We're all trying to break silos between different disciplines, but also between different types of stakeholders,” she said. When talking about infrastructure and building neighbourhoods and cities, “it's pretty crucial to have the involved parties at the table and create that kind of continuous dialogue.”
