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From National Housing Strategy to National Urban Strategy: A Timely Discussion
April 28 @ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Registration
Event Registration
The Government of Canada created its first National Housing Strategy (NHS) in 2017 and it is coming up for review in 2026. For the 80% of Canadians who live in urban areas, and indeed arguably for all Canadians, affordable and appropriate housing issues intersect deeply with all the other pieces of building communities – transportation, urban design, public spaces, access to nature and environmental protection, public health, and economic development to name a few. While not holding constitutional responsibility for most of these issues, the federal government plays a direct role in shaping how municipalities address these intersecting challenges, through its spending power. Yet rather than being a coordinated whole, administration of these various interventions lives in a variety of different ministries, uncoordinated with each other while the housing “file” seems to dominate policy discussion. This fragmentation reflects the absence of an overarching national urban policy to align federal investments and policy instruments across sectors, orders of government and spatial scales. In parallel, over 64 OECD and developing countries have adopted National Urban Policies (NUPs) as integrated, whole-of-government frameworks to guide the development, financing, and governance of cities.
What if Canada’s next national housing strategy was actually a national urban strategy, designed to integrate housing within a broader spatial, economic, and environmental vision, while providing a coordinated approach to federal support for municipalities?
In this collaborative session of presentations and discussion, we will explore the current landscape for federally-funded municipal programs, academic partnerships with both federal and municipal governments that shine light on siloed approaches, and models from other countries in which higher levels of government have adopted national urban strategies or national spatial planning to give contour to federal interventions at the municipal level.
Please join us in person at NCGI in Montreal, or virtually, for this timely discussion. Zoom registration HERE
Presenters:
Dr. Anneke Smit, Prof Dorian Moore, Crystal Waddell and James Tischler (Centre for Cities, UWindsor)
Dr. Ursula Eicker (Next Generation Cities Institute, Concordia University)
Omar Siddique (UN-Habitat Canada)
