Mary W. Rowe, President & CEO, Canadian Urban Institute

When I took on the staff leadership at Canada’s Urban Institute (CUI) in the fall of 2019, I proposed a central part of our mission was to strengthen the connective tissue between people and places. Canada’s governance systems are organized vertically – municipalities relate to their provinces, which in turn negotiate with the federal government. Corporate life mirrors this: with regional and national offices, to which local operations report ‘up’. But our daily lives are lived more on the horizontal plane, to those adjacent: our co-workers, customers and suppliers, service providers and neighbours. Folks we ‘see’ and interact with, some often, so we know their names and stories, others less frequently, but just as essentially, exchanging an act of interdependence: a purchase, a shared experience, a courtesy. There is a fancy term for the traits of daily life: quotidian. Another related idea: when something becomes regular, suggesting a standard or norm. Both of these terms are grounded in the practical, transactional nature of daily life. And both continue to be thrown up in the air, like humpty dumpty, still tumbling down into what, if any, a new normal may be. But we know that the quotidian matters, and focusing on the particularities of place has to become regular.

When I proposed CUI be focused on connective tissue, I was curious how to best share clues about making urban life work better for everyone across a vast geography and diverse histories and experiences. The last five years occasioned an unexpected urgency to realizing this aspiration, as communities of all sizes in the country continue to experience generational challenges posed by the pandemic, economic pressures, housing and health care shortages, severe weather events, demographic challenges, repeated social justice reckonings, and mounting global uncertainty. How else can we manage, without ways to learn how everyone else is making out? Like dogs in packs, we learn most quickly from our peers – those adjacent to us – who we can see trying things. CUI is about quickening those lines of connections, shortening feedback loops essential to building resilience, and to learn quickly what’s working, what’s not and what’s next. CUI’s work must always be grounded in the practical, the quotidian ways in which we live, work, learn and play in actual places. We need to accelerate the capacity of place-builders to learn, adapt, create workable solutions.

Main streets and downtowns remain our principal units of analysis, because they have common characteristics that we recognize: places of economic and social gathering as small as Joe Bats Arm or long as Commercial Drive. Although varying scales, these are places of opportunity, investment, and resilience, and the building blocks of this country. CUI is dependent on partners from every sector to undertake research and develop demonstration projects that amplify potential solutions to common challenges: housing, accessibility, mobility, adaptive reuse, local economic development, cultural vibrancy, climate resilience. CUI’s most recent Summit on the State of Canada’s Cities highlighted the challenge – and potential – before us: to invest in the infrastructures that make our shared life possible. This is a herculean task, after decades of accumulated under-investment. Business-as-usual won’t cut it: we need a myriad of tools and approaches that tap into new pools of capital, knowledge and practical experience. The Summit sessions, available here, are a start.

Places are fundamentally about hope: we come together to create something better. As we head into a year of what may seem to many as extraordinarily uncertainty, lets double-down on the things we know and see, conditions over which we have some agency and potential to influence directly. How we spend, move, engage, and advocate to make neighbourhoods, communities, cities and regions that work well more regular: vibrant, safe and accessible main streets that ground us in places that include everyone; dynamic and diverse downtowns that surprise us with new possibilities; connections between; and with a general disposition of kindness and belief that people will realize their potential in places that enable them to do so.