Canadian Urban Institute

Who We Are

CUI’s International Partnerships centre shares with the world Canada’s experiences of managing its urban regions. Our goal is to connect people, resources and ideas to build strong communities and equitable, sustainable, and competitive urban regions.  We draw on these synergies to assist our partners, national and local governments and their civil society and private sector constituents, to envision more sustainable futures and work toward this vision. 

Areas of Expertise

Drawing on our Canadian expertise, CUI focuses its international work in the following areas:

Civic Engagement – supporting the development of a culture of collaborative governance, improving women’s participation, and planning and implementing initiatives that promote local economic development, poverty reduction and investment in community assets.

Urban Leadership and Capacity – building leadership and capacity for good urban governance and management within our partner cities and regions (local authorities and communities) through education and organizational strengthening, with the end view of creating an enabling environment for change.

Applied Research and Policy Solutions – working with our partners to design and implement policy solutions to the challenges and priorities identified through their participatory planning processes. These include new and improved policies, procedures, systems, structures and mechanism.

Environmen   tal Sustainability – strengthening the capacities of local governments and communities to address the environmental impacts of urbanization through land use planning, local sustainability planning, disaster risk reduction and intergovernmental cooperation for bio-regions.

Knowledge Sharing – building a body of development knowledge on good urban governance, sustainable economic growth and development of cities and urban regions through urban symposia, creation of information and toolkits, and networking in Canada and internationally.