The City of Brampton, located in the Ontario province of Canada, has a highly mobile workforce that needs data at a moment’s notice to do their jobs. The city is using Microsoft cloud solutions to deliver highly secure IT services to its workforce when and where they’re needed. The city has created a collaborative culture where employees come together to address citizen needs, work more efficiently, and ultimately save taxpayers money.

This roundtable aimed at discussing and sparking new train of thoughts on how to strengthen the role of urban innovation among the city leaders, institutions and urban stakeholders, including private sector organisations. It further explored the strategic pathways for Urban Innovation Community (UIC) to provide new tools, expertise and knowledge on implementing and achieving the SDGs at the local level. 

This Urban Strategic Planning Guide provides a brief overview of the key components that should be included in an urban strategic planning framework. It also provides a synopsis on the art of facilitating urban strategic planning workshops.

Prepared for the USAID/DRG Centre Volume Decentralized Governance and Accountability: Academic Research and the Future of Donor Programming

The Living City Initiative is a targeted pilot tax incentive which aims to seek to address this issue in two ways by focusing on: 1. encouraging people back to the centre of Irish cities to live in historic buildings 2. encouraging the regeneration of the retail heartland of central business districts. The Initiative will provide tax incentives for works performed to refurbish residential and retail buildings either to bring them up to a habitable standard or even to make improvements to buildings which are currently inhabited. The incentives will be targeted at owner/occupiers rather than property developers.