About Cities Centre

The Cities Centre promotes and undertakes university-based, interdisciplinary research across the spectrum of urban issues. These disciplines include physical infrastructure, social infrastructure, economic development, urban design, governance, finance, health, environment and other related fields.  Their goal is to network the diverse strengths of these disciplines within the University to provide a holistic approach to major urban planning, design, development and management policy issues.

The Centre is a forum for training, knowledge transfer, and debate:

• Hosting visiting scholars to bring fresh expertise and insights to the region
• Sponsoring seminars, workshops and symposia to provide an environment for knowledge transfer, debate and innovative thinking
• Training undergraduate and graduate students to develop the next generation of planners, analysts and decision-makers

It is a technical centre of excellence for analysis, modeling, and visualization:

• Collecting, maintaining, and analyzing the urban region database to provide neutral, professional, comprehensive database management for the region
• Developing and applying models of urban spatial processes (housing, transportation, regional economy, etc.) to explore “what if” questions concerning alternative policies.
•  Visualizing the urban region to develop and apply advanced 2D and 3D methods for static and dynamic visualization of urban structure and evolution, applied to both historical and modeled data.

The Cities Centre is supporting the regional policy agenda:

• Basic research into urban processes (spatial, economic, social, etc.) to improve our understanding of how urban systems “work”
• Development and testing of new design concepts (at both macro/regional and micro/neighbourhood scales) to support sustainable urban development.
• Policy analysis undertaking neutral, objective, innovative investigations of policy alternatives to move the policy agenda forward
• Research implementation working with government agencies and community groups to translate University-based research into practice 

Please click here for more information about Cities Centre.