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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

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  1. For your next visit—if you’re done spewing carbon into the air to score some cheap political points—you might want to visit a city that blows all of these out of the water in terms of affordability. Edmonton boasts some of the highest incomes in Canada while having some of the cheapest rents and homeownership costs. There’s even a train to take you there. And perhaps you might even learn something about your own country: what works there and what doesn’t, for a change.

  2. Hi Again,

    You’ll be glad to know that representatives from Edmonton were actually part of the trip—and they had valuable insights to share, as well as a genuine interest in learning from Singapore’s approach.

    You’re absolutely right that cities like Edmonton offer a meaningful counterpoint. There’s much to learn from the diversity of urban forms within Canada—just as there is from international contexts like Singapore. The purpose of these comparative explorations isn’t to declare winners, but to better understand the trade-offs that different urban systems make.

    There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Edmonton’s model has its own strengths and challenges, as do others across the country. The spirit of the trip was to understand how cities respond to common pressures—housing affordability, climate adaptation, demographic change—in locally specific ways.

    Urban planning is rarely about absolutes. It’s about navigating difficult trade-offs between land use and environmental impact, affordability and equity, policy ambition and lived reality. That’s what makes it both so complex and so important.

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