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Welcome to Canada’s Urban Design Forum 2026 - Capitalising Design! We’ll kick off the Forum with a brief welcome and introduction to this year’s theme, setting the stage for the conversations, ideas, and perspectives to come.

A capital city is never just a city. It's a reflection. Ottawa-Gatineau carries a double mandate few regions ever face: G7 national capital and a metropolitan region racing toward 2 million people. It just ranked number one in North America for livability. But rankings capture a moment, not a trajectory, and the transformations ahead are big. This panel unlocks how urban design can find the synergies and surface the tensions between public and private interests, clarify who's actually responsible for what, and catalyze the interventions still to come. Our panelists explore what it takes to plan a capital that carries national identity and federal function, while still delivering the complete, livable neighborhoods residents actually live in. What does the future of the Capital look like, and how do we get there? That's the question this room is built to answer.

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Design isn't the markup on built projects. It's the multiplier.

For too long, urban design has been treated as a cost center: the line item cut when budgets tighten, the first thing sacrificed in the name of "getting units built." This panel flips that logic. Our panelists explore the true ROI of leading with design, making the case that high-quality urban design isn't an added expense to affordable housing delivery or municipal budgets, but the mechanism that makes them perform - financially, socially, and over time.

The conversation digs into how financial frameworks can be reshaped to recognize what design actually returns: higher occupancy, lower long-term maintenance, stronger community buy-in, faster approvals, greater asset value. And it's grounded in the real, drawing on case studies of realized projects that prove design and financial return aren't a trade-off. They're the same outcome.

Good design isn't what you pay for after the numbers work. It's what makes the numbers work.

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The center of the room is never fixed. Neither is the conversation.

This session runs as a fishbowl: a small circle of experts at the center, working through real problem statements out loud, while the wider room listens in and lines up its own questions. Every seat at the center carries a clock. When your time is up, you leave, and the seat sits empty until someone new claims it. The conversation belongs to whoever's willing to sit down.

Potential topics on the table: true resiliency, housing, transportation, and more. Register and add the topic you care about most. The room will build itself around what the group brings.

This isn't a panel that talks at you. It's a structure built to keep making room.

A walking tour through the historic Glebe district will take participants to the most recent evolution of Lansdowne park and redevelopment. Learn how the next phase of development will contribute to this urban destination, and what that means for the surrounding neighbourhood.

This walk will introduce the ideas of Jane Jacobs, using Ottawa landmarks and neighbourhoods to illustrate the ideas detailed in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We'll explore the roles of sidewalks, parks, zoning regulations, and more on our way from the ByWard Market to Parliament Hill.

Tucked away, minutes from downtown - Greystone village provides the best of mixed-use urban amenities and access to nature and parkland. A walking tour will showcase the various phases that have turned this project into an award-winning master planned community.

Sponsored by Building Equality in Architecture – Capital Region (BEACAP), this walking tour explores two women-led projects that have made significant contributions to the Capital Region’s role in marking and memorializing important parts of our country’s history at an urban scale.

The tour begins at the Canadian War Museum, one of the earliest major projects in the revitalization of LeBreton Flats, where Emmanuelle van Rutten and Carolyn Gillespie of Moriyama Teshima Architects will explore the Museum’s exterior architecture and landscape design, including its distinctive green roof, public spaces, and thoughtful integration into the surrounding natural and urban environment.

The second half of the tour will focus on the recently completed 2SLGBTQI+ National Monument, Thunderhead, led by the monument’s design lead and landscape architect, Liz Wreford of Public City. The tour will explore how the monument brings together landscape, structure, art, and storytelling to create a new public space for remembrance, reflection, and celebration within the evolving LeBreton Flats.

A walking tour of Zibi and the islands will explore the most recent buildings and public spaces at the very heart of the Capital. Learn how district energy is being deployed, and post-industrial lands are being re-opened to the public for the first time in generations.

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Feature presentations from CanU's 'Vanguard' program, which elevates ideas from innovative practitioners in the first ten years of their career. Please visit canu.ca/forum2026/vanguard to learn more, and apply to share your ideas in Ottawa this fall.