Focus Areas & Initiatives
Applied Complex Systems works across multiple, overlapping domains where systemic risk, institutional design, and long-term public value intersect.
Rather than organizing our work around isolated projects, we operate through focus areas that frame enduring system challenges, and initiatives that evolve in response to real-world conditions, partnerships, and learning.
Our focus areas
These focus areas anchor our work and guide where we invest analytical, convening, and stewardship capacity.
Housing and urban systems
We work on housing and urban systems as complex socio-economic ecosystems shaped by land markets, finance, governance, infrastructure, and lived experience.
Our work in this area explores leverage points for improving affordability, resilience, and long-term urban value creation, while addressing financialization and structural inequities.
Systemic finance and public value
Modern financial systems often prioritize short-term returns over long-term resilience and public purpose.
We explore alternative financial architectures, including public, cooperative, and place-based finance that better align capital with societal goals, risk management, and intergenerational value.
Democratic innovation and governance
Complex societies require governance systems that can learn, adapt, and maintain legitimacy under uncertainty.
Our work in this area focuses on participatory, deliberative, and adaptive governance approaches that help institutions make better decisions in complex environments.
Planetary health and regenerative infrastructure
Human wellbeing is inseparable from ecological systems.
We work on integrated approaches that connect health, climate, infrastructure, and place-based interventions, with a focus on regenerative outcomes and co-benefits across systems.
AI as a systems amplifier
Rather than treating AI as a standalone solution, we explore its role as an amplifier of human judgment, collective intelligence, and system learning.
Our work examines how AI can support modelling, deliberation, and decision-making without reinforcing fragility, extraction, or centralized control.
Initiatives and
Working Groups
Within these focus areas, we support initiatives, labs, and working groups at different stages of development.
These may include:
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- applied research collaborations
- policy-oriented working groups
- place-based experiments and labs
- national or international learning networks
Initiatives are intentionally allowed to evolve as understanding deepens and system conditions change
Stewardship and network building
In addition to discrete initiatives, Applied Complex Systems plays a stewardship role in several broader efforts aimed at building long-term capacity for systems change.
This includes:
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- convening cross-sector communities of practice
- supporting shared language and frameworks
- holding continuity across funding cycles and institutional boundaries
- enabling systems to “see themselves” over time
Much of this work is relational and infrastructural by design, and may not always be visible as a standalone project.
How this work connects
Across all focus areas and initiatives, our role is consistent:
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- to support system-level insight
- to strengthen institutional learning
- to help partners act with greater clarity under uncertainty
We collaborate closely with academic, public, community, and financial partners, including the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the Canadian Network for Complex Systems, while operating as an outward-facing, applied platform.
Explore
Collaboration
If you’re working within one of these domains, or at their intersections, and are interested in exploring collaboration, we welcome conversation.
We’re currently in a listening and partnership-building phase, and welcome thoughtful engagement as collaborations take shape.