New city-building institute at University of Alberta names its first executive director

Murtaza Haider, the executive director of the newly established Cities Institute and its first Radhe Krishna Gupta Executive Chair, speaks at the Edmonton Convention Centre on June 5, 2025. (Galen McDougall/CTV News Edmonton)

The University of Alberta’s School of Business has named the first executive chair for a city-building institute.

Murtaza Haider is the executive director of the newly established Cities Institute and its first Radhe Krishna Gupta Executive Chair.

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Haider, who comes to the position from Toronto Metropolitan University, has spent 30-plus years “studying cities, building bridges, working with industry, and being an engineer who researches real estate markets, bringing together disciplines, engineers, planners, computer scientists, people who specialize in machine learning,” he said Thursday at the Edmonton Convention Centre.

The institute was established by a $5-million gift from Rohit Gupta, president of the Rohit Group, and his parents, real estate developers Radhe and Krishna Gupta.

Its purpose is to “allow for partnerships to exist between academia, public policy and industry, so industry, municipalities or different governments can fund research that gives them better knowledge,” Rohit Gupta told CTV News Edmonton.

“Effectively, the University of Alberta becomes a think tank to get better solutions out there ... We’re all in here to build better communities and better neighbourhoods.”

Haider said his vision for the city “is a place where Edmontonians will be proud.”

“They will be going places, telling proudly that we are from Edmonton,” he said. “The city functions in a way that it creates lots of wealth, and then is able to share that wealth, and it’s able to become a place which celebrates diversity, celebrates equality, and is able to rely (on) and exploit the resources nature has given us to the fullest to be able to create those future pathways that will lead to sustainable growth and development.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Galen McDougall