Planning Pool

On a day when millions of people around the world were making New Years resolutions about shrinking their waistlines, Vancouver quietly saw a policy enter into action that may end up seriously shrinking the city’s carbon footprint. Effective January 1st, gasoline taxes will rise in Greater Vancouver by three cents, and the parking sales tax will rise by 300%. While the taxes come amid fiscal turmoil at the region’s transportation agency Translink, they are good policies that will help build a better city. If only Vancouverites knew how lucky they truly are. . .

This fence is known as a bicycle graveyard due to high chance of theft. St. James Town has terrible bike facilities.

A few months ago, I wrote about Jane’s Walks, a yearly weekend of walking tours in cities all over the world. Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in one of these walks, held especially for the Creative Places + Spaces conference. It took place in one of the most curious neighbourhoods in Toronto – St. James Town. After a major zoning change in the 1950s, maximum heights were raised drastically, and developers quickly bought up the Victorian homes in their way. In … Continue Reading

Millions of dollars are collaboratively allocated each year according to the priorities of residents in Toronto’s public housing units. This participatory budgeting process was invented 20 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is now transforming budgeting processes in cities around the world.

The Canadian Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation presented a panel on Toronto Community Housing’s experience with participatory budgeting from academic, management and participant viewpoints.

How Participatory Budgeting Works
Dr. Daniel Schugurensky, University of Toronto professor, outlined five stages of participatory budgeting: (1) diagnosis to identify community needs, (2) deliberation to understand, (3) decision-making, (4) implementation of agreements, and, (5) follow up, including monitoring and evaluation.

Each year, Toronto Community Housing spends $9M on capital projects (infrastructure, improvements, etc). Twenty per cent of this budget, $1.8M, is allocated by residents according to their priorities. Once a … Continue Reading

This session took place on October 1.

Uri Avin of Parsons Brinckerhoff and Iain Dobson of the Real Estate Search Corporation discussed edge cities and how they can be transformed into urban places. Avin described Tysons Corner, Virginia, a prototypical “edge city” and the 12th largest business district in the United States. Although Tysons Corner, located just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Dulles Airport corridor, is generally considered to be an economic success, the city suffers from an increasingly dysfunctional environmen. Dobson contrasted Tysons Corner with Mississauga, Ontario, a similar city in terms of square footage, population, jobs, and other statistics, but stagnating nonetheless.

Edge cities are typically suburban commercial, retail, and residential developments built in areas that contained no development 30 years ago. They are usually outside a larger urban area and tend to be close to highways and airports. … Continue Reading

Perhaps the last installment in live blogging from the 2009 CIP conference, this session (held October 3) dealt with growth management, a critical issue for many North American cities. This summary focuses on the presentations of two of the session’s speakers.

Russ Mathew, a planner from Toronto, ON with Hemson Consulting, spoke about the new Growth Plan for Canada’s most populous urban area. The Greater Golden Horseshoe includes the Greater Toronto Area as well as smaller subcentres. Looking ahead to 2031, the Plan sets numeric targets for residential and employment density (an average of 50 residents + jobs per hectare) as well as intensification of currently built-up areas (40% of new housing is to be accommodated within the current built-up area, especially transit-oriented growth centres.) Russ is concerned about the plan’s focus on predictive numeric targets instead of livable design, and … Continue Reading

This post comes to you from an afternoon session entitled “Saving our cities: Contemporary approaches to heritage planning.” The two joint speakers are Phil Goldsmith and Antonio Gómez-Palacio, who have worked together on several projects. Mr. Gómez-Palacio works with the Office for Urbanism, while Mr. Goldsmith has extensive experience in adaptive reuse of Toronto’s heritage buildings.

Phil Goldsmith and Antonio Gómez-Palacio argue for a hybrid approach to heritage restoration and new architectural styles. Photo by author.

The session opened with the quote “Although […] heritage belongs to everyone, each of its parts is nevertheless at the mercy of any individual” (Amsterdam Charter, 1975). Intensification of urban fabric places stress on heritage buildings, so the present is an important time for the heritage of … Continue Reading

Good and evil. In the media, so many things are reduced to black and white, liberal and conservative, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. In the past week, the Toronto media has seised upon a specific grudgematch, and they decided to take out their biggest wedge. I’m talking about the epic struggle between the “build more roads” crowd and the “tear out roads” crowd. See – isn’t it easy to put them into two boxes? In real life, it’s never that simple.

Creative Commons Photo by Sean Munson

In recent months, many governments have decided to spend their way out of the current recession. The United States has seen a scramble to fund “shovel ready” projects that will create the most short term jobs, regardless of the usual criteria of worthiness. It’s the same old story – politicians taking the easiest, most expedient option. But word comes from Spain of the benefits of looking ahead. The Wall Street Journal printed an article last Monday about the success of the Spanish high speed passenger rail network, named AVE (meaning both Spanish high speed and bird). It’s the kind of epic, transformative project that requires not only billions of dollars but also the will … Continue Reading

Listen up, municipal governments – bike sharing is in. All the cool cities are doing it – Paris, Washington DC, Beijing. And why not? It’s effortless, sustainable, and it cuts down on congestion. But for so long, us Torontoians (and Vancouverites) have only been able to look on and dream. Well not anymore.