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September 21 and 22
2 days, 2 disciplines, 2 ways to participate – defining our professional roles and uniting to build more equitable, accessible and inspired communities.
#2GETHER2022
The idea of “evolving communities” is very important at a time when our population is again growing dramatically, largely due to immigration. Some prominent Canadians (see Century Initiative http://www.centuryinitiative.ca/) have reported that we need to prepare a national growth plan for Canada that targets the accommodation of 100 million people by 2100. This presentation shows that urban growth through evolution (i.e., densification and/or intensification) is, in fact, how Canadian cities developed until roughly 1950. Canada was an evolving country, full of evolving towns and cities whose newcomer households responded to rapid growth by supporting an evolving approach to land subdivision, basic servicing, and housing forms that could grow and expand over time as family composition and economics changed. The presentation contrasts the 1945 plans by E. J. Faludi for a number of cities in Canada, based on his 1943 County of London Plan (UK). He took the opposing stance that, through a combination of urban renewal (e.g. Regent Park) and new peripheral development of “garden suburbs” (e.g. Don Mills), required that all new housing, shopping, and public space be fully planned and developed before inhabitation and be capable of change only permitted by restrictive covenants. We then trace the resultant growth of unaffordability and increased poverty as documented by housing and income statistics (1950–2005) and show how real neighbourhoods changed in this period, in concert with increased informal, urban development (e.g. tent-cities) and how all this led to the accelerated growth of a renewed building-material-supply economy, governed by increased zoning regulation. We finish with a new approach to planning that embraces zoning for a continuum of housing in neighbourhoods subject to increasing intensification and/or new greenfield development and introduce a concept for a neighbourhood growth plan.