The pandemic taught us the importance of local production; we are competing globally for PPE and vaccines. Do we want to do the same with our food? Despite an economic system that relies on population growth, we are losing farmland at an alarming rate, while warming due to climate change and extreme weather is hurting crop yields. A growing group of Londoners want to counter this with expanded opportunities for urban farming and a look at how the city intends to expand.

How do we start conversations about what makes strong neighbourhoods? How do we intentionally plan for the future? Who will make the decision on what the new neighbourhoods of the future will look like? Do we leave it up to the developers and let 'market demand' dictate?

Have you heard of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture's HomeGrown campaign? A campaign geared to the Greater Horseshoe area, but coming soon to London. Did you know:

-175 acres of prime farmland are being lost to development in Ontario EVERY DAY

-only 5% of Ontario's land is suitable for farming, once paved over it is lost to agriculture forever

-Since the beginning of the pandemic, an MZO has been used 6 times to rezone farmland for an urban use

-40% of land owned by the City of London is rural and currently outside of the current growth boundary

-the provincial government can override a city's boundary proposal if they think it is too small (as they did in London in 1996)

-these growth boundaries lock in for the next 30 years the type of development allowed in the growth areas

The London Plan is the new policy framework for all planning in London. It emphasizes growing inward and upward, to reduce the costs of growth, create walkable communities, revitalize urban neighbourhoods and business areas, protect farmlands, and reduce greenhouse gases and energy consumption.

The London Plan is in force as the new official plan for the City of London. All appeals have been resolved as of May 25, 2022

“Intrinsic to the success of cities and the quality of life they offer is how people move around within them,” notes Cities Alive: Towards a Walking World. “In the twentieth century, planning for the city was about planning for the car. In this report we make the case for policies that encourage walking to be placed at the heart of all decisions about the built environment, as walkable cities are better cities for everyone.”

Article by Robert Steuteville, editor of Public Square: A CNU Journal and senior communications adviser for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Once built, Tornagrain is designed to be a “15-minute city,” with most or all of daily and weekly needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from housing.

The first neighborhood, including 350 houses, neighborhood shops, a pre-school nursery, garden allotments, and civic and recreational spaces, is nearly complete. It is designed as a stand-alone village and Phase 1 of the overall town of 5,000 living spaces—a mix of detached, semi-detached, terraced, and apartment homes—projected to be complete in 2062.

By Robert Steuteville, editor of Public Square: A CNU Journal and senior communications adviser for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

When it comes to preserving livability, density is not really the issue, as many of us know. Some high-density areas are delightfully livable, and some low-density areas are miserable. The deeper question is the quality of the development, and whether it elegantly handles impacts like vehicles, shading, safety issues, noise, and just plain ugliness.

The “B” word—beauty—is less often raised in the public debates. Partly that’s because there is a general attitude that beauty is subjective, and anyone who makes a claim about the aesthetics of a project is merely expressing a random individual preference with no collective weight. But recent findings from neuroscience, environmental psychology and other fields is pointing out that people share aesthetic evaluations to a remarkable degree. When it comes to human environments, evidence shows that most people have a shareable “intersubjective” experience of the beauty and livable appeal of these places.

By Michael Mehaffy, Ph.D., a development consultant, planner, designer, author, educator, researcher, and executive director of the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series as well as the Oregon-based Sustasis Foundation.

This building needed to be 8 stories, reaching the permitted height, to be financially viable. And yet many of the buildings in that part of the corridor are 2-3 stories in height, and much smaller in scale.

The architect went to great lengths to break down the scale of the building, including varying the window types between buildings and the cornice line and design details at the street, and using seven different types of colored and textured brick as well as metal panel for individual facades, which also vary in width. How many passersby will know this is one building?

By Robert Steuteville, editor of Public Square: A CNU Journal and senior communications adviser for the Congress for the New Urbanism.

It's no secret that a lot of public engagement is worthless—or worse. It's not just that much of it is lazily designed to check off a box on a list of requirements—though that's true. It's not just that there's a built-in power imbalance, in which public feedback tends to overrepresent groups with a lot of access to and familiarity with the political process—older, wealthier, whiter, and more politically engaged residents. Though that's true too.

By Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor for Strong Towns

There is a sweet spot between the heart of a city and suburb. "Middle neighborhoods" offer the right balance of urban amenities and elbow room. The problem is that current zoning laws and other standards make it extremely challenging to build these neighborhoods. That needs to change.

Primarily built before the 1940s, they include a mix of small-lot single-family homes, house-scale buildings with multiple units (which I call missing middle housing), high-quality private and public spaces that are not overly crowded, great walk- and bike-ability, and enough population density to support commercial amenities and services like high-quality health care. Typically, they have population densities of 8,000 to 11,000 people per square mile,

By Daniel Parolek US News

The engineer Tim Snelson, of the design consultancy Arup, writing in the architecture magazine Domus, points out that a typical skyscraper will have at least double the carbon footprint of a 10-storey building of the same floor area.

He is talking about the resources that go into building it, what is called its “embodied” energy. Tall buildings are more structurally demanding than lower ones – it takes a lot of effort, for example, to stop them swaying – and so require more steel and concrete. Snelson also mentions “in-use” energy consumption and carbon emissions – what is needed to cool and heat and run lifts, which he says are typically 20% more for tall than medium-height buildings.

The traditional city is a pedestrian city, whose buildings where designed to work together. When good urbanism was the norm, it was the architecture that gave a place its unique character. The question then becomes, what is it about older places which make them lovable? They have what I call harmonious beauty. Historically, architects employed a language of compositional patterns that enable buildings of various styles to harmonize. People love these places because they are picturesque.

When well composed, the relationship between a detail to a building, a building to a street, and a street to a neighborhood creates a harmonious ensemble that results in a lovable place.

By Daniel Morales is a practicing architect and urban planner, currently with Parkwood Homes, a TND builder based in Gaithersburg, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation by Daniel Morales at CNU 28.A Virtual Gathering

We have had a constant policy of providing affordable, social housing. The state finances this. And in each new housing area, especially in the big cities, at least 25 per cent of housing must be affordable, social housing. This has kept the supply to a reasonable level. This has been probably the main reason why we don't have the kind of housing crisis that most European countries have at the moment.

Affordable social housing stock is another option. For over 30 years, the Y-Foundation has been buying flats from the private market. We use these flats specifically as rental flats for homeless people.

Maybe the most important structural change in Finland is that we've renovated our temporary accommodations in shelters and hostels into supported housing. For example, the last big shelter in Helsinki, run by the Salvation Army, had 250 beds. It was completely renovated in 2012. Now they have 81 independent, modern, apartments in that same building. They also have on-site staff for support. So this structural change has probably been the crucial thing that has led to this trend of decreasing homelessness.

“I’m completely convinced that … we can do schemes in residential zoned neighbourhoods that are going to be successful, that people will love, and that neighbours won’t get upset about. The missing middle, it’s quite tricky, because you are dealing with residential zoning, and the city generally prefers to build condo towers, but that’s not the solution for everyone.”

And there’s the question of affordability, which won’t be achieved by merely adding new supply, he said. The E. 22nd site may have added an extra two units of housing than it originally had on the property, but they aren’t affordable to the average income earner because the cost of land and development is so high.

“It’s market housing, and I hope that young families move in or whatever, and it’s not some kind of investment vehicle for people. But it is definitely not affordable housing,” Mr. Yates said.

He believes that in order to bring down prices and make housing more affordable, including rental housing, the government has to get involved in helping the people who are displaced by redevelopment of old housing stock.

“There isn’t a market solution for that,” he said. “It has to be a government solution. I don’t think there’s any other option at this point. And the government is just so reluctant to get involved in housing. They are still sticking to their market fundamentalism that the market will provide all the solutions. And we clearly know that’s not the case.

“Any time the city does something that would affect somebody’s property value there’s a backlash. And owners of property see the city or the authority almost as their portfolio manager. They are responsible for keeping the value of their home high, and keep it growing so they can financially benefit from that.

“That’s our system. And it’s not working – and simply adding more supply is not working either.”

Ontario is expecting major growth around the GTA, and the provincial government has tasked municipalities with rewriting their plans on how to accommodate an influx of new residents. As part of that, the government has offered to let municipalities grow their urban boundaries. That's led to a debate in cities such as Hamilton. Four stakeholders discuss whether Hamilton should expand or build within its current limits.

Episode:

How Should Ontario Municipalities Handle Growth?

City Space is a new podcast from The Globe and Mail that seeks to answer the question:

How do we make our cities better?

We’d all like them to run more efficiently, be more affordable to live in and collectively plan as smartly as possible for the continuing impacts of climate change — but how do we actually achieve those things?

Can we build a new neighbourhood from scratch and make it good? This is an open question in urban planning right now – not just in Toronto or in Canada, but across the Western world. There are few examples of new districts that have become beloved places.

Now Toronto has the chance to answer that big question with a big project: The redevelopment of 520 acres on a former airstrip, Bombardier factory and military lands in Downsview, in a northern area of the city.

This week, the developers Northcrest and Canada Lands Company will release a “framework plan” for the project. It promises a walkable urbanism full of parks and “green corridors” and a runway turned into a mile-long pedestrian street. It would be light on cars, great on managing stormwater, and full of Scandi-style mass timber buildings.

“This is a plan that puts nature first, and then people, and then the built form,” says Kevin Bridgman, a partner at local firm KPMB Architects, one of the groups leading the design. “It’s a very different result than you get if you start with buildings and density.”

The world will have 2.5 billion more people living in cities by 2050, the United Nations predicts. Conventional wisdom holds that the most climate-friendly way to house those new urban dwellers is in tall, close-together buildings. But that’s actually the worst urban design from a greenhouse gas perspective, a new study suggests.

To minimize the carbon emissions associated with city buildings, planners should aim for an urban fabric of dense, low-rise buildings along the lines of Paris, not densely packed skyscrapers like Manhattan.

The results highlight the need to analyze carbon emissions across the life cycle of a building, as well as how a building fits into the larger cityscape—factors that aren’t well covered by existing green building assessment schemes.

A rationale for how pricing roads is the only solution to traffic congestion - not building more roads by Michael Manville, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.

In this essay he explains that alternate transportation methods are necessary to provide options, but that the only way to motivate drivers to seek other options is to put a "price" on roads.  This price could be tolls, but could also be dedicated transit/HOV lanes like we now see on the 401 and QEW. There will always be "congestion" because roads will always fill up until they reach that point of being "too costly" in terms of time/aggravation.