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With over a decade having passed since the inception of the provincially led growth plan in Ontario, there is an opportunity to explore how cities have adapted to meet the challenges of this regional-scale plan. The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe seeks to mitigate the negative effects of decades of sprawling development by focusing on building dense, urban, transit-connected communities. While the growth plan has a primary focus on municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area, it is also inclusive of smaller urban centres that sit outside of the province's Greenbelt. These mid-sized cities have a history of downtown decline and dispersed urban form. With the inclusion of mid-sized cities in the growth plan, however, there is an opportunity to explore the strategies smaller municipalities are using to attract public and private investment and achieve residential and employment provincial targets in their core areas by 2041. Th rough a case study approach, focused on downtown Guelph, Ontario, this paper argues that the growth plan can serve as a catalyst to alter the planning paradigm in mid-sized cities, and that through locally led community planning efforts, and a range of site-specific incentives, mid-sized cities can begin to revitalize their downtowns and reverse core area decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, panel regression analysis is used to examine the fiscal impact of urban growth on per-capita or perhousehold expenditures of providing municipal services in the province of Ontario, Canada. Three variables are used to measure growth: households, population and assessment. Using a panel data set for 68 municipalities, we find that for the most part, urban growth has no effect on per-capita or per-household expenditures. The policy implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of inner city spaces has been dominated by explanations stressing political economy factors such as rent gap and cultural factors such as urban amenities. This paper takes a diff erent approach in that it uses the tools of urban semiotics to show how the representations of space in a downtown location of protracted decline in the Canadian city of Calgary are transformed discursively and experientially to produce a different image for a diff erent social class. What made this reimaging of space so critical was the fact that the displacement of the existing population was rejected which called for a powerful and aggressive semiotic reinterpretation of the area. The semiotic strategies are discussed in relation to the material changes which reveal the contradictions and dilemmas in attempting to create a mixed class community through revitalizing imagery rather than merely redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]