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This paper examines how policymakers interpret and deploy cultural economy approaches within municipal economic development strategies and cultural plans. Focusing on the 33 largest municipalities in Ontario, Canada, we conduct a keyword analysis of 63 municipal planning documents, supplemented with key informant interviews with economic development and cultural planning staff. Our analysis reveals that the use of cultural economy approaches in economic development and cultural plans varies depending upon city size, municipal governance structure and municipal organizational structure. However, despite the widespread use of cultural economy ideas in planning documents, we conclude that its uptake in municipal policymaking fails to reflect its professional and scholarly popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New models of urban planning, including the lofty design principles of City Beautiful architects and the comprehensive schemes of Garden City and Garden Suburb reformers, were introduced to Canada during the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite their widespread advocacy by professionals and civic-minded enthusiasts alike, the impact of these new models on the contemporary Canadian city was actually quite limited. However, selected principles of these models were used rather pragmatically in several locations, including the northwestern suburbs of Montreal where the Canadian Northern Railway built the 'Model City' of Mount Royal, a corporate suburb that was planned, designed, and developed as a real estate venture to help offset the costs of building a railway tunnel into the centre of Montreal. This paper examines the process of city-building in Mount Royal during the town's formative years, from 1910 to 1925. It demonstrates how the idea for the town emerged as a speculative residential scheme at the height of the pre-First World War land boom; how the City Beautiful ideals of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr and the Garden Suburb principles of Henry Vivian were introduced to Montreal during their visits there in 1910; and how, one year later, their ideas and other planning models converged and were incorporated to form the unique design for Mount Royal's urban plan by Frederick Todd, a protege of the junior Olmsted and Canada's most prominent landscape architect of the early twentieth century.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of plans to destroy them. City Beautiful era plans, development projects, and other public and private interventions displaced or sought to eradicate Chinatowns, from Los Angeles to Victoria to Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Urban renewal era projects destroyed large portions of many Chinatowns, and some entirely. This article traces these broad patterns and trends of planned and realized destruction and preservation across 15 of the major cities in twentieth-century Canada and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an impressive international career, the German city planner Hans Blumenfeld remains largely unknown. In The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, Christopher Klemek depicts him as an apologist of authoritarian and technocratic urban renewal. This statement is puzzling because many post-war planners saw him as a humble left-wing progressive. Drawing from a close analysis of the writings and actions of Blumenfeld, in particular his work in Canada, this article shows that he was far from being an uncritical apologist of urban renewal in North America. He was always very sceptical but, as opposed to Jane Jacobs, he did not think that modernist urban planning had it all wrong. He always thought that progress came not only from citizens' participation, but also principally from science and expertise. For that reason, Blumenfeld tried, on the one hand, to transform the language of city planning to answer criticism from citizens and activists, and, on the other, to retain the expertise to proceed from plan-making to a communication-process, as some professionals were beginning to advocate at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For four years, Frederick G. Todd (1876-1948) studied and practiced with the Boston-based Olmsted Brothers, the seminal landscape architecture and town planning firm. The Olmsteds executed ambitious plans for parks, park systems, urban design, and suburban development according to the pioneering design principles of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr and his two sons, John Charles and Frederick Law Jr. In 1900, Todd left the firm to establish the first landscape architecture office in Canada. While Todd was deeply influenced by the ideas of Olmsted Sr and his sons, he arguably had more direct impact on Canadian city development than his mentors. Many Todd projects survive as treasured open spaces, and sought-after residential enclaves. However, despite Todd's impressive career his reputation remains overshadowed by the legacy of the Olmsteds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, urban sustainability has become a new policy common sense. This article argues that contemporary urban sustainability thought and practice is coconstituted by two distinct representational forms, which we call green urban nature and gray urban nature. Green urban nature is the return of nature to the city in its most verdant form, signified by street trees, urban gardens, and the greening of postindustrial landscapes. Gray urban nature is the concept of social, technological, urban space as already inherently sustainable, signified by dense urban cores, high-speed public transit, and energy-efficient buildings. We develop Lefebvre's ideas of the realistic and transparent illusions as the constitutive ideologies of the social production of space to offer a framework for interpreting contemporary urban sustainability thinking in these terms and concretize this argument through case studies of postindustrial greening in the Ruhr Valley, Germany; municipal sustainability planning in Vancouver, Canada; and the Masdar smart city project in Abu Dhabi. We conclude by examining the implications of green and gray urban natures for the politics of urban sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to contribute to the field of urban planning by applying policy mobilities and transfer theories to a case study of the Capital Regional District and its 13 municipalities in British Columbia, Canada, in order to analyse and understand the dynamics of how sustainability is governed locally, with a special focus on barriers to sustainability policy mobility. The empirical material is primarily based on interviews with key stakeholders who guide policy development and creation in the region to inform an understanding of how sustainable development initiatives are developed and shared. This study finds that while there is interest and demand in sustainability, policy-makers are frustrated with their lack of success in implementing sustainability programmes. While there are some instances of policy sharing and transfer among municipalities in the region, there is a clear desire for more exchanges which would allow municipalities to respond more effectively to the demands placed upon them. Significant barriers to policy mobility are also identified, in particular, an unclear understanding of sustainability, a culture of competition and hostility among municipalities, difficulty with the process of transfer itself, and a lack of time, money and resources. These barriers are in part a result of a broken governance structure which does not provide clear leadership to the municipalities, sets municipalities to be competitive with each other and provides ineffective support for municipalities through an unwieldy regional administrative body which is not well regarded by the municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hamilton Spectatorsports editor Melville Marks ‘Bobby’ Robinson was a proud British imperialist who wanted to create a new large sporting event to showcase the Empire's athletes when he helped create the British Empire Games. But when he sought financial support from Hamilton, Ontario's city council for the 1930 hosting of those Games, he used symbols that were less about the Empire and more about what was important to that city's local government officials, urban boosters, and citizens; he promised that the event would pay for itself, that it would promote the city abroad, and that it would leave Hamilton with sports facilities that would be ‘the envy of Canada’. Seventy years later another person from theHamilton Spectator, its publisher Jagoda Pike, evoked Robinson's story when she led Hamilton's bid to once again host those games, now called the Commonwealth Games. That bid relied on themes similar to those used in the past – civic pride, unity, sport infrastructure legacy and economic development. Using urban regime theory as a conceptual framework, we argue that despite the difference in generations, the City of Hamilton has continued to use the Commonwealth Games for the same purpose – city building – and called upon high profile citizens from similar spheres of influence to further the bid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Toronto is conventionally considered quite unlike “American cities.” This article does not fundamentally challenge this convention, but does suggest that differences between Toronto and American cities may be overdrawn and that Toronto may have more American elements than is generally recognized. The evidence presented in this study comes from three episodes in Toronto’s postwar planning history: creation of an ambitious postwar master plan in 1943–44, formation of metropolitan government and planning in the mid-1950s, and the design and construction of the iconic suburban neighborhood of Don Mills also in the 1950s. All three show strong American planning connections. The article then offers some reasons why these American planning ideas did not produce an “American city,” and concludes by challenging the view that it is due to Canada having a fundamentally different urban culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

No clear ecological footprint calculation strategy is available for small- and mid-sized communities within Canada. By adjusting provincial or national footprint findings using data sets available in the public domain, we develop and test a calculation strategy to estimate municipal ecological footprints. Because the calculation approach is consistent with the Global Footprint Network standardised methodology, it permits meaningful comparisons between communities and with global and national footprint estimates. It offers planners, policy-makers, and community leaders an accessible, straight forward, and cost effective strategy for estimating the ecological footprint at the community and municipal level. The suggested approach is best suited for using the ecological footprint as an awareness and education tool. The large number of limitations associated with calculating the municipal approach and limitations associated with calculating ecological footprints in general at the local level make it an unsuitable tool to inform community planning and policy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 2006, researchers surveyed Canadian “new urbanism” projects by reviewing literature and websites, examining municipal and government documentation, and contacting local authorities. The study found that many of the projects that began as “new urbanist” changed during development, eventually becoming more conventional in character. Only one development project reached build-out as a complete new urbanism community by its targeted date. Although new urbanism principles are increasingly integrated into planning principles across Canada, full-fledged new urbanism developments prove surprisingly rare in the market. The survey indicated that new urbanism projects cluster in particular parts of the country: generally the areas growing most quickly around Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary. New urbanism communities have been successful in achieving a mix of housing types, high design standards, attractive open space systems, and a walkable environment. They have had less success in establishing viable commercial districts, increasing urban densities, providing affordable housing, or reducing reliance on automobiles. While new urbanism and smart growth principles are affecting planning ideology, development practice may prove resistant to transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning and local policies, informed recurrently by theories of transformative urban development, have represented influential (and at times decisive) agencies of change in Vancouver's metropolitan core. A commitment to principles of post-industrialism in the 1970s, realised through the conversion of False Creek South from an obsolescent industrial site to a medium-density, mixed-income residential landscape, effectively broke the mould of the mid-century urban core. The seminal Central Area Plan (approved 1991) enabled the comprehensive reordering of inner-city space, exemplified by a post-modern diversity, complexity and interdependency of territory and land use, and a strategic reversal of the employment-housing imbalance in the core. The city has broadly succeeded in asserting public interests as contingencies of change within the core, but these processes have created new social conflicts, tensions and displacements, as well as a glittering and paradigmatic 21st-century central city. In theoretical terms, the Vancouver experience marks a clear break from the classic model of the post-industrial city, the latter typified by a monocultural, office-based economy, extreme spatial asymmetries of investment and development and modernist form and imagery. At the same time, emergent production clusters, residential mega-projects and spaces of consumption and spectacle in the central area present marked contrasts to the spatial disorder and chaotic patterns of 'incipient' post-modernism, underscoring an exigent need for innovative and integrative retheorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article distinguishes between cities experiencing high rates of growth and those growing more slowly and argues that 1) widely held North American assumptions to the contrary, slow growth is not a pathology: and 2) because we do tend to view it as a pathology, we fail to plan for it and instead follow policies more appropriate to rapidly growing centers. Using Winnipeg as the primary example of a slowly growing city, but drawing on a wide range of data, the article considers the following policy areas: housing, management of infrastructure, economic development, and immigration. In each of these areas the argument is that policies that may be defensible in rapidly growing centers are inappropriately.followed in slowly growing cities where different lines of policy would be more beneficial. Appropriate policies for slowly growing cities are suggested and their merits evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]