Description

Planning Approaches for a Family-Friendly Central Edmonton

Thousands of people have moved to Edmonton’s urban core over the last decade, but one group of people remains conspicuously
underrepresented: families with children. As part of the new Capital City Downtown Plan, Edmonton’s City Council adopted the policy goal of a “family-friendly” urban core, but there is little direction as to how this will be achieved. Based on the findings of a series of thirteen key informant interviews, this paper explains why few families currently live in central Edmonton, identifies the key challenges, and evaluates possible planning approaches to making central Edmonton more family-friendly. Topics considered include amenity space provision, adult-only housing, and incentive programs to encourage the creation of family-oriented residential developments.

Thomas Beck is a second year student in the Masters of Science in Planning (MScPl) at the University of Toronto. He received his BA in Geography from Queen’s University in 2009.

Developing Complete Communities in the Suburbs: The Role of Retail

One of the guiding principles of the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe is to “build compact, vibrant, and complete communities,” where people can live, work, play and shop. The Growth Plan barely mentions retail, but shopping is a fundamental human activity and a major structuring force in people’s everyday lives. Unfortunately, recent retail development has seemingly been moving in the opposite direction to that which the Growth Plan promotes; vast power centres, where shoppers cannot even walk between stores, let alone to home or work, have been appearing at many highway interchanges, while efforts to create fine-grained, street-related retail have often failed. This presentation explores retail planning in Ontario and abroad with the goal of identifying how the public sector can promote the retail component of complete communities in the suburbs.

Anna Iannucci is a second year student in the University of Toronto’s Masters of Science in Planning Program. She received her B.A. in 2009, also from the University of Toronto, with a major in geography. Her primary research interest is retrofitting the suburbs to create more sustainable communities.

Building Communities to Live and Work: Evaluating Balance and Self-Containment in New Towns, Seoul Metropolitan Area

New towns in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) have been criticized for functioning as bedroom communities. Responding to the criticism, development actors and policy makers have attempted to create balanced, self-contained new towns with sufficient local employment opportunities. This paper explores how new town policies in the region have pursued jobs-housing balance and self-containment and examines the viability of the policies. Findings from key informant interviews suggest that the commitment towards local job creation derives from the development framework of new towns that sets out barriers toward a balanced growth by discouraging employment in new towns. Although much effort has been made, policies and strategies for promoting local employment remain ad-hoc and face challenges and constraints imposed by the legal and financial framework of the new town development.

Dukhee Nam is a second year student in the Masters of Science in Planning (MScPl) at the University of Toronto. He received his B.A. in Urban Planning at Yonsei University in 2010.