Regeneration Toronto S Waterfront And The Sustainable City Final Report

In Blue-Green Province, Mark Winfield takes a long overdue look at the crucial relationship between Ontario’s environmental policy and its politics and economy. Covering the period from the Progressive Conservative "dynasty" that dominated Ontario politics from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, through the subsequent Peterson, Rae, Harris, Eves, and McGuinty governments, Winfield offers a trenchant analysis of the effects on Ontario’s environment and politics of these administrations’ dramatically different ideologies. Timely and original, Blue-Green Province is the first comprehensive study of environmental policy in Ontario. It will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in Ontario’s environmental and economic future.

Cities and Natural Process is a book for all concerned with the future of our cities, their design and sustainability, and our quality of life within them. Michael Hough describes how economic and technological values have squeezed any real sense of nature out of the modern city, the ways in which this has led to a divisive separation of countryside and city, wasted much of the city's resources, and shaped an urban aesthetic which is sharply at odds with both natural and social processes. Against this is set an alternative history of ecological values informing proven approaches to urban design which work with nature in the city.

A small river in a big city, the Don River Valley is often overlooked when it comes to explaining Toronto’s growth. With Reclaiming the Don, Jennifer L. Bonnell unearths the missing story of the relationship between the river, the valley, and the city, from the establishment of the town of York in the 1790s to the construction of the Don Valley Parkway in the 1960s. Demonstrating how mosquito-ridden lowlands, frequent floods, and over-burdened municipal waterways shaped the city’s development, Reclaiming the Don illuminates the impact of the valley as a physical and conceptual place on Toronto’s development. Bonnell explains how for more than two centuries the Don has served as a source of raw materials, a sink for wastes, and a place of refuge for people pushed to the edges of society, as well as the site of numerous improvement schemes that have attempted to harness the river and its valley to build a prosperous metropolis. Exploring the interrelationship between urban residents and their natural environments, she shows how successive generations of Toronto residents have imagined the Don as an opportunity, a refuge, and an eyesore. Combining extensive research with in-depth analysis, Reclaiming the Don will be a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Toronto’s development.

Large-scale development is once again putting Toronto's waterfront at the leading edge of change. As in other cities around the world, policymakers, planners, and developers are envisioning the waterfront as a space of promise and a prime location for massive investments. Currently, the waterfront is being marketed as a crucial territorial wedge for economic ascendancy in globally competitive urban areas. Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront analyses how and why 'problem spaces' on the waterfront have become 'opportunity spaces' during the past hundred and fifty years. Contributors with diverse areas of expertise illuminate processes of development and provide fresh analyses of the intermingling of nature and society as they appear in both physical forms and institutional arrangements, which define and produce change. Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront is a fundamental resource for understanding the waterfront as a dynamic space that is neither fully tamed nor wholly uncontrolled.

Federal property issues - especially those involving divestiture - create political disputes at all levels of government. Federal Property Policy in Canadian Municipalities analyzes the emergence of many of these issues involving military bases, airports, and other facilities in communities across Canada. With careful analysis the contributors show the underlying patterns and causes of these conflicts and their resolutions while emphasizing intergovernmental relations and the social forces that are active in property issues. Contributors examine general federal policy as well as issues pertinent to British Columbia, the Toronto waterfront, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The unprecedented number of cases discussed in these essays provides general conclusions and recommendations for a new orientation that will take local interests and preferences into account from the outset of decision-making. Public property is an understudied field of public policy, particularly as it concerns municipal government. Federal Property Policy in Canadian Municipalities presents a comprehensive treatment of federal property, changes in policy, and the effects these changes have on various levels of government. Contributors include Jeff Braun-Jackson (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Pierre Filion (University of Waterloo), Michael C. Ircha (University of New Brunswick), Leonard Wade Locke (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Robert MacKinnon (University of New Brunswick in Saint John), Kurt Peacock (University of New Brunswick in Saint John), Christopher Sanderson (Government of Manitoba), Tracy Summerville (University of Northern British Columbia), Stephen Tomblin (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Gary N. Wilson (University of Northern British Columbia), John Young (University of Northern British Columbia), and Robert A. Young (University of Western Ontario).

Most new urban growth takes place in the suburbs; consequently, infrastructures are in a constant state of playing catch-up, creating repeated infrastructure crises in these peripheries. However, the push to address the tensions stemming from this rapid growth also allow the suburbs to be a major source of urban innovation. Taking a critical social science perspective to identify political, economic, social, and environmental issues related to suburban infrastructures, this book highlights the similarities and differences between suburban infrastructure conditions encountered in the Global North and Global South. Adopting an international approach grounded in case studies from three continents, this book discusses infrastructure issues within different suburban and societal contexts: low-density infrastructure-rich Global North suburban areas, rapidly developing Chinese suburbs, and the deeply socially stratified suburbs of poor Global South countries. Despite stark differences between types of suburbs, there are features common to all suburban areas irrespective of their location, and similarities in the infrastructure issues confronting these different categories of suburbs.

Given the pressures of integration and assimilation, how are people within communities able to make decisions about their own environment, whether individually or collectively? Governing Ourselves? explores issues of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across Canada. It shows how communities large and small, from Toronto to Iqaluit, have distinctive political cultures and therefore respond differently to changing global and domestic environments. Case studies illuminate historical and contemporary challenges to local governance. This book covers topics including government structures and institutions and intergovernmental relations and reaches more broadly into geography, urban planning, environmental studies, public administration, and sociology.