The Council for Canadian…

The Council for Canadian Urbanism (CanU) is a national organization bringing together urbanists and city builders through our annual summits, our regular events, and the activities of our working groups and caucuses. Our Board of Directors and membership consists of private and public sector professionals from across Canada with an interest and expertise in urbanism.
As the Province continues to grow, it is important to be reminded of the need for quality in the manner in which we plan and design our communities. Urban Design plays a crucial role in shaping the quality of our living environment. It involves many different disciplines including planning, development, architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, economics, law and finance, among others.
As an organization and as professional practitioners, we recognize the dire need for greater housing affordability in Ontario and the need to take action to help address our current housing crisis. We are strong believers in supporting intensification and the streamlining of planning processes to deliver housing across our communities but not at the expense of delivering complete, sustainable, and liveable communities.
Housing affordability is a measure of economic prosperity. Quality design ensures the creation of complete communities that influence the economic success and diverse social fabric of a community.
Urban design plays an important role in facilitating more housing through good design ensuring all housing is part of a healthy, complete, and attractive community that can and does co-exist and fit into its context. Conversely, bad design leads to public backlash hindering the provision of much needed housing. In short, urban design can be used as a very effective tool to ensure quality, sustainable growth.
Bill 23 proposes extensive modifications to a number of Acts and regulations and if passed as proposed, in combination with Bill 109, these changes will hinder the ability of municipalities and practitioners to ensure that complete communities can be delivered across Ontario.
CanU is concerned with the following provisions affecting urban design and ultimately the quality of life, of all Ontarians:

• Proposed changes to parkland dedication, and the ability of development to provide and locate land at their discretion, compromise the ability of municipalities in the creation of safe, healthy and complete communities. Rather, these changes will impact the capacity to deliver open spaces in the shape and form needed by communities, specially in intensification areas. The process of locating and providing open space takes place in the context of the “network building” that urban design undertakes. It is not and cannot be undertaken as a piecemeal exercise where a dissonant series of parkland pieces are not readily accessible to the community or are not of the hierarchy and scale needed by the community.

• The proposed legislation skims and avoids looking at how “gentle intensification” forms (other than the as-of-right 3 units per lot) can be delivered within residential communities and misses the opportunity to introduce regulation that delivers the range of built forms usually associated with the “missing middle” typology (i.e., from townhomes to walk-up apartments).

• At the local scale, matters of exterior design and streetscape (except to matters related to exterior access to a building that will contain affordable housing units) are excluded from the Site Plan process. When applied properly, urban design is not about architectural style and frivolous requirements. Rather, in its review of exterior design and streetscape urban design seeks to achieve various goals such as: (1) mitigating impact on existing development trough massing articulation; (2) contributing to quality walking environments; (3) mitigating wind and shadow impact; (4) offering safe urban spaces in the provision of well sited and designed open spaces and public realm; and (5) delivering greater public understanding and acceptance of change in their communities. If matters of exterior design are excluded from the Site Plan process, it impacts the scope and ability of Urban Design Review Panels to help municipalities and the development industry deliver excellence in design.