When my partner and I drove across Canada last summer, we saw some of the most amazing scenery in the world. But in every city and town along the highway, we were confronted with the blight of urban sprawl. From Thunder Bay Ontario to Medicine Hat Alberta, we saw street after street of big box stores, single-level, single-use buildings and burb after burb of single family homes consuming land and resources at a terrifying rate.
Urban sprawl is an epidemic spreading across Canada and the rest of North America and it seems that the Ontario government is finally taking the problem seriously.
Earlier this week, the Liberal party announced their Places to Grow initiative, which sets out guidelines on how cities will develop over the next few years. Thanks to Nature Guy for pointing this one out to me.
I haven’t read the proposal, which is still up for public debate, but I will. From the outset it looks like the government will seek to please both the New Urbanists and the developers. This middle of the road approach could end up solving very few of the current problems facing cities and pleasing no one. Time will tell and thanks to the community meetings, we can all have our say.
If the sight of sprawl gets you depressed, then head over to to the Sierra Club’s great Stopping Sprawl page on their site. In addition to links and tools, they have this really cool Community Transformation page that lets you see how smart urban planning and renewal can turn this:
Into this:
The transformation tool is a great use of the web to help educate and inspire others to see cities in new way and show that sprawl can be stopped.
Check it out and get inspired. Let’s spread the word, not sprawl.
