Urban form and sustainable urban development : an ecosystem approach to growth management / Ray Tomalty.: En107-3/4-1993E-PDF

"Municipal land use planning in Canada has tended to allow incremental changes that result in regional impacts that were unforeseen and unwanted. On the other hand, environmental assessment, which is mandated to evaluate the likely impacts of land use changes, has been carried out with a narrow scope and in a sporadic way. Arguably, one of the most environmentally destructive consequences of this planning “system” has been what is derisively called urban sprawl, or the incremental spread of urbanized areas across the regional landscape. The dispersion of our cities has been linked to increased air pollution and energy consumption from greater automobile use, the destruction of natural habitat such as wetlands and woodlots, the undermining of the farm economy, and the degradation of water quality due to runoff, in addition to social and economic ills. On the other hand, a review of the literature on sprawl versus the compact city reveals that we can not give our unqualified support to the notion of the compact city. We conclude that the ideal urban form cannot be identified in the abstract. The task at hand is to develop a planning framework with which communities can determine suitable urban form for local conditions and achieve that form through an appropriate development strategy. Toward this end, a regional growth management framework based on ecosystem planning concepts is proposed. An overview of growth management in the Toronto region allows us to gain insight into how current growth management regimes would have to be adapted to incorporate ecosystem planning principles"--Exec. Summary.

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