The Canadian Association of Planning Students held their 2005 national conference at Metro Hall last week on the theme of “Cities in Transition.” The conference featured distinguished speakers from across Canada, including former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray and former Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford.
Murray shared his thoughts about urban planning during the conference’s keynote address on Thursday morning.
“What’s emerging right now, I think, is a new plan where the world is really both a global place and a local place. The intermediaries-such as the nation-state-will increasingly become less important. That has a huge impact on the way cities work and the way we’ll think about cities. We’re living, effectively, for economic purposes, in a borderless world.” Murray said.
Murray said that throughout the 21st century, as cities become more and more important to global trade, a country’s economy will only be as powerful as its cities’ ability to attract investment.
“An interesting study…explained that the half of the difference in the lower level of GDP per capita growth in Ontario in comparison with 14 major US states was directly related to the lower level of urbanization and density in Ontario.
“We in Canada have to look very differently at various national priorities,” said Murray, who ran unsuccessfully for parliament last year. “We’ve been very obsessed with health care in provincial and federal elections and we’ve been very focused on spending on social services in these elections, but not very focused on the kinds of policies that we need in this new kind of economy to create wealth.”
Murray said that Canada’s obsession with health care has had detrimental effects: “Canada has fallen from the fifth-fastest-growing economy in productivity to sixteenth since 1998,” Murray said. “That’s a pretty dramatic fall.”
Among Murray’s recommendations was an expansion of transit systems to relieve overcrowded freeways and roads. Both Murray and Bedford warned against continuing development of huge subdivisions that overextend the infrastructure of the city. Bedford said that an estimate of the sum value of Toronto’s total infrastructure came out to $1.2 trillion. Overextension of the infrastructure has meant that much of it has been neglected. The result, Bedford explained, is that 60 per cent of Toronto’s infrastructure needs to be fixed or wholly replaced.
Other recommendations that Murray made were the beautification of cities through more sympathetic architecture, and planning and splitting municipal property taxes into two categories: land and building taxes. (The building taxes would be lower on high-rise developments than on houses to encourage more high-rise condo complexes and in turn, higher density.) He also recommended that cities should specialize their economies based upon available local resources so that communities produce only what they viably can, instead of inefficiently importing and exporting resources.
“What gets built where, what creative capacity happens where, is now more based on local capacity, local resources, and the quality of life that the community can maintain,” Murray said. “It essentially retains creative people, which is the single most important thing a city can do”
“In Canada, eight out of ten of us live in an environment that is either urban or suburban. This is the first year in history that the urban population worldwide is larger than the rural population.”
