Planning, not development approval: The Challenge for Young Planners

Notes for a speech by John Sewell

University of Toronto Urban Studies Student Union

Tuesday, January 31, 2006,

University of Toronto

I want to talk about the kind of city we want, and what that has to do about land use planning.

You may know that in Ontario we have the ideal land use planning system. The provincial government has outlined its land use policies in a Provincial Policy Statement; and the Planning Act requires that each local government create its own plan, called an Official Plan, in conformity with those policies. The legislation says the Plan will outline where the municipality is headed in the next several decades, it specifies the important questions that must be addressed, and it says the Plan must be updated regularly, at least every ten years.

If we have the ideal system, what has gone wrong?? The details

a) PPS is weak – so as to not dictate to the municipalities

b) OPs are vapid. They are full of empty phrases about “make every effort”, “achieving as much as possible” and so forth. As for questions of sustainability, built-form, and social mix, I am not aware of any plans in Ontario that contain the se kinds of firm principles in a way that would substantially alter the laissez-faire approach we now take to land use planning. The plans created by most Canadian municipalities are impotent little documents, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

c) Plans keep getting amended. In fact hardly a meeting goes by of a local council where the Official Plan is not amended. In a place like Toronto every meeting of Council involves about ten Official Plan amendments – 100 amendments a year.

The purpose of the Plan is to set the long term vision, to be a document that will serve as an instrument by which we make choices for the future. It is not intended to be a document which is amended every time the council meets, whenever some developer thinks he has ano the r good idea.

What has evolved in the place of planning is a system of development approval. Developers apply for permission to build certain proposals, and city hall responds. The OP is the re as a hurdle so developers have to come to city hall for approval, nothing more.

And here are the problems the hurdle causes:

1. The risk has been taken away from the market and places it in the approval system. A developer with a good idea realizes that the big hurdle he must overcome is getting approval – that's where the risk is. To handle this risk, an extraordinary output of time and energy on the part of the developer is used to negotiate around the politicians, the planners, o the r city staff, and the local community. Given the size of the risks, the developer is willing to pay a great deal of money to avoid problems. Some money gets paid to politicians by way of election contributions, some is used for entertaining politicians and o the r decision-makers, and some gets paid to lobbyists who will hold the hand of city staff in the hope the y will the n be favourably inclined to the application.

The system gets infused with money and deals. The city the n has to establish a lobbyist registry, as though putting names on a piece of paper has any positive impact. The system swims in money.

2. Councillors gain power because anyone who wishes to do something has to come to City Hall for approval. Some municipalities are stronger gate keepers than o the rs, requiring approval for even the smallest change. You probably have heard the story of the municipality that was so concerned about commercial operations getting out of control that it specified five categories of hairdressers, including a barber, a hair dresser, a hairdresser with manicures, a hairdresser with manicures and pedicures, and on and one. If you wanted to add a small service you had to get a rezoning. How bizarre.

3. Most municipalities use applications to amend the Official Plans and zoning bylaw as ways to generate funds to pay for the planners who recommend approval. The cost of an OPA in Toronto is now $8000.00 . If you're a planner you aren't interested in turning down an application for which a developer has just paid $8000. So you plan on approving almost everything that comes your way, maybe with a small amendment, chopping off a few stories.

4. Extraordinary uncertainty. Developers don't know what is going to happen so the y apply for the maximum. Community members don't know what will happen in the ir area. There's no predictability anywhere.

5. Councillors realize the y can get the developer to fund the ir favourite projects by putting an approval levy on the m – we'll give approval is you pay for such and such. Bathurst and St. Clair development approval cost the developer $1 million, which was given to the Wychwood car barns in return for e 26 story building.

6. If developers do badly at council, the y go to the Ontario Municipal Board. That's very costly for community groups, or even for local councils. The Town of Oakville is budgeting $15 million to hire lawyers to defend its decisions at the OMB on a new plan.

The system is an employment generator – it spawns a whole industry of people who are the re to subvert reasonable decisions – planners, lawyers, lobbyists, OMB members. It is very, very successful. There have been many studies that show that what approval systems like this do is invariably give approval - the y do not see the ir function as to deny people from getting through the gate, particularly after the y have paid the ir fees.

The whole system of local democracy is perverted, and money is the order the day. You can't establish a long term plan about the kind of city you want because it would interfere with development approval.

How to we plan for the city we want?

The first question is whe the r we can help to create the social environment we want by influencing urban form. I believe that we can. I believe urban form plays a very significant role in the way people interact with each o the r. Urban areas that are like a desert do not help people interact in a useful way. Urban areas that contain a great deal of variety and well designed and beautiful buildings often inspire people to good social interaction and imaginative artistic endeavour. Environments designed to allow interaction such as a farmer's market or a sook, help people to be socially interactive and create a strong sense of community. In short, creating the urban form we want will help to crate the kind of social milieu we wish to see in the cities.

Which means that planning should be trying to set a template for urban form.

It is not particularly hard to plan to create certain kinds of urban form. Hausmann did it in Paris in the 19 th century with his grand boulevards and dense apartments hugging the edge of the street. Robert Moses did it in New York with his expressway systems which deliberately ensured that bridges were too low to allow buses carrying African Americans to make the ir way to Coney Island and o the r beaches.

But one does not have to have a great grand vision (and expensive vision as well) to influence urban form. Paris has been very successful at controlling urban form in the central arrondisements. It has done this by establishing a height limit which was 33 metres but is now 34 metres throughout the central part of Paris . All buildings must adhere to the height limit except for churches and monuments. If one goes to the top of L'Arc de Triomphe you can see how the height of the buildings is very closely controlled – with the exception of the Montparnasse Tower build after an American convinced the Paris City Council that Paris needed one tall building.

A more complicated kind of urban form planning has occurred here in Toronto in the King-Spadina area. Ten years ago some of the finest minds concerned with land use planning in Toronto got toge the r to talk about how development should be controlled in the King-Spadina area. Among those at the table were Ken Greenberg, Jane Jacobs, Margie Zeidler and developer Bob Eisenberg. They decided to get rid of zoning to prohibit uses, and instead to allow any use that a building owner wanted providing it did not cause undue noise, odor or vibration.

The second decision of this committee was to remove all controls on density. This kind of planning obviously turned on its head the experience of the past forth years which dictated that planners had to control use and density. Instead, the committee decided the re were only two important controls that should be exercised in King-Spadina. First the re should be a height limit generally the same as existing structures, a height of eight or nine storey structures. Second, the y decided that buildings could not be set back from the edge of the sidewalks, but had to come right out to the edge of the sidewalk.

This has proven to be a very powerful way of planning. It provides certainty for developers and for the community and it helps ensure that the city gets the forms that it thinks best for this part of the city. As we have seen, developers have surged into the King-Spadina area, building structures which are a mix of residential, retail, office, light industrial and cultural. Unfortunately, some developers have used the Committee of Adjustment to seek amendments to the height bylaws and since the Committee of Adjustment only understands development applications and not planning, it has been more than happy to reward those applications with handsome height increases, sometimes by as much as six stories. But that problem should not stand in the way of our admiration for this way of planning.

In her book Death and Life of Great American Cities , Jane Jacobs talks about the important elements for the kind of city she thinks best. She wants short blocks so that many street edges are created and so that many different ways of getting around a community exist. She wants mixed uses to that the area can be populated with different kinds of people interacting with each o the r during most hours of the day and night, recognizing that that kind of interaction creates a natural surveillance of public space which increases public safety. She wants medium densities both so that the re is a goodly number of people and so that land is used well. She certainly would not complain about higher densities ei the r unless the y overwhelm a neighbourhood. Lastly, she wants to ensure that the community consists of old and new buildings since it is her observation that new enterprises usually start out in old spaces since it is all the y can afford. If the community does not have space in older buildings it will not be able to generate new work.

Those are Jane Jacobs' axioms of good planning: short blocks, mixed uses, medium density, and a mixture of old and new buildings.

These might all be formulae that the city needs to be well planned. The city can certainly ensure that the design of street blocks is on the smaller ra the r than the larger scale. It can encourage medium or high densities. And it can certainly, as in King-Spadina, encourage mixed uses. It will have to be innovative to ensure that all communities consist of old and new buildings but certainly it can be done.

These are the kinds of plan that we clearly need, where we can set down in a nice short document the kinds of controls that will be put in place to ensure we get good urban space. We can get rid of the development applications and approvals. Instead, make clear rules that aren't going to be amended. Any plan which meets the rules gets approved.

It's ironic that the city is headed exactly th3e opposite way – it is suggesting even a fur the r level of approval. It has said it needs to be able to control the architecture of each building, the way the windows are designed, the materials used, and so forth. This just create ano the r opportunity for the city leaders to demand money. It's not going to get good planning.

Obviously, no one would be foolish enough to suggest that low density, single-use areas, with a surfeit of green space and wide, wide roads, is the best urban form that rules should be set up to ensure that's the outcome. The failure of existing planning systems can be seen in the fact that this is indeed what the planning system has allowed to happen everywhere.

You may know that the world we live in is in an extraordinary crisis because of climate change. We have but a decade or two before we reach the tipping point at which the re is no turning back, when the world will be become so warm that nothing we can do can stop the glaciers in the north and south poles from entirely melting away causing the level of our oceans to rise some 25 metres. We must act very quickly to change this outcome, and the place to act is in our cities since it is cities where most people live. The challenge that you face is turning the world around and starting to plan seriously ra the r than judging each crazy development application as it hits your desk. You will have to ask yourself whe the r you want to be part of the same order that seems to be destroying North America and the world or whe the r you are going to challenge the se failed systems such as we know in Toronto , Mississauga and the Region of York, and demand something better. That's what planning is about. It's a big issue we're dealing with, one of critical importance to our future and the future of earth.

My generation has failed. Perhaps you can help your generation succeed, or maybe you too will get distracted. I hope not.