Engineering Papers

202 Walkable Suburbia: Greater Toronto Experience in Retrofitting Suburban Development

| Alex Taranu, Dan Leeming

Summary: The regional cities evolving around Canada's largest cities host a significant portion of the country's population, economy and growth. They represent great opportunities for sustainable and healthy development through a complex and strong urban structure, sustainable regional transportation, development based on transit and active transportation, provision of complete, compact, liveable urban neighbourhoods, districts and communities. This presentation is looking at one of the key components of the evolution towards the walkable city - urbanization of suburban areas of the large metropolitan areas evolving to become Regional Cities. The focus is current work in the rapidly developing Greater Toronto Area and deals in particular with the principles and methods to make suburban development healthier and more sustainable through planning and design and the retrofit of car-oriented development of the recent past to walkable, transit supportive and oriented development. The presenters worked intensively the last few years with municipalities, private developers, public health authorities, professional organizations on a number of key initiatives to make suburban areas - inner and outer suburbs more walkable, people, transit and active transportation friendly. They will present an overview of the key areas of work in remaking suburbia: revitalization of existing historic areas; development of new urban centres, mobility hubs, transit nodes and corridors; redevelopment of existing conventional suburban areas; development of walkable, transit supportive new urban extensions. Projects presented include the development of compact urban centres and nodes such as North York Centre, Brampton Central Area, Markham Centre, transit oriented corridors such as Sheppard East and West, Avenue 7 in Markham and Vaughan, Hurontario and Queen East in Mississauga and Brampton, the retrofit of the older, car-oriented suburbs to be urban, walkable areas such as Don Mills and Bramalea Centre, Parkway Forrest as well as new sustainable urban extensions such as the new transit oriented Mount Pleasant Village, Mayfield West, etc The Healthy Communities, Sustainable Communities initiative (extensively focused on walkablility and active living) and the Peel Health Healthy Development and Healthy Community Index tool with supportive case studies in the Peel Region area of the Greater Toronto will be presented. Developed with support from the best experts, this tool shows how health agencies could work with planners and designers to achieve the common goals of liveable, healthy and viable urban development. Presenting the Canadian experience in sustainable development of regional cities, of increasing walkability and livability, with trends, examples, projects illustrated will lead to discussion of opportunities highly populated, strong economic and growth city-regions present. Sharing information with the other participants, learning from each other, exchanging information about the most current methods, tools and techniques will have an impact in the way city regions but also mid-sized and smaller cities could work to implement the principles of sustainable, healthy, walkable and liveable development around the world. N.B. NO PAPER TO DOWNLOAD. It may be unavailable or too large. However, please feel free to contact the author if you are interested in further information.

Download 202 Walkable Suburbia: Greater Toronto Experience in Retrofitting Suburban Development PDF

Please Note: The above PDF document requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download this free software here.