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The citizens of Mission recognize that the chief function of local government, at all times, is to serve the best interests of the people of Mission. Decisions must not undermine Mission's long-term fiscal, social and environmental sustainability. For this reason, citizens have created this code of conduct outlining our expectations of elected officials. We believe that adherence to this code of conduct will result not only in more ethical and fair decisions, but also more responsible and beneficial decisions for the community. Enhanced citizen participation can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of more transparent, inclusive and fair governance. We welcome public feedback. Please send us your comments and suggestions about this document.
Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct:
By Tracy Lyster

With input and assistance from MyMission members Mike Gildersleeve, Hilde Tonkens, Mike Diener, Phyllis Young, Kevin Francis, Don Mair, Sieglinde Stieda, Jeanette Smith, Nikki Watkinson, Anne Arsenault, Matt Johnson, Othmar Kagi
FAIRNESS
Ensure decisions and community goals are based on complete and accurate information. Ensure technical information, including environmental studies, is completed at arms length from proponents Bearing in mind unique individual circumstances, treat like cases alike and uphold and implement municipal policies adopted by elected officials. Decisions should as much as possible reflect longer-term community goals instead of short-term gains for individuals.

Resist any encroachment on council responsibilities, believing the member should be free to carry out official policies without interference, and handle each problem without discrimination on the basis of principle and justice.

Treat all citizens regardless of background, ethnicity, sex, age, orientation and belief as equal under the law, the UN charter and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection/CH37-4-3-2002E.pdf).
INCLUSIVENESS:
Ensure public is informed about municipal issues and there is opportunity for meaningful public input into these issues. Keep the community informed on municipal affairs, encourage communication between the citizens and all municipal officers; emphasize friendly and courteous service to the public and seek to improve the quality and image of public service. Information should be readily and easily available to the citizen. New means of communication other than the traditional forms (papers, websites) should be explored to ensure every citizen could access information. Do not assume that everyone has access to a computer.

Hold regular Town Hall meetings in various neighborhoods in order for council to hear the concerns of the neighborhood and to provide opportunity for public participation and debate and dialogue on important issues- in particular land use decisions and budget planning.

Public question period should not be reduced due to council verbosity. Allow citizens to fairly represent themselves and adequately have time to state their case and ask questions for council during meetings. Allow specific agenda related questions after each item before council votes and close the meeting no later than 9:00 pm to allow sufficient time for general questions.

Provide written answers to citizens' questions either in the minutes of the meeting or as a separate agenda item for the next council meeting.

No late items unless there is an emergency.

Ensure all socioeconomic, ethnic, and community groups are represented on major policy projects such as the OCP, neighborhood planning.

Ensure the process and guidelines are clearly set out as to how meetings will be run in accordance with procedural fairness. Ensure citizens are respected and avoid harassment of speakers or other conduct that undermines public participation. Provide public education about municipal affairs and any major up and coming issues ensuring that there is ample and at least reasonable notice for any special meetings held by Council.

Do not hold important public meetings during times when people usually not expected to be available e.g. during the summer or holiday season. If this still needs to happen, then provide time and opportunity for people to send in a letter with comments.

Ensure all relevant information on any issue is available on Mission website, at Mission's city hall and at the library.
ENCOURAGE PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
Provide hard copies of agenda on request to individuals or to groups.

Fee barriers to Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests should be eliminated

Ensure there are clear and specific limits to in-camera meetings.

All members of a council have the duty to seek a determination on the appropriateness of a proposed in-camera session from the BC FOI and Privacy Commissioner's Office if they feel the meeting should not be held in-camera.
FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
We believe the district of Mission should be spending within its means. This means that we need to avoid borrowing and saddling citizens with debt. There needs to be prioritization of spending for projects needed for the health and long term sustainability of the community before other major projects are considered.

Institute a District wide audit to reveal any irregularities in operational expenses. Increases in operational expenses should be tied to population growth.

Ensure a cost benefit analysis is completed for every project/proposal at arms length from proponents. Ensure there is a project manager who conducts a risk assessment for every major project.

Respect Mission taxpayers. Raises for staff and councilors should be tied to municipal spending. No raises for the mayor and council if property taxes rise. Make raises contingent on staying within the budget. Recognize it is unethical and illegal to institute policies and bylaws which provide a benefit to a business at the expense of Mission taxpayers.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Currently there are no conflict of interest provisions covering municipal politicians in the province despite the fact that many have called for such ethical oversight.

We believe the District of Mission needs to have clear conflict of interest guidelines enshrined in policy.

Councilors and city staff should seek no favour and believe that personal enrichment or profit secured by confidential information or by misuse of public time is dishonest. In general, a conflict of interest exists for mayor, councilors or staff who use their position at the city hall to benefit themselves, their friends or their family.

Conflict of interest exists where a public official has a private or personal interest sufficient to influence the objective exercise of his or her official duties. The conflict may be:

Real conflict of interest: The mayor, councilors and staff should not accept gifts, favours or money from suppliers, employment by another organization, ownership of a significant part of another organization or business, for passing along confidential or privileged information or for voting in favour of a specific decision.

Perceived conflict of interest: The Mayor, councilors and city staff should avoid situations which could be seen as a conflict of interest, despite good intentions on the part of the councilor or city staff member.

Potential conflict of interest: The mayor, councilors and city staff are expected to perform their duties conscientiously and in a manner which will not put their personal interest in conflict with the best interests of the people of Mission.

Each elected official should be required to fully disclosure all circumstances that could be construed as a conflict of interest and get recommendations for any actions needed to eliminate a conflict of interest.
TRANSPARENCY OF DECISIONS
It is council's responsibility to ensure they are fully informed about any decision before they vote.

Every municipal decision-making process must be open and there has to be fair and ample opportunity for the public to comment or ask questions. Ensure minutes from the work of all municipal committees are available to the public.

Develop a useful form of public accountability explanation called an Equity Statement (Esq.). The statement sets out, for proponents of an intention that would affect the public in important ways:

1. Who would gain what benefits from what is proposed, and why they should, in both the short and long term.

2. Who would bear what costs and risks, and why they should, in both the short and longer term.

3. And assuming the proposal was to go ahead, who would be required to meet what standard of performance.

All contracts must be vetted in an open public process with at least 2 applicants before the contract is awarded.

In addition, transparency of decisions will be enhanced by broadcasting of municipal council meetings on cable TV and creating Hansard (verbatim) minutes of public meetings.
This code of ethics shall be reviewed annually.

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The citizens of Mission recognize that the chief function of local government, at all times, is to serve the best interests of the people of Mission. Decisions must not undermine Mission's long-term fiscal, social and environmental sustainability. For this reason, citizens have created this code of conduct outlining our expectations of elected officials.

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Effects of urban sprawl can be devastating or subtle in and around large, medium-sized, and small cities, and even small towns. On this page we will be describing some of the negative consequences or results of sprawl, by which we mean the spreading out of the footprint of a city or town beyond what would be necessary to accommodate population increase.

Growth and sprawl are different, as we hope you'll come to appreciate. Do not be offended if we call it an urban or suburban issue and you are in a small town. We are just using the terms most commonly found in the research world.

We will help you identify sprawl consequences for your metropolitan or micropolitan area. (A "micropolitan" area is one with a core city of at least 10,000 people, but fewer than 50,000. So if you live a mile outside a town of 12,000 folks, you live in a micropolitan area.)

Since we confine our definition of sprawl to instances in which urban land use growth exceeds population demand, a metro area can grow considerably through infill of the spaces between developed sites, without sprawling a bit.

At the sprawling edge of the city, and further in if the sprawl tendency has been ongoing for the last 50 or 60 years, traffic seems to become ever more severe.

Partly this occurs because of family patterns, where children are frequently delivered to school by automobile and where two adults now are working. Parents often decide to enroll children in every lesson and after-school activity that seems remotely feasible, so those trips add to the traffic also.

But beyond that, the fact is that there are few true town centers where multiple errands can be accomplished during one trip. The downtowns of large cities usually don't afford convenient grocery shopping and the dry cleaner adjacent to the major department store.

If big box stores (large discount stores) are more your price range, you may be able to take care of a few needs nearby, but adjoining restaurants and services tend to be set up for you to drive to them, rather than walk.

If you don't drive, you're in for a tough time in most areas. Each metropolitan area offers a few pedestrian-friendly walkable communities where you can find shops, restaurants, banks, and some services, but often keeping a grocery store in these locations is a hard sell.

Many people experience ugliness in the road dominance, incessant traffic, and excessive accommodation for automobiles through protruding garages and huge mostly vacant parking lots. It's a scene that mostly auto dealers and road building contractors love. But it's one of the effects of urban sprawl.

The cost in auto accidents is very high too. It's not unusual for fatal accidents to occur at the intersection of two 40-mph arterial roads. In turn the accident rates cause higher automobile insurance costs, another cost attributable to the effects of urban sprawl.

With more driving comes more air pollution. While the suburbs don't necessarily experience an obnoxious, visible amount of pollution, they certainly contribute when their residents commute to closer to the center of the city to work.

So far we have been talking about intangible negatives of a sprawling environment, which each person will value differently. However, some of the most important effects of urban sprawl are directly related to monetary costs.

A sprawling pattern means that the road transportation system has to be lengthy, miles driven and delays due to traffic congestion are high, and transit becomes cost-ineffective because overall density is low. All of these add up to higher financial costs, either at the household level (for example, gasoline and automobile purchase and maintenance costs), or at the governmental level (for road building and repair, or for inefficient transit systems). Of course governmental costs then equate to taxpayer costs.

Most cities look like an urban doughnut when healthy activity is mapped. The hole in the middle where downtown tries to survive has come to pass because one by one, businesses and institutions moved to the suburbs. The disinvestment in most cities has now spread far beyond the urban core, however.

Inner suburbs, depending on their age, may now be showing the effects of urban sprawl. The small houses built on the promise of veterans' financing after World War II are now painfully obsolete, as households and even single people crave large closets, two-car (or more) garages, and a guest bedroom and bathroom, not to mention offices, exercise rooms, and the like.

Due to sprawl, small houses, obsolete architectural types, and older housing have a hard time competing in the marketplace. Who wants to worry about major renovation and room additions if you can find a brand new house in the far suburbs for about the same price?

We're not just being sentimental architects when we talk about this. The disinvestment pattern has tremendous implications for the finances of the public sector. That translates into your tax rate!

When demand for the older houses declines, the municipality cannot abandon the street. Not only does the street need resurfacing, but about now, those 50-year-old sidewalks are looking pretty decrepit, if you're so lucky as to have any sidewalks. And your street lighting--well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The developer at the edge of the urbanized area, developing on greenfields (areas that have not been developed for urban use previously), has to install new streets and new sewer and electrical and cable TV lines.

Never mind that these utilities already are available closer to the center of the city in a neighborhood whose housing stock has become slightly dated. It's just easier to develop new housing. And buyers prefer it, at least if they have few other choices that fit their lifestyle.

The inefficiency of these effects of urban sprawl to the public sector--and therefore to you, the taxpayers--tends to be masked because the municipality building the new infrastructure tends to be different from the central city.

If everyone in the metropolitan area could look at their public sector investment as a whole, the effects of urban sprawl would come to a screeching halt as we realized how much extra money we're spending in most cities on infrastructure that is being duplicated on the edge of the city.

Lack of Choice of Housing Types

Because the effects of urban sprawl include duplicating more and more the most popular floor plan from the last development, we are left with fewer choices ultimately. One of the effects of urban sprawl that I find really distasteful is the homogenous nature of the housing stock we're leaving for our children.

Of course lack of housing choice can be alleviated in suburbs more than 30 or so years old. The process of housing renovation in the urban core and older suburbs leads necessarily to creative problem-solving as developers attempt to meet current market demands in a multiplicity of ways.

The housing shells themselves provide more variety than today's developments, which tend toward similarity and mass production. Renovation strategies that can provide the housing features today's buyers want are quite diverse.

I've seen two car garages that are tandem style where one car parks in front of the other. Entire bedrooms are turned into walk-in closets. Walls are eliminated to provide open flow between rooms and rescue the kitchen from its isolation. Additions to the back, front, side, and top of the home are made.

Small groups of homes on a cul de sac are formed into a homeowners association and instantly upgraded to "villas."

And of course former industrial and commercial buildings downtown find new life as unique residences. Smaller places of worship in semi-rural areas become housing, as do former corner groceries in cities.

But developers will only work on these projects if they can be distracted from the repetitive and predictable profits resulting from the effects of urban sprawl.

Concentration of Poverty Is One of the Major Effects of Urban Sprawl

Recently I made a presentation to social workers, and I asked them if they considered the geographical concentration of poverty in a few areas to be a problem. I thought they might say that no, poor people should be able to live where they've always lived, or where they are comfortable because others are in a similar predicament.

However, I learned that the social work community fully appreciates that the concentration of poverty means the concentration of problems, a lack of positive role models and the social networks that support obtaining employment, poor public schools for those who can least compensate at home, and the withdrawal from pockets of poverty of well-capitalized businesses that provide jobs, goods, and services.

The effects of urban sprawl increase as the physical distance between the haves and the have-nots becomes greater and greater. Probably that's correlated to social distance. Social isolation for a group of folks in poverty not only robs them of positive role models, but also feeds the sense of hopelessness.

You'd be a pessimist too if everyone you knew and interacted with on a daily basis was unemployed or underemployed. Such desperation can lead to crime and anti-social activities such as turning to drug dealing to make a living.

Another big point is that population sprawl leads to job sprawl. Businesses want to locate in a place that is convenient for the workforce and the executives.

As the workforce lives further and further out in the suburbs, a business has an all too convenient excuse for leaving its historic roots in or near the city center. And when jobs are further away from the concentrations of poverty, a reliable work commute every day is even more difficult.

Mobilizing the social justice community to understand the effects of urban sprawl better is critical to forming the right coalitions to fight sprawl.

Sprawl and Health

Increasingly people want to say that the lack of exercise, and therefore poor health, are effects of urban sprawl. I'm not sure I buy that completely, as I need forms of exercise beside walking.

However, the point is that we can't use walking as transportation in most of sprawling suburbia. So we ride, grabbing some fast food between errands. Beyond not getting any exercise, we gain excess calories and add to the total air pollution floating around.

Certainly when we look at the effects of urban sprawl on children, it may be more defensible to talk about health. Children once obtained their exercise naturally, walking and biking everywhere, and playing actively in the outdoors.

Since in the edges of most cities, the abundant open space is fenced into back yards, the children don't have much of an opportunity to interact with nature's streams. The woods often were scrapped when the Normandy Woods subdivision was constructed.

Since we started the website, information on this topic has mushroomed. Check out our page on effects of sprawl on public health.

Increased Costs for Communities and Taxpayers

The low density residential patterns typically appearing as one of the effects of urban sprawl increase the demand for road building, and the need for spending money on new schools, public services, utilities, waste disposal, and water and sewer infrastructure follow.

Police, fire, and emergency medical services must be provided immediately, but the demand for recreation programs and centers won't be far behind. Even if developers are billed for the obvious additions to roads and storm sewers, the effects of urban sprawl on public services are significant.

Remember that even if the developer pays for the streets in the new development, those new residents must drive to work, shop, and recreate. These trips will add congestion to roads that already are at capacity, in some instances. The intervening streets will require a serious rebuild sooner than had the sprawl not occurred.

Many people suppose that the property taxes generated by the new development offset these costs, but only rarely does residential development contribute as much to municipal coffers as it removes. Certainly in the case of new capital expenditures and public services, the public sector funding will not keep up.

Many economists in fact assign a negative value to the impact of new residents on public services in the central city, because infrastructure--both the service infrastructure and physical one--already is in place. A new customer simply lightens the load for others.

Many visitors to this site who are here to learn about urban neighborhood revitalization actually benefit financially when a new family moves in. But those of you on the very edge of urbanization find new households add a distinct financial burden as one of the effects of urban sprawl.

The more rural the area that is being provided with urbanized services, the more severe the tax burden.

Mingling the urban area with the rural fringe also causes other costs that people don't think about. For instance, wildfires at the edge of the suburbs are becoming a problem almost everywhere. Besides private property damage and misery--and therefore eventually rising homeowners insurance costs eventually--the public cost of firefighting is becoming a major municipal burden in these almost no-win situations.

Sometimes when I give an anti-sprawl talk, people enter the room thinking this is some sort of liberal idea. But if I have time to show the actual researched cost numbers, every single conservative in the room leaves extremely motivated to fight sprawl. This is a topic where real agreement is possible if we think rationally about the advantages and disadvantages of particular development patterns.

Loss of Rural Heritage and Open Space

Depending on your geography, you might be losing something important when you allow the effects of urban sprawl to continue unabated. The rural heritage is valued from a sociological point of view in many places in the world.

As another aside, it's really important to notice that loss of agricultural land means loss of local food production in most urban areas.

Rural living is a particular culture that not only provides food--and corn for ethanol and soybeans for almost everything--but also a particular way of life that many families on the fringe of your urban area may cherish.

If there's some nostalgia for the rural way in your area, count the loss of that hard to measure public good as you enumerate the effects of urban sprawl. Certainly isolated instances of sprawl, such as the small subdivisions that tend to intrude on rural land first, are damaging to the rural landscape.

As we who have worked with code enforcement have learned, it also leads to strange conflicts, such as complaints that the roosters are crowing too early in the morning, the goat got out and damaged my lawn ornament, or the horses are running and making a lot of noise. So there's even a public sector code enforcement cost to a rural-exurban interface.

If your geography means that your hinterland (it's a geography term and not meant to be a put-down) is more of a forest than a series of farms, you also are suffering a loss that shouldn't be taken lightly if the effects of urban sprawl gradually eat away at the forest line. Walking in the forest or mountains is a restorative pleasure that is precious to a certain part of your population.

The ecological value of your open space or agricultural land is important too. It absorbs your air pollution and gives Mother Earth a break from your various kinds of chemical pollution. In many instances the rural land is critical to your groundwater restoration.

With help from your state, you can evaluate exactly what the effects of urban sprawl are likely to be on your surrounding rural areas.

Summary of the Major Effects of Urban Sprawl

Sprawl results in:

Decreased livability, due to lack of walkability or bikeability and increased traffic

Lack of maintenance and renewal investments in downtown areas, urban neighborhoods, and the inner ring of suburbs around a central city, resulting in gradual declines of areas where street and utility infrastructure already exists

Loss of variety in housing choices as mass-produced housing predominates

Concentration of community poverty leading to an even more bleak future and desperate choices

Obstacles to spontaneous exercise opportunities through walking

Increased costs for communities and taxpayers for public infrastructure, utilities, and services, including fighting wildfires

Loss of the sociological and ecological benefits of rural heritage, local food production, and open space

If you're ready to adopt fighting sprawl as part of your agenda, head on over to learn about solutions.

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If you aren't sure: 1) We do have a newsletter archive page on our site that links to the past actual newsletters, and 2) Be assured that you can unsubscribe at any time by using a link at the bottom of each newsletter. Note that we use the MailChimp platform.

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Effects of Urban Sprawl in Cities and Towns Explained

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Effects of urban sprawl can be devastating or subtle in and around large, medium-sized, and small cities, and even small towns. On this page we will be describing some of the negative consequences or results of sprawl, by which we mean the spreading out of the footprint of a city or town beyond what would be necessary to accommodate population increase.

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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/20/mega-projects-reshaping-mississauga-sprawl.html

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I'm Hilary Clinton and i aprove of this message 

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I'm Hilary Clinton and i aprove of this message 

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We have been hearing for a while now about the continued explosive growth of cities around the world. According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the global population lived in an urban area in 1990, we crossed the 50 percent threshold by 2010, and we'll be at 60 percent by 2030 and 70 percent by 2050. That means more cities, bigger cities, and, importantly but often forgotten, more sprawl.

"Urban sprawl increases the connectivity among urban habitats while simultaneously fragmenting non-urban habitats such as forests and grasslands," write researchers in a new PLoS One paper. "These changes have a variety of effects on species and ecosystems, including impacts to water pollution, disturbance dynamics, local climate, and predator-prey relationships." The researchers, from the U.S. Geological Survey and North Carolina State University, modeled how urban sprawl-defined as low-density development outside the "urban core"-is going to change in the American Southeast over the next few decades to see how ecosystems in that area may change as well.

They found that sprawl is expanding in a big, big way. Overall, the simulations pointed to an expansion of "urbanization" in the Southeast by between 101 and 192 percent over the next 50 years. The median number was 139 percent, representing an overall expansion of 90,700 square kilometers (~35,000 square miles); that's bigger than the entire area of one southeastern state, South Carolina.

The specific types of land that end up as urban sprawl, of course, matter greatly as to how the expansion affects habitats. The paper found that the largest conversion will be from agricultural land to urban uses, with up to 21 percent of farmland yielding to the cities' tentacles. Grasslands (up to 17 percent) and forests (up to 12 percent) are next, followed by wetlands (up to 7 percent).

"The increasingly fragmented natural landscape would reduce habitat availability, suppress natural disturbance processes (such as wildfires), hinder management actions that come into conflict with urban areas, and likely eliminate existing corridors," the authors write. "Furthermore, all these impacts could occur simultaneously, posing a particularly devastating threat to already vulnerable species and systems." They note the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker as an example; it lives in longleaf pine forests, which will likely be among the forest casualties in this new urban wasteland.

And there are secondary effects to simply eliminating forests and grasslands where animals live. The urban heat island effect (and all its attendant causes, effects, and cause-effect mishmashes) will expand its reach, for example raising temperatures in the Piedmont region by between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius. And while sprawl destroys some wildlife corridors, it will open up other, weirder ones: the simulation suggests that some currently disconnected urban environments will expand enough to join forces. Creation of "urban corridors" could create novel habitats that allow totally different groups of species to flourish; one giant megalopolis will exist, unbroken, all the way from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia, 400 miles distant.

Given the knowledge we have that urban sprawl is likely to expand rapidly, in the Southeast and in many other areas, one could argue that we are well prepared to adjust and ease back on the throttle. The researchers, in concluding, take a cynical view of that possibility: "History suggests humans, in contrast to ants and slime molds, rarely optimize growth, particularly when multiple objectives such as profit, equity, and ecological integrity come into conflict." And since we aren't quite as good at this as slime molds are, there is the distinct possibility that we should plan for the worst rather than assume we'll fix the problem ahead of time. - Dave Levitan | August 5 2014

Source: Terando AJ, Costanza J, Belyea C, et al (2014). The southern megalopolis: Using the past to predict the future of urban sprawl in the Southeast US, PLoS One, 9 (7) e102261. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102261

Image: shutterstock.com, trekandshoot

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Just how far will urban sprawl spread? - Conservation

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We have been hearing for a while now about the continued explosive growth of cities around the world. According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the global population lived in an urban area in 1990, we crossed the 50 percent threshold by 2010, and we'll be at 60 percent by 2030 and 70 percent by 2050.

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Urban Sprawl in the US: Amazing Aerial Photography

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Christoph Gielen has captured these amazing visuals of the results of urban sprawl in US suburbs.

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Most people don't give much thought to the differences between streets, roads, drives, boulevards and avenues. But the differences are pretty distinct and can even affect public health and the way you live your life.

Streets in Toronto are mostly main thoroughfares like Yonge Street, Bloor Street, Queen Street and King Street.

Streets are wider, busier and have lots of offshoots to neighbouring roads. A drive tends to be a quieter road than a street, but still a relatively busy neighbourhood artery. An avenue in Toronto is often a tree-lined neighbourhood road with lots of houses on it. A boulevard has a segment of grass between the main road and sidewalk and is usually tree-lined.

There are exceptions, of course. Nobody thinks that Lawrence Avenue looks much like a residential street. Similarly, Lakeshore Boulevard resembles more a highway than a lovely path. History has changed streets more than once: Widening has turned boulevards into avenues, but the original name sticks because it's easier that way.

But, by and large, the naming conventions work. You can see how the entire city is organized by road types in the interactive here. Note the differences between old parts of the city and new, the newer planned neighbourhoods and the older mixed zoning neighbourhoods.

Fredericton, another old city in Canada, organizes itself similarly.

And Vancouver is in a similar boat, as this interactive by the Vancouver Sun's Chad Skelton outlines.

But that's not necessarily the best way to go about it. As many North American cities deal with rising congestion on roads that can't get any wider, city planners are struggling to introduce master plans that make most errands possible by walking or cycling, eliminating more vehicles from the road. The other half is making neighbourhoods dense enough that rapid transit is economically viable.

For examples of seeing this done well, look at London, New York and Paris: Plenty of low rise buildings in mixed-zoning plans with lots of rapid transit. Car ownership in these cities plummets as they become less useful, partly driven by rising congestion from the suburbs, and the personalities of neighbourhoods rise as people spend more time in them, partly driven by the exorbitant cost of driving and parking.

But while city cores are densifying and improving access to transit and active transportation, suburbs are often left out of the loop.

The proliferation of crescents in the less dense areas of the city work against that goal of creating neighbourhoods and merely create subdivisions. As several studies have pointed out, windy roads make it harder to get to anywhere from where you are. They extend travel times and therefore promote car use instead of active transportation. They also make it more difficult to integrate public transit into neighbourhoods and more difficult to develop the land into mixed-zone usage where commercial enterprise can exist alongside residential buildings.

A study in Atlanta found the extensions of these windy streets into the subdivisions outside of the old city core was creating a predictably fatter community as people spent more than an hour commuting out of their subdivisions to get to work.

It's no surprise the Romans built their cities in grids, and so did most of North America leading up to the 20th century. Grids are easy to organize. They put people in close proximity to each other and the services they need. They're easy to serve with public transit and easy to densify with predictable lot sizes.

Toronto is now figuring that out.

Jennifer Keesmaat is the city's chief planner and has been pushing for densification and better public transit or active transport infrastructure since she took the job. Densification basically means the death of the cul-de-sac, the death of the Circle, the Court and the rise of mid-rise structures that bring more people within walking or cycling range of their work, errands and play. Contrary to popular mythology, though, more people closer together actually means less congestion.
If we truly want to reduce congestion, and if we truly care about becoming a more sustainable city, increasing housing choice and affordable housing near the places where people work should be at the top of our city-building agenda. -Jennifer Keesmaat
Look at the map above and select "Crescent." See where they are. They are the home of wide property spaces, lots of parks, community centres and plenty of green space. They are also the home of large parking lots, strip malls and poor access to public transit.

But as the downtown continues to densify and the push of rising property values expands outward, how will these areas be renovated to accommodate more demands on their space? It's a running question urban planners and community advocates have been trying to figure out for years.

Across North America, old suburbs are dying out and city planners are figuring out new ways to use that space.

"It's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves," said Ellen Dunham-Jones in her TED talk on retrofitting suburbia.

"I think we have three challenges for the future," she said. "The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. Where should we be redeveloping? And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation?"

Whether Toronto's circular communities want that drastic a transformation remains to be seen. But the suburbification of Toronto came at the cost of public health and the availability of services. It gave rise to the calls of " subways subways subways " as an election platform even when population densities don't merit that kind of project.

But as Toronto is projected to add millions of people to the city within the next few decades, it's not just about figuring out how the city can deal with existing suburbs. It's increasingly about dealing with the enormous influx of people still arriving at our doorsteps.

According to a report from The Neptis Foundation, a non-profit in Toronto that examines urban design problems, Toronto is no longer expanding outward nearly as quickly as it once was and trying to keep people closer to the core. Instead, the suburbs are growing denser, accommodating more people in smaller spaces, and holding the city into a smaller space than in the past.

The Toronto region has grown in population by about 18% per decade between 1991 and 2011. But while the city expanded its land use by 24% in the first decade, it plummeted to only 7% in the second.
Although Canadian cities have already been shown to develop more densely than their American counterparts, they continue to face challenges associated with single-use, auto-dependent subdivisions. This is one reason why the Toronto region continues to suffer from ever-worsening traffic congestion. -Neptis Report
The report questions whether regional plans are designating more land for urban development than is necessary, and if that might be contributing to the sprawl problem. Meanwhile, residents in these areas don't act like they live in a dense city.

"As some suburbs grow denser, they continue to function like lower-density areas in terms of traffic congestion and low levels of transit use," the report finds.

There are more of us than ever before, and everyone around Canadian cities wants to live in a neighbourhood, have amenities like convenience stores, grocery and transit nearby and to be healthy. But the way Toronto was built out in recent decades doesn't allow for enough of us to have that.

Toronto was built in phases: From initial founding and grid-pattern establishment to suburbanization and sprawl. Now we have to figure out how to tie those cities together.

"Culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It's time to let them grow up," Dunham-Jones said.

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Most people don't give much thought to the differences between streets, roads, drives, boulevards and avenues. But the differences are pretty distinct and can even affect public health and the way you live your life. Streets in Toronto are mostly main thoroughfares like Yonge Street, Bloor Street, Queen Street and King Street.

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Las clásicas casas con jardin en Estados Unidos que vemos en las películas, suelen ocupar grandes extensiones de suelo. Christoph Gielen, pr...

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http://o.canada.com/news/interactive-the-suburbanization-of-toronto-and-the-death-of-urban-sprawl

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https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2013/02/21/urban_sprawl_is_destroying_ontarios_farmland.html

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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/12/urban-sprawl-how-cities-grow-change-sustainability-urban-age

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http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/victoria-urges-crd-to-combat-urban-sprawl-1.2367053

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Toronto's downtown condo boom attracts a lot of attention, but the Toronto region is actually growing five times faster at its suburban edges. High suburban growth rates in Toronto and other Canadian cities are raising important future sustainability issues.

The good news for Canadian urbanism is that the Toronto and Vancouver regions are both showing significant population increases in active core neighbourhoods that are walkable, mixed-use and have access to transit. Unfortunately, as a report I recently co-authored shows, most other metropolitan regions did not show similar downtown growth from 2006 to 2011, and all regions are still experiencing a tidal wave of suburban expansion led by lower-density automobile-dependent developments.

Big footprint: The GTA's exurbs (white), auto suburbs (yellow), transit suburbs (gold) and active core neighbourhoods (khaki). (School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen's University / Google Earth)

Why is this a problem?

The huge growth imbalance between core neighbourhoods and automobile suburbs is not sustainable from economic, social or environmental perspectives. Perverse CitiesPamela Blais' book Perverse Cities recently demonstrated the market distortions and flawed policy that subsidize our expensive suburban sprawl. She recommends better pricing and policy tools to reduce the economic incentives for sprawl.

The vast expansions of our automobile-dependent neighbourhoods have important social and health implications for those who are too young, too old or too poor to drive a car. There is a growing body of medical evidence that suburban lifestyles are correlated with higher obesity rates in children and adults. As for seniors, where will the coming wave of elderly baby boomers live after they lose their licences? Our public health doctors call for more walkable, compact and mixed-use neighbourhoods to meet our current needs and coming demographic shifts.

Environmentally, there is no question that extensive automobile use leads to substantially more greenhouse gas emissions compared to commuting by transit, walking or cycling. In addition, low-density suburban development requires more energy to heat and cool than more compact development. Toronto's Regent Park redevelopment and Burnaby's UniverCity are fine examples of more environmentally appropriate new communities, but we need many more examples across Canada to balance the rapid growth of our suburbs.

Our research analyzed this suburban growth by studying cities across the country using the latest census data. We found that Canada is still a suburban nation. More than two-thirds of the nation's population (22.5 million) lived in some form of suburban neighbourhood in 2011. In the Toronto region shown in the map above, more than 86 per cent of the population live in a suburban neighbourhood.

Within every one of Canada's 33 census metropolitan areas, the proportion of suburban residents is over 80 per cent. Many policy-makers underestimate the vast growth happening in the suburban edges. If we are going to have a more sustainable country, we have to figure out what to do about these suburbs.

Our report looked at three classifications of suburbs: exurbs, auto suburbs and transit suburbs. The exurbs (shown in white in the map above) are low-density rural areas where more than half the workers commute to the central core. Auto suburbs (shown in yellow) are districts where almost all the residents commute by automobile, including more than 4 million people or 72 per cent of the Toronto region's population. Transit suburbs (gold) are neighbourhoods where a higher proportion of people commute by transit, home to 14 per cent of the region.

Only 11 per cent of the Toronto region's population live in the active core neighbourhoods (shown in khaki), where a higher proportion of people commute to work as pedestrians or cyclists. Many of these core neighbourhoods were in downtown Toronto, but we also found them in the Beach and North York. A few towns such as Port Credit, Oakville and Newmarket also retained active cores after they were inundated by the suburban tsunami.

The population in Toronto's core neighbourhoods grew by 52,000 people from 2006 to 2011, and the transit suburbs grew by another 26,000 people, which was good news. Meanwhile, the less sustainable exurban and automobile suburbs grew by 390,000 people, or 83 per cent of the regional growth.

Within the boundaries of the City of Toronto, more than two-thirds of the population growth was in the active cores and transit suburbs, but the districts outside the 416 area code saw another story. The outer part of the region was swamped by more than triple the population growth found in the city proper. And 99 per cent of that growth was in automobile suburbs and exurban areas.

Markham, Vaughan, Brampton and Mississauga are all making commendable efforts to create "city centres," and their policies all say the right things about transit-oriented development and sustainability. But these worthy policies are being overwhelmed by the great influx of people into auto-dependent suburbs.

If suburban growth continues at these rates, Canada's most important metropolitan region will suffer increased costs of sprawl, poor public health and a decline in environmental quality.

The inconvenient truth is that the Toronto megalopolis is getting more suburban every year. Our regional planning needs to reverse this trend and do a much better job of creating sustainable suburbs.

David Gordon is professor and director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen's University. He is a founding director of the Council for Canadian Urbanism and co-author of Planning Canadian Communities.

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Toronto's downtown condo boom attracts a lot of attention, but the Toronto region is actually growing five times faster at its suburban edges. High suburban growth rates in Toronto and other Canadian cities are raising important future sustainability issues.

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Urbanization is a complex process in which a country's population centres tend to become larger, more specialized and more interdependent over time.

Urbanization is a complex process in which a country's population centres tend to become larger, more specialized and more interdependent over time. It arises from interacting economic, social, technological, demographic, political and environmental changes. Over 80 per cent of Canadians live in urban centres. The three largest cities are Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal.

Background and International Context

In 2011, 81 per cent of Canadians lived in an urban centre, compared to 45 per cent in 1911. Statistics Canada defines an urban area as community with 1,000 residents or more.

According to the 2014 United Nations report on global urbanization, Canada ranks 40th in the world. It is more urbanized than the United States, Norway, France and Germany, but less so than countries such as Japan, Belgium, Australia, Israel, the United Kingdom and Argentina.

Regional Variations

An important characteristic of Canadian urbanization is distinct regional variations reflecting the different economic bases of provinces and territories. Ontario, Québec and British Columbia have long maintained proportions of urban population at or higher than the national average. More recently, they have been joined by Alberta.

On the other side of the coin, some long-established centres have been losing population for substantial periods. This trend has accelerated recently as immigration has become the determining factor in comparative population growth. The 2011 Census revealed that about 34 per cent of municipalities with 1,000 inhabitants or more (321 out of 951) have declining or static populations. These were located disproportionately in Eastern Canada and among centres of 5,000 or fewer inhabitants.

Population decline promises to become more of an urbanization issue in the future. Vital choices need to be made about investment in health care facilities, infrastructure and amenities to serve an aging population. Six major urban agglomerations concentrated around Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Ottawa- Gatineau, Calgary and Edmonton receive the bulk of immigrants and investment. They also contain most of the faster-growing municipalities.

Because of the initial role played by the royal courts of France and England, Canada became an urban nation relatively early in its history. The urbanization process has passed through five major phases and, in the 2000s, entered a sixth stage. These phases overlap: each one has not entirely taken the place of previously established patterns.

Phase One: Colonization

The earliest European urbandevelopment was characterized by imperial (French and British) control over location, function and growth. Québec City, Montréal, Halifax and St John's tended to be administrative or military centres. Economically, they were collection points for colonial resources and distribution centres for manufactured goods from the mother country. There were few significant connections with other towns in the colonial Canada: their primary relationship was with Paris or London.

Phase Two: Early 19th Century

A second phase began in the early 1800s, marked by increasing control by locally based commercial interests over development. Exclusive reliance on resource exports such as lumber and fur was reduced, giving way to a new emphasis on artisanal production for local or regional markets. Some cities began to assume metropolitan functions, dominating their immediate region. New transportation technologies came into use, notably steam-powered shipping, railways and production equipment in factories and workshops. Banking, postal, stage coach and other connections among settlements increased.

The form of cities also changed as imperial direction became less important. Land surveys and related town plans promoted more orderly development. Transportation routes and the provision of water and sewer services began to determine the long-term direction of development. Functions of cities began to be sorted into residential, commercial and industrial categories, and also along class and ethnic lines.

Phase Three: Turn of the 20th Century

The third phase began in the late 1870s, with industrial expansion prompted by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald's National Policy and settlement of the West. This lasted until the late 1920s and saw the development of a Canada-wide urban system linked by rail, telegraph, canal, post office and telephone systems. New Western cities began to arise. However, economic power was concentrated in central Canadian cities, notably Montréal and Toronto. More fully developed industrial capitalism and its counterpart, the industrial working class, emerged. National politics began to be shaped by conflicts between these two groups, as demonstrated by the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

Urban development depended more than ever on major improvements in technological capacities. Science and engineering were systematically applied to transportation, telecommunications, building methods and production. Rapid expansion of suburbs along streetcar lines was combined with tall office towers in the central core. All aspects of urbanization became larger: size of suburbs; heights of downtown buildings; and organization of business enterprises accompanied by enormous factories. Land use was increasingly specialized. Zoning systems were adapted from those applied in the United States and Great Britain, beginning most actively in the late 1920s.

Phase Four: Second World War

A fourth era of development began during the Second World War with industrial mobilization for defence production during the 1940s. This extended into the 1970s. The new "corporate" urban era was characterized by expanded use of automobiles and trucks, displacing streetcar and railway transportation respectively. Urban economies shifted from a base dominated by manufacturing to one increasingly reliant on providing services. Decentralization of both population and economic activities began in earnest.

Canada's population grew rapidly owing to a flood of immigrants and a domestic " baby boom " after the war. Comprehensively planned suburbs were developed by the private sector; modestly appointed high-rise apartments were built in the core and along transit lines; suburban industrial parks were established; even higher downtown office towers became the norm; and regional shopping centres supported and encouraged suburban expansion.

Phase Five: 1970s and 1980s

By the late 1970s, a fifth era in urbanization was identifiable. Populations of the old urban core areas levelled off or even declined. Suburbs and areas around the periphery of cities expanded considerably. Long-established cities, previously attractive to rural migrants, began losing population to "ex-urban" areas. In contrast to the United States, however, the Canadian shift to the suburbs was not as much motivated by ethnic or racial factors. Medium-sized cities and their suburbs grew as well as larger urban centres. Changes to national policies on unemployment insurance helped population centres in previously declining areas of the country to carry on. Nevertheless, the proportion of employment in farming continued to decline.

Also in the 1980s, larger municipalities annexed adjoining lands and municipalities to increase their tax base. For example, Edmonton's land area was effectively doubled through annexation, a process which added approximately 100,000 new residents to the city's population by 1986.

Phase Six: Turn of the 21st Century

After the 1980s, a sixth era began to take shape. The percentage of Canada's population living in urban areas stabilized at around 80 per cent. The population as a whole aged. Natural increase slowed effectively to zero net growth. High immigration levels to Toronto and Vancouver in particular fuelled these cities' expansion, increasing their cultural and ethnic diversity. Retirement and leisure communities began to boom across the country. Larger metropolitan communities continued to grow. Populations of many smaller urban places declined, except in metropolitan commuter-sheds and attractive leisure areas.

Decentralization continues as outer suburbs attract new industry and grow more rapidly than central areas. At the same time, however, new downtowns are being developed or expanded in larger urbanized regions. Examples of this trend include: Burnaby in Metro Vancouver; Mississauga town centre and Markham town centre in Greater Toronto; and Laval in Metropolitan Montréal. These trends all contribute to multi-centred urban regions becoming the norm.

There continue to be very densely populated cores, dominated by some of the tallest structures in the world. These are inhabited by large numbers of financial and other service workers in cities globally connected via the Internet and cellphone systems.

Canada's cities have always had international links, initially focused on Europe. Many are now connected not only with their rural neighbours, but also with urban counterparts around the world. For example: the London and Shanghai financial markets; Hollywood and Mumbai entertainment complexes; Russian and Kazakh oil businesses; Latin American and Australian mining ventures.

Successes and Challenges

Canada's urbanization has demonstrated both successes and ongoing challenges. Chief among to manage expansion and promote sustainable development. For example, to accommodate growth, cities must invest in infrastructure while at the same time preserving green space and preventing air, water and land pollution. A solution is to concentrate development near existing neighbourhoods, which increases density and limits sprawl. However, land prices rise as a result, making property ownership difficult for many middle- to lower-income individuals and families.

Urbanization also poses a challenge for rural areas as their population and economic opportunities decrease.

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Urbanization is a complex process in which a country's population centres tend to become larger, more specialized and more interdependent over time. Urbanization is a complex process in which a country's population centres tend to become larger, more specialized and more interdependent over time. It arises from interacting economic, social, technological, demographic, political and environmental changes.

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Despite its huge area, Canada has relatively little dependable farmland. Good soil and a friendly climate are hard to find. So it seems like good news that on a clear day you can see about half the best agricultural land in Canada from the top of Toronto's CN Tower. If we're to feed our growing urban populations, having food lands close to where people live will be critical to sustaining local food security.

Some regions of the country, like the Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto, have been blessed with an abundance of Class 1 soils. But an increasing proportion of the best soils in the Golden Horseshoe and in most urbanized regions of Canada now lie beneath sprawling housing developments, highways, strip malls and other infrastructure. As urban communities have grown over the years, agricultural lands and natural areas have far too often been drained, dug up and paved over.

As urban communities have grown over the years, agricultural lands and natural areas have far too often been drained, dug up and paved over. (John Overmyer / NewsArt)

According to a study by Statistics Canada, our growing cities sprawl over what once was mostly farmland. Only 5 per cent of Canada's entire land base is suitable for growing food. At the same time, urban uses have consumed more than 7,400 square kilometres of dependable farmland in recent decades. That's an area almost three times the size of Prince Edward Island.

Almost half of Canada's urban base now occupies land that only a few generations ago was being farmed. For the most part, this land can't be used for agriculture again, despite efforts of city people to use community gardens, green roofs and even guerrilla gardening to grow food.

Though there are strong sprawl-busting policies in provinces such as Ontario, with its internationally renowned Greenbelt Act and Greater Golden Horseshoe Growth Plan, prime farmland and rare ecosystems in the region, like wetlands, remain at risk from further urban development.

A recent study by the David Suzuki Foundation examined threats to farmland in a 94,000-hectare patchwork of farms, forests and wetlands circling Toronto and its surrounding suburbs, called the Whitebelt Study Area. The report warns that this productive mosaic of green space and rich farmland is at risk from the blistering pace of urban expansion in the Golden Horseshoe.

Municipalities there have proposed developing more than 10,000 hectares of the Whitebelt over the next three decades. This is in addition to 52,000 hectares of land the province had already approved for development before new policies to curb urban sprawl came into effect. Together, these lands are more than twice the area of the city of Mississauga.

Paving over remaining prime farmland and natural assets like wetlands is foolhardy. Studies show that near-urban croplands and farms in the Golden Horseshoe contribute billions of dollars in revenue to local economies each year, from a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, dairy and award-winning wines.

And as the Foundation report shows, near-urban farmland and green space also represents a Fort Knox of additional natural benefits that we typically take for granted: trees clean the air, wetlands filter water and rich productive farmland soils store greenhouse gases.

Today, Ontario's towns and cities are at a crossroads. Down one path is continued low-density, creeping urban expansion. We know how this well-worn route looks: endless pavement, long commutes and traffic jams, not to mention the high social and ecological costs associated with such a wasteful form of urban design. Simply put, continued sprawl threatens the health and well-being of our communities and the ecosystems that sustain us.

In the other direction is an extraordinary new path: ending sprawl using the principles of smart growth and creating compact, higher-density communities serviced by public transit, bike paths and walking trails, and surrounded by local greenbelts of protected farmland and green space.

Our political leaders should seize this opportunity. While industry and developers will continue to pressure us to sacrifice our cultural and ecological heritage, together we much embark on a visionary path. We must protect near-urban nature and farmland and ensure the health and well-being of all Ontarians.

If we value local food and want to maintain the critical benefits that nature provides, we must put food and water first. That's why we're calling on municipalities and provincial governments to redouble their efforts to protect our remaining farmland and green space from costly and polluting urban sprawl.

You can join the conversation on Twitter at #FoodAndWaterFirst.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Ontario Director Faisal Moola.

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Urban sprawl is destroying Ontario's farmland | The Star

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Despite its huge area, Canada has relatively little dependable farmland. Good soil and a friendly climate are hard to find. So it seems like good news that on a clear day you can see about half the best agricultural land in Canada from the top of Toronto's CN Tower.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/urban-sprawl/

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http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/causes-and-effects-of-urban-sprawl.php

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http://mirror.unhabitat.org/documents/SOWC10/R4.pdf

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Canadians must really like each other. Although we live in one of the world's largest countries with an endless horizon of space, we choose to live right next to each other in our cities. Over 80% of us now live in urban areas. As our cities grow bigger, urban sprawl is beginning to affect our quality of life.

The most obvious problem is that sprawl leads to a car-dependent culture-and driving is stressful for drivers and for nature. More traffic, more carbon emissions, more smog! But sprawl isn't inevitable. It is often the result of poor planning and short-sightedness.

Sprawl affects us in surprising ways-like draining our precious free time and expanding our waistlines. A commuter who drives just one hour each day spends the equivalent of nine working weeks a year in a car. Researchers have found that people living in sprawling suburbs spend less time walking and weigh up to six pounds more than those living in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.

Urban sprawl is cutting into precious farm and wildlands, leaving us with less greenspace and precious wildlands, like bogs, which are being drained and paved over, putting valuable wildlife habitat and species at risk.

Okay, so you know sprawl is bad news for your health and for nature, so what can we do about it? As it turns out, quite a lot.

If you are moving, choose a home that is within a 30-minute walk, bike or transit ride from work, school or shopping. If you are not moving, try to get out of your car more and help reduce the many problems associated with being car-dependent.

Learn more about what is going on your community: listen to the radio and read the local newspapers. Most cities in Canada are faced with a range of urban sprawl issues - road expansion, poor transit, new shopping malls and mega-stores, new suburban development, and stresses on existing water and sewage facilities. You can't get involved if you don't know what's going on.

Take your concerns to the next level. Contact your city planning department and convey your concerns and ideas. Talk to your mayor or city councilor about strengthening the best qualities of your city and redirecting plans to build out.

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Discourage urban sprawl - David Suzuki Foundation

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Canadians must really like each other. Although we live in one of the world's largest countries with an endless horizon of space, we choose to live right next to each other in our cities. Over 80% of us now live in urban areas. As our cities grow bigger, urban sprawl is beginning to affect our ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Despite its huge area, Canada has relatively little dependable farmland. Good soil and a friendly climate are hard to find. So it seems like good news that on a clear day you can see about half the best agricultural land in Canada from the top of Toronto's CN Tower. If we're to feed our growing urban populations, having food lands close to where people live will be critical to sustaining local food security.

Some regions of the country, like the Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto, have been blessed with an abundance of Class 1 soils. But an increasing proportion of the best soils in the Golden Horseshoe and in most urbanized regions of Canada now lie beneath sprawling housing developments, highways, strip malls and other infrastructure. As urban communities have grown over the years, agricultural lands and natural areas have far too often been drained, dug up and paved over.

As urban communities have grown over the years, agricultural lands and natural areas have far too often been drained, dug up and paved over. (John Overmyer / NewsArt)

According to a study by Statistics Canada, our growing cities sprawl over what once was mostly farmland. Only 5 per cent of Canada's entire land base is suitable for growing food. At the same time, urban uses have consumed more than 7,400 square kilometres of dependable farmland in recent decades. That's an area almost three times the size of Prince Edward Island.

Almost half of Canada's urban base now occupies land that only a few generations ago was being farmed. For the most part, this land can't be used for agriculture again, despite efforts of city people to use community gardens, green roofs and even guerrilla gardening to grow food.

Though there are strong sprawl-busting policies in provinces such as Ontario, with its internationally renowned Greenbelt Act and Greater Golden Horseshoe Growth Plan, prime farmland and rare ecosystems in the region, like wetlands, remain at risk from further urban development.

A recent study by the David Suzuki Foundation examined threats to farmland in a 94,000-hectare patchwork of farms, forests and wetlands circling Toronto and its surrounding suburbs, called the Whitebelt Study Area. The report warns that this productive mosaic of green space and rich farmland is at risk from the blistering pace of urban expansion in the Golden Horseshoe.

Municipalities there have proposed developing more than 10,000 hectares of the Whitebelt over the next three decades. This is in addition to 52,000 hectares of land the province had already approved for development before new policies to curb urban sprawl came into effect. Together, these lands are more than twice the area of the city of Mississauga.

Paving over remaining prime farmland and natural assets like wetlands is foolhardy. Studies show that near-urban croplands and farms in the Golden Horseshoe contribute billions of dollars in revenue to local economies each year, from a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, dairy and award-winning wines.

And as the Foundation report shows, near-urban farmland and green space also represents a Fort Knox of additional natural benefits that we typically take for granted: trees clean the air, wetlands filter water and rich productive farmland soils store greenhouse gases.

Today, Ontario's towns and cities are at a crossroads. Down one path is continued low-density, creeping urban expansion. We know how this well-worn route looks: endless pavement, long commutes and traffic jams, not to mention the high social and ecological costs associated with such a wasteful form of urban design. Simply put, continued sprawl threatens the health and well-being of our communities and the ecosystems that sustain us.

In the other direction is an extraordinary new path: ending sprawl using the principles of smart growth and creating compact, higher-density communities serviced by public transit, bike paths and walking trails, and surrounded by local greenbelts of protected farmland and green space.

Our political leaders should seize this opportunity. While industry and developers will continue to pressure us to sacrifice our cultural and ecological heritage, together we much embark on a visionary path. We must protect near-urban nature and farmland and ensure the health and well-being of all Ontarians.

If we value local food and want to maintain the critical benefits that nature provides, we must put food and water first. That's why we're calling on municipalities and provincial governments to redouble their efforts to protect our remaining farmland and green space from costly and polluting urban sprawl.

You can join the conversation on Twitter at #FoodAndWaterFirst.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Ontario Director Faisal Moola.

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Urban sprawl is destroying Ontario's farmland | The Star

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite its huge area, Canada has relatively little dependable farmland. Good soil and a friendly climate are hard to find. So it seems like good news that on a clear day you can see about half the best agricultural land in Canada from the top of Toronto's CN Tower.

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http://www.davidsuzuki.org/what-you-can-do/reduce-your-carbon-footprint/discourage-urban-sprawl/

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takes away farmland and other big areas of land that could be used for finding resources. also it could be other animals habitats, some examples of places with urban sprawl are: Boston, new york and toronto these are some places where there is major urban sprawl and it will soon become a problem for them in the  future

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takes away farmland and other big areas of land that could be used for finding resources. also it could be other animals habitats, some examples of places with urban sprawl are: Boston, new york and toronto these are some places where there is major urban sprawl and it will soon become a problem for them in the  future