The global demographic trend of population ageing presents a challenge for government institutions, urban planners, policy makers and community organizations. Concurrently, ageing in place has emerged in planning discourse, with the potential to support cities in becoming age-friendly environments. This thesis poses the research question: to what extent and how can cities experiencing population ageing use ageing in place as a conceptual planning and policy tool to create the conditions for older adults to age in place successfully? The literature review finds five dichotomies, offering analytical frameworks for the case studies of Windsor, Canada and Brescia, Italy. The case studies describe the existing conditions for ageing in place at three spatial scales: the internal and external characteristics of the home, and the neighbourhood, considering both private owned homes and social housing. The research question is answered in a six-part proposal for ageing in place programs in care, the home and ICT: the Continuum of Care, Neighbourhoods of Care, Green Retrofitting, Adaptable Homes Modifications, Alternative Housing Typologies, and Telemedicine and Social Calls. These proposals offer a framework for cities to implement ageing in place policies according to their unique contexts, and highlight the role of older residents as important community resources.

Guiding Urban Forestry Policy into the Next Decade: A Private Tree Protection & Management Toolkit

This presentation will introduce a toolkit that explores tree protection and management in mid-size municipalities. It identifies bylaws, programs and strategies being used to protect trees on private property, and includes specific Ontario case studies highlighting the successes and challenges of different approaches. 

Why Embodied Carbon Matters to Planners

This presentation will explain what material carbon emissions are, why they matter to planners, what barriers exist to integrating their consideration into planning processes, and what actions planners can take to reduce them. It will use the City of Nelson and its work to reduce material carbon emissions as a case study for how planners can help reduce consumption-based emissions. While there is no panacea, we aim to offer planning professionals insight into work currently being done on this topic, and inspiration on how to tackle the overwhelming task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Many local governments have adopted the BC Energy Step Code and developed climate plans with ambitious GHG emission reduction targets. At the same time, these local governments may also have policies and bylaws that do not support, and in some cases inhibit, construction of low carbon buildings. The Low Carbon Building Policy Toolkit was developed to help local governments remove barriers and make it easier to build low-carbon, high-performance buildings in their communities. In this session, toolkit authors Devon Miller and Brendan McEwen will provide an overview of the toolkit, and how it can be used by local governments seeking to remove barriers to the uptake of low carbon buildings in their communities.

This session will look into some of the latest tools planners and architects are using to assess the human experience of the built environment. Car and technology companies have long been using these tools to help market their products; now planners can use them to understand the human experience of the built environment and how human perception is relational, meant for one-on-one interaction. They can help to create safer and healthier places and spaces for people. This session will present studies using mobile eye-tracking and galvanic skin response (GSR) monitors to reveal how the nervous system acts subliminally, directing our behaviour without conscious awareness or control. Participants will gain understanding of essential human biology and learn how we can track and record hidden behaviours that lay the foundation for the experience of place.

According to Revenue Canada, the United Church of Canada and the National Trust for Canada, close to 10,000 of Canada’s 28,000 church buildings will close in the next ten years. The Trinity Centres Foundation was established in 2018 as a pan-Canadian charitable organization with the goal of restoring and repurposing underutilized churches across Canada. TCF is creating dynamic new community hubs for various neighbourhood uses, applying a new social business model that generates both societal and economic value. The Foundation is committed to enabling churches to bring about positive change while maintaining a secure financial future. In the process, they are finding innovative ways to deliver services, advance social inclusion and revitalize communities and local neighbourhoods. With case studies from Montreal, Calgary and Kitchener Ontario, this presentation will explore the TCF model of: • Assembling community hubs in churches across Canada • Creating a Diversified Impact Investment Fund • Creating a shared services operating model.

This presentation will discuss BC’s response to COVID-19 for people experiencing homelessness and women and children fleeing violence. We will share data demonstrating the pandemic’s impact and outcomes for the emergency shelter and transition house sectors in BC and the effects on the people they serve. The presentation will discuss how the information collected from emergency shelter and transition house providers informs BC Housing’s planning and decision-making during the pandemic, and its usefulness for future pandemic and emergency planning.

The City of Laval is the second-largest city in the Greater Montreal area, the third largest in Quebec and an archetypical suburb. The land use bylaw in application since 1970 had never been fully revised and multiple amendments have changed it to Kafkaesque proportions. In 2021, the city adopted the draft of the Code de l’urbanisme (CDU), a new form-based code, which had never been done at this scale so far in Canada. A rigorous process was put in place to prepare this serious change and to allow innovation. Preliminary studies were done for months early in the project. In 2019, the city launched a comprehensive communication and consultation. Over three years, several tools were developed in that respect, such as a virtual open house as well as virtual public hearings. A continuous attention was also given to the transition within the city departments to make sure people were both made aware of what was coming and guided during the process. Recognizing the opportunity, the city wanted to distance itself from Euclidian zoning by regulating the urban development with a form-based code. The CDU represents a major shift in the way the city views and regulates its territory. Inspired by some of the best North American examples, the CDU is based on a transect. It thus applies this ecological concept of a spectrum of natural environments and their symbiotic elements to human habitats.

Urban planning has evolved as a settler-colonial project and tool of White supremacy that has resulted in the systemic marginalization and exclusion of Black Indigenous and People of Colour communities. From the planning classroom to planning practice, it has become imperative for practitioners, future planners, and scholars to adopt anti-racist agendas and rethink how to facilitate system-wide transformation for Canadian cities. We will discuss our academic research, teaching, and professional practices associated with diversity and cities to interrogate how to bring planning forward and create inclusive and equitable cities. Topics including but not limited to public space, urban health, environmental justice, immigrant settlement and integration, and community engagement will be addressed. We call for a system-wide transformation taking a multi-scalar approach, critically reflecting on components of change at the personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. A national-level task force for strategic collaboration and a coordinated shift toward the profession’s anti-racist future is recommended.