Trends in Demand of Urban Surface Water Extractions and in Situ Use Functions

Scientific literature currently lacks comprehensive understanding of urban surface water use functions. This hampers sound analysis of the demand and potential supply of these functions. This study provides a comprehensive overview of potential use functions, by integrating knowledge from ecosystem services and integrated urban water...

Suburban Metabolism: Growth and Sustainability in the Greater Toronto Area

The issue of suburban sprawl in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTA) has been increasing the pressures of land consumption, infrastructure development, resource consumption, and population growth over the past 50 years. The same can be said for many peripheral regions of Canada’s urban areas. In 2011, two thirds of the population of...

Diversity and social cohesion: the case of Jane-Finch, a highly diverse lower-income Toronto neighbourhood

Diversity has increasingly emerged as the core focus of many studies concerning factors impacting on social cohesion. Various scholars have concluded that diversity is detrimental to cohesion. Most of this research, however, draws generalisations based upon quantitative data and fails to account for the impact of inequality, segregation and...

Living with diversity in Jane-Finch

In the past decades, diversity has become a popular catchphrase in theoretical, policy and public discourses in Canadian cities.<br/><br/>This study seeks to add to our understanding of urban diversity, as perceived and experienced by those who inhabit, frequent and govern urban areas. The study further makes use of a variety of qualitative and...

Serving diverse communities: The role of community initiatives in delivering services to poverty neighbourhoods

The recent decades have witnessed a shift from the traditional top-down model of service delivery led by the state to the provision and delivery of services by community organisations. This article explores the extent to which community initiatives in Jane-Finch, a highly diverse, lower income, inner-suburban neighborhoods of Toronto, were...

Creating 'spaces for diversity' from 'spaces of modernity': The case of the Jane-Finch neighbourhood, Toronto (Canada)

Modernist planning and urban development created a lot of residential space without consulting the people who would live in it. It was generally assumed that the professional planner was the best judge of the needs of the community and knew exactly how to meet these needs through physical design: open green space and high-rise, cheap-to-build...

Extending dialogue in a design competition? A participatory urban design competition on Toronto's Waterfront

Design competitions are often used to select design teams for high profile development projects, yet have received scant attention in the literature. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this paper presents a competition model that was employed on Toronto’s waterfront in 2006 for a large public realm project and describes how it was structured...