Canada's Environmental Voice
Always eager to learn more about community engagement, A\J attended the Sustainable Neighbourhoods Summit presented by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) at Evergreen Brick Works. The summit began by featuring neighbourhood initiatives within the Golden Horseshoe that are tackling community-scale sustainability issues.
I imagine the authors of the seminal work “Limits to Growth” are squirming somewhere as they see UK’s greenbelts threatened. The ‘development related’ threats became a hot topic in late 2012, and while the debate appears dormant in the news at the moment, I suspect it will resurface when updates on […]
This month’s Greenbelts issue was still hot off the press when A\J was once again reminded of the need to actively protect our green spaces. While we were assembling the issue in late January, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), the provincial adjudicative tribunal for municipal and planning issues, ruled in favour […]
AFTER THE PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT CREATED THE ONTARIO GREENBELT IN 2005, an unforeseen land-buying frenzy began just beyond its borders. Developers, land bankers and their offshore investors have since bought up thousands of hectares of farmland in the counties of Brant, Simcoe, Niagara and Wellington.
ON A CRISP SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Lorrie Rand savours a lunch of baked arctic char and roasted carrots while she chats with friends and neighbours. Not far away, a father and son test steaming rice-stuffed squash and decide that it’s done to perfection. Dave Courtney, meanwhile, nudges glowing coals into a […]
HERE ARE JUST FOUR of the many ways in which greenbelts can be used to the advantage of nearby cities.
From the lookout at the top of Mount Royal, you can see how the city rolls out upon the great plain of the St. Lawrence Valley. In the foreground are the tightly knit neighbourhoods and narrow streets that make Montreal so liveable, the historic McGill campus and the city’s distinctive […]
It’s been said that every migrant to a mountain town idealizes that town in exactly the form it existed in on the day they arrived. In The Weekender Effect, Canmore, Alberta-based author and water use expert Robert Sandford suffers from a severe case of this particular nostalgia.
Eager A\J interns (and aspiring urban planners) attended Arriscraft Lecture Series at the School of Architecture at Waterloo along with students and other community members to listen to Toronto’s newly minted chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, discuss the best practices in city building and why urbanism truly matters.
MORE THAN A SET of scientifically based conditions for a sustainable society, the Natural Step Framework has been the foundation for hundreds of innovative sustainability programs around the world.
