Urban Development Planning

FOCUS AREA ADVISING GUIDELINE

Permanent Faculty: Stephanie Chang, Larry Frank, Tom Hutton

Adjunct Faculty (2011-12): Larry Beasley, Michael Gordon, Jay Wollenberg, Ann McAfee

Since the early 20th century planning for cities has emphasized the regulatory dimension of policy, focusing on planning for growth via a suite of development control, growth management and spatial planning policies. In the early years of the 21st century, urban planners among advanced and transitional societies are encountering a more complex array of issues associated with the growth and change of city-regions and urban communities, responding to new development factors and interdependencies, and engaging with new urban theory and innovative planning concepts. More specifically, urban planners are engaged in policy innovation associated with sustainable development as paradigm for integrating economic, social, cultural and environmental imperatives within the urban realm. SCARP’s UDP focus offers courses and associated learning opportunities designed to equip masters students with the requisite knowledge, skills and practice-based experience for progressive urban development planning.

Trajectories of urban development reflect both continuities and discontinuities, the former seen in (for example) the influence of global processes, demographic factors, industrial restructuring episodes, and the flows of population and jobs to suburban and exurban areas. At the same time, important contrasts in urban scale, environmental and amenity factors, and in the mix of policies and planning approaches (among other contingencies) have shaped quite divergent (and increasingly complex) outcomes for cities. The period of ‘transcendant’ or universalizing urban theory characteristic of the post-industrial era has given way to what some have depicted as the chaotic, centreless patterns of postmodernism, while others have identified new logics of location and development derived from the rise of the technology-intensive ‘New Economy’, and the ‘new urban cultural economy’ and associated ‘creative class’. International immigration constitutes an increasingly salient feature of change in housing, labour and land markets. The emergence of ethnically-diverse multicultural cities has also stimulated ‘transnational urbanism’ as a generative process of urban growth and change in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and European cities. Transnational cities represent sites of cultural co-production and transmission within diverse, heterogenic urban communities such as Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and Sydney, influencing the planning of new urban landscapes and the built environment. New patterns of demand for urban land use have also reconfigured the economics and financial conditions of real estate and development in high-growth, globalizing cities in Canada and elsewhere.

Some ascribe primacy in the shaping of urban development to the market, globalization processes, and social dynamics. But it is clear that the quality of policy constitutes both a variable of urban change (exemplified by local transportation, infrastructure and heritage policies which in part influence investment decisions, business start-ups and residential development), as well as a mediating factor in the nature of outcomes of urban growth and change experienced as the level of the community, neighbourhood, household and individuals (illustrated by the array of social and community planning models deployed in Canadian cities and elsewhere, and positioned as a focus of SCARP’s Community Development and Social Planning.

The emphasis on teaching and learning within SCARP’s UDP focus is on an interpretation of planning as an agency of progressive growth and change in the city and among urban communities, and includes instruction on theory and practice in planning for labour and housing markets; urban structure and land use; and transportation and infrastructural development. While specialized knowledge concerning each of these important policy fields is included within constituent course offerings, there is also a clear focus on a demonstration of the linkages, interdependencies and spillovers between and among each. At the same time, the principle of ‘best practice’ in urban development also requires a systematic and rigorous consideration of critical relationships between urban economic development, society and the natural environment, consistent with the tenets of sustainable development acknowledged as the defining mission and motif of the UBC School of Community & Regional Planning.

Some illustrative concepts and terminology which structure discourse and instruction within course offerings of SCARP’s UDP focus include:

The centrality of planning for transportation infrastructure and systems, exemplified by Cervero’s ‘transit metropolis’, and Calthorpe’s ‘regional city’ notions;
Policies for achieving ‘compact’ and ‘complete’ urban communities, linking transport planning, land use and zoning, employment, housing and service provision;
Policies for responding to the imperatives of industrial restructuring (major shifts in the composition of industries, firms, and divisions of labour), including innovations in planning for the ‘creative metropolis’ identified as an important trajectory of development for cities;
Innovative methodologies and techniques for evaluating the projected benefits and costs of capital projects, in an era of increasing pressure on public finance, and growing interest in new financing arrangements;
Planning for disaster preparedness, in view of the apparently growing exposure of city regions and urban communities to natural and man-made disasters; and
Learning from the successful experience of consultative and expert planning experiences from Vancouver and other internationally-acknowledged exemplars of progressive planning.

SCARP COURSES IN UBAN DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

PLAN 548D Affordable Housing Policy & Planning (Eberle)

PLAN 548K Planning for Disaster Resilient Communities (Chang)

PLAN 548M Strategic Planning (McAfee)

PLAN 548P Practical Practice: City Planning as a Craft (Beasley)

PLAN 561 Urban Development Market and Financial Analysis (Wollenberg)

PLAN 583 Housing Policy (Gordon)

PLAN 592 Structural Change and the City (Hutton)