More ideas from the last four days of the World Urban Forum in Vancouver...Click the "read more" link above to see the entire post.

Regional planning from Toronto

An audacious — and politically popular — regional plan is coming out of the Toronto region. It can be a model for how other regions of North American can approach growth and conservation in a comprehensive manner.

First, they did a regional Greenbelt Plan, which protects 1.8 million acres of environmentally sensitive land, water resources, and important agricultural areas. Then, they did the Places to Grow plan, which will curb suburban sprawl by intensifying new develop in existing cities and town centers (thus reducing demands for new infrastructure, improving transportation and housing choices, and protecting air quality).

Together, they represent the Province of Ontario's commitment to more sustainable patterns of urban development in Canada's most populous region. If it had the political will, Ohio could do something similar to help Northeast Ohio.

Redeveloping Toronto's waterfront

Another Toronto project for Clevelanders to pay attention to is the West Don Lands redevelopment. It has a lot of parallels to the Flats East Bank project.

The West Don Lands are an 80-acre former brownfield site on the Toronto waterfront. Plans call for 5,800 of housing units (1,200 of which will be affordable rental housing), a million square feet of employment space, and other facilities that will make a complete community, such as a school, recreation center, and child care centers.

The master developer is the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC), an independent entity created by the federal, provincial and city governments. The TWRC worked with community groups to develop a long-term vision for the site (workshops included computer simulations so people could "fly through" the site and imagine what alternative designs would be like) and then developed a sustainability framework to guide the development. The goal is to create one of the most sustainable communities in the world as a new symbol for Toronto.

Environmentally friendly features will include:

• Buildings required to be meet the LEED Gold standard for green builidng.
• Twenty percent of the site will be parks and public spaces.
• All housing will be within a five-minute walk of transit.
• A mix of housing, shopping, workplaces, and other uses will create a complete neighborhood where resident's needs are met in a walkable environment.
• Efficient district heating system.
• Stormwater management.

The project has a number of lessons for Northeast Ohio. To get it done, there had to be a powerful but nongovernmental development entity serving the public interest and capable of managing a large-scale development. And the quality of the development will be driven by principles of sustainability set at the outset. 

Bogatá resists the car

"Transportation is the only problem that gets worse as you get richer," Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogatá, Columbia, said today at the World Urban Forum. Other conditions, such as sanitation and health care, improve. But, as people can afford more cars, cities become clogged with traffic, more polluted, and more dangerous for pedestrians.

That's why Peñalosa actively discouraged automobile use as mayor. Instead of building highways to benefit a minority of Columbians with cars, he invested scarce public resources in better sidewalks, bikeways, transit, parks, schools, and libraries — democratic amenities that could be used by everyone. He also staged "Car Free Days" on which all auto driving was banned.

"The possibility to walk around your city is the least a democracy should provide," he said. "A good sidewalk is a signal that people are equal to those with cars."

He also noted that, while he was motivated by a sense of social justice, policies to reclaim cities from auto dependence are also good for the environment and sustainability in general.

70 actions

Leading up to the World Urban Forum, UN HABITAT organized an online "Habitat JAM" to gather ideas from tens of thousands of people around the world. Go here to see an interesting summary of 70 actionable ideas for developing sustainable cities.

And coming soon...why planning for sustainable energy needs to be linked to land use.