Sustainable Urbanism In The City Of Toronto

New Urbanism refers to an architectural style developed in the United States around the twentieth century. It may also be addressed as Neotraditional town planning. This style focuses on laying emphasis on the need for walkable neighbourhoods, complexes infused with pedestrian walkways, concentration of civic, institutional and commercial activity and designs that cater to the masses, be it of any age, financial or religious category.

Urban sustainability is the idea that an urban area can be organised without excessive reliance on the surrounding countryside and be able to power itself with renewable sources of energy. The aim of this is to create the smallest possible environmental footprint and to produce the lowest quantity of pollution possible, to efficiently use land, compost used materials, recycle it or convert waste-to-energy, and to make the urban area overall contribution to climate change minimal. Therefore allowing the next generations and future generations to have the required resources without compromising them. However sustainably needs to focus also on other issues such as crime and economic factors.

It has attracted many who are looking for work and a factor of a new exciting way of living. For young men from the rural areas the big cities seemed to offer unlimited job, the ability to enjoy new modern technology such as electricity, transportation, and the telephone. A popular magazine of the era pointed out “The towns are being recruited by those too poor to be able to live in the country as well as by those too rich to be willing to live there”.

Making a sustainble city of tommorrow requires extensive city planning. Urban cities in Canada are making strides to create large metropolitan areas more environmentally friendly by using the latest green technologies and strategies. With comittment and time, all Canadian cities can implemet methods that will create livable cities for future generations.

The city that in 2010 hosted the Winter Olympics has adopted sustainability as a slogan and took seriously the idea: the medals given to athletes were made of metal debris thrown away. But not only that. The concept of sustainability is present in Vancouver for a long time - 90% of the city's energy is produced by waves, wind, solar and hydropower.

Criticizing contemporary urban policies that ignored the needs of most city-dwellers and destroyed the nature of cities, Jane Jacobs (1961) wrote four parts in this book, which respectively are ”the peculiar nature of cities”, “the conditions for city diversity”, “forces of decline and regeneration” and “different tactics”. Among four parts, the part of “the conditions for city diversity” has the most far-reaching influence, and it is also the most important thought in the book. Thus this report is mainly concerning the illustration of this part. I will give not only the demonstration of what Jane Jacobs says about, but also my opinion on this chapter with examples.

A sustainable city is when harmony is reached between the environment, economy and society. Environmentally, sustainable cities are ecologically friendly by using alternative sources of energy such as solar or wind power. Economically, governments should share a similar decision-making process with institutions and with the public by having a common belief in what should be done by improving sustainability. Sorensen, Marcotullio, and Grant (2004), find that a good decision making process consists of planning and control at the municipal and national political levels which would allow local level functions to become reinforced. Socially, sustainable cities are classless, meaning that there are no social divisions which serve as limits; leading to a more equal society. One of the many ideas would be using mixed housing to remove the class divisions between people. Also, city streets would be walkable, with businesses and services located at close proximity to promote a healthier lifestyle and serve as an alternative to using cars for transportation. The writers differ in their analysis when examining the approaches to improving sustainability in cities. This section will analyze four important ideas on how cities can become more sustainable.

New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,

This paper examines the theoretical aspects of urban planning. It also discusses what lessons professional planners can learn during the process, and what the conflicts between planners and citizens may be.

The garden city idea emerged during a time when countries were beginning to urbanize (15% of the world’s population were urban, a rapidly growing figure). There, the living and working environments were squalid and the working

The complex processes of urbanisation overarches and entails a set of social, cultural, economic, political, environmental and technological functions that result in sprawl and densities, proportional to core size and settlement. Further implicating the extensive use of natural resources from fringes and rural spheres within city limits to be consumed and then later in turn converted into waste. Urban ecosystems are therefore, complex multifaceted systems that require a burdensome amount of natural resources input and negotiations for their adequate development. In urban discourse, the lack of interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary interest partly due to an absence of tools to which all disciplines can use to further incorporate ecological theories to assessment and planning of urban centers. All these connections have been made and academics have divided the complex concept into biophysical processes and socioeconomic processes when examining cities in case studies. The urban ecology theory and a closely related concept of urban metabolism can explain the technical aspects of urban density and growth but human influences are not accounted for in the assessment. However, human scholarship is a key component that shapes the metabolic processes in urban ecologies and in turn alters the initial footprint.

In this book Lynch defines that performance of the city can be measured by reference to its spatial form. But the quality of a place is depends upon combined effect of place and the society which occupies that place. Here Lynch sets up new dimensions for performance in his own criteria. Author also expresses his approach on size of the city, conservation and growth, planning practices and utopian models. The dimensions which are demonstrated in this book may not be fully perfect but of course they combine all social values as well as physical values. Lynch believed that these described dimensions must cover all features of all forms of the settlements and all these dimensions should be usable where values are different.

Around 1910, the idea of garden city began to be emphasized and developed. There are planners started to rework Howard’s idea of decentralizing social city into accommodate metropolitan growth in partially self-contained satellites towns (Ward,1992). These cities would be physically distinct, with extensive

　　　We all know the urbanization rate is an index to value the development of a country. However, though urbanization provides great convenience to some individuals, it also brings about negative effects. Problems such as pollution, overcrowded and the high unemployment appear during the process of urbanization and they are hard to cope with. In face of the sequence of problems, a new way of development ----sustainable development was put forward. Just like its literal meaning, the word sustainability has something to do with continuity. It was used since 1980s and first appeared in Britain law in 1993. Sustainable development can help solve parts of the problem caused by

Urbanization, which is becoming a buzzword during the last few decades, is enlarging at a booming speed. It is predicted that 93 percents urban growth will occur to the year 2020, in the developing world (Elliot J.A, 1999). Generally speaking, more than half of the people around the world have been moved to cities, which led to a series of “matters” connected with people’s life that changed in a dramatical way. In this period, sustainable development, another buzzword during the past few years, came into people’s view and gradually became the mainstream of society development. Its definition is to make the development continue in a long term, which means allowing appropriate economic growth and industrialization without