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The map of urban poverty and inequality in Canada is changing. Neighborhoods which have traditionally symbolized wealth and privilege still do - Toronto's Rosedale, for instance. And residents of Regent Park still have among the lowest incomes in any neighbourhood in Canada. But increasingly, the list of the poorest areas in the country includes neighborhoods in smaller cities such as Saint John and Winnipeg.
It's an important shift in the urban geography of Canada, and one that provides context for everything from urban planning to transportation design to housing and immigration policy, says Geography professor Larry Bourne, winner of the 2004 Massey Medal, the top honour given by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
Bourne began tracking neighbourhood income changes in Canadian cities in the 1970s, analyzing Toronto data from the 1951 census forward. More recently, he has studied the national data with Geography professor Alan Walks, of the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
In the 1950s, the median income in the richest neighbourhood in Toronto was about three times the median income in the poorest neighbourhood. By 1985, it was almost 14 times as high, and by 2001, incomes in Rosedale South were more than 19 times those in the poorest part of Toronto - Regent Park.
"The wealthy neighbourhoods got much wealthier and the poorest neighbourhoods became poorer," says Bourne. "But at least in the 1950s, the poorest neighbourhoods had incomes of about 50 or 60 per cent of the average for the entire metropolitan area. Now, it's 20 to 30 per cent."
The poorest Toronto neighbourhoods in the 1951 census were downtown but by 2001 many were in the older suburbs. "We've suburbanized poverty," says Bourne. "So a current map of poverty in Toronto picks up Flemingdon Park, parts of Scarborough, Jane/Finch, and Lawrence Heights. We've
moved it around largely by decisions on where we located public housing."
Polarization has increased at the national level as well, according to data from 4,000 census neighbourhoods across Canada. The richest neighbourhoods in 2001 were still in Toronto and Montreal but the list of the poorest by then included
areas in Saint John, Thunder Bay, Quebec City and Winnipeg - a major change from the 1981 census.
The average household income for one Saint John neighbourhood in 2001 was just 33 per cent of the average in Canada. In Rosedale South, it was 726 per cent of the average.
"In a sense, income is filtering up to the wealthy cities and into the wealthiest neighbourhoods," says Walks. "But poverty is filtering down to the poorest neighbourhoods, particularly in the smaller cities which are not growing as quickly."
In fact, there has been an increase in the number of Canadian cities which are stagnant or declining, according to an analysis of 2001 census data by Bourne and his colleague, professor emeritus Jim Simmons.
"Essentially, all of the growth is within five major city-regions and the rest of the country is undergoing fairly dramatic population decline," says Bourne. "Government strategy must recognize that many settlements in Canada are going to be smaller in the future, may not be sustainable and certainly can't provide high-quality services such as medical care."
The picture that has emerged of changes in the Canadian urban landscape is dramatic, says Bourne, who has produced groundbreaking work in this field for more than 40 years for U of T's Centre for Urban and Community Studies.
"It is clear governments will have to go beyond a New Deal on fiscal issues to meet the needs of both rapidly-growing cities which are gateways to immigrants, and communities where population and employment are falling," he says.
Walks is continuing the tradition of cutting-edge urban research at U of T by studying the links between political ideology and place. He is, for example, examining the effects of segregation, gated communities and different types of urban environments on residents' social and political attitudes.
"The way we build cities is important for shaping our social habits, our values, and our institutions. Some of the effects of the way we currently build cities may not be felt until years in the future. The challenge for Canada will be to grow in a way that is equitable and sustainable, not only in environmental or economic terms, but socially and politically as well."
Look around Ontario and you'll see that high density doesn't have to mean highrise, says George Baird.
In fact, there are some fine examples of attractive higher-density developments from the past, and some of them have gardens, says the dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
A case in point is the Garden Court apartment complex, built in the 1930s on Bayview Avenue in Toronto, says Baird. Its buff-brick, three-storey Art Deco buildings are essentially row-houses that are turned inward around gardens and away from the street.
It is useful to examine this kind of successful residential development at a time when the Ontario government has introduced a greenbelt plan to limit urban sprawl and is calling for an increase in density, says Robert Levit, director of the Master of Urban Design Program. "It's a balancing act. The garages at the Garden Court apartments are convenient but they're not at your door. On the other hand, all of the units have fronts and backs and look into extraordinary gardens."
"High density" makes most people think of condominium towers, Baird says. However, developers are already increasing residential densities without towers. "The lots are smaller, with fewer single-family detached houses, more townhousing and more semi-detached housing. But people don't actually think of this as being density, because they are still freehold houses with front and back yards."
There are plenty of opportunities to increase density by redeveloping industrial sites and strip malls. In Toronto, there is also potential to add housing to some of the most desirable neighbourhoods, he says.
Working with University of Toronto students, Baird first researched the potential of vacant lots in Toronto in the 1970s. In 2003, Professor Brigitte Shim led a course in architectural and urban design in the Faculty, which demonstrated once again the potential for intensification in the city.
The report from that course, Site Unseen, showed that - with some regulatory changes - some of the garages and toolsheds that line laneways in Toronto could be replaced with small houses or apartments.
Creative site planning may also help to achieve intensification, says Levit. With some innovation, it may be possible to put more housing units on sites than in the past and yet preserve the comfortable feeling that people get from having yards, he says.
Eric Miller wants to know what you're doing after work.
In fact, he wants to know what everyone in the Toronto area is doing before and after work, and more importantly, how they will get there.
It's part of the Civil Engineering professor's plan to design tools that will more accurately model travel demand in cities. The City of Toronto already uses a system that Miller developed a decade ago, which models rush-hour trips to work. However, his latest project - known as TASHA (the Travel/Activity Scheduler for Household Agents) - also takes into account trips to the daycare and the dentist, and from one shopping mall to another.
"TASHA is simulating a day in the life of the household. So, given that we know a family lives here and works there, goes to school over there and has two children, a dog, a cat and two cars, what are they going to do today?"
The goal is to develop sophisticated models that will tell policy-makers how people actually behave in the transportation system, says Miller, director of the Joint Program in Transportation at U of T and Bahen-Tanenbaum Professor.
To do this, TASHA is focusing on individual households and people, rather than groups, which were used in earlier modeling.
"You might have somebody who's driving to and from work, so you improve the transit system and they still don't take it. Why is that? Maybe it's because they have to take their child to daycare and you can't get to daycare by transit, or it's a major schlep."
A modeling system which takes into account all of a household's activities should make more sense of choices like this, Miller says, and help in analyzing transportation policies.
This "microsimulation" - which will be complete in a few months - will simulate the activities of about 100,000 households and the data will be scaled up to project travel demand for the five million or so people who live in the Toronto area and Hamilton.
It is part of an even more ambitious multi-year, multi-million-dollar project U of T is leading, known as ILUTE - the Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment modeling system - that will also use research from the University of Calgary, and Laval and McMaster Universities.
"ILUTE evolves the households over time. It simulates how the people will change residential locations and it simulates demographics - aging them, marrying some of them off, divorcing some, having some die, and hiring and firing them." With sufficient funding, this could be complete in two to five years, Miller says.
In keeping with his department's new focus on urban engineering, he is also developing a "best practice" travel demand modeling system for the Toronto area, with modeling methods that could be applied in any Canadian city.
"Worldwide production of oil is expected to peak in the next 10 or
15 years and, in 1996, Toronto-area residents were already spending 18 per cent of their income on transportation.
If we don't seriously rearrange how we organize ourselves in cities, I think we
are going to be in serious trouble."
Municipalities across the country are calling for more tax revenue. But there are unanticipated consequences with many types of tax and cities do not have the research they need to predict these consequences, says Enid Slack. As director of the University of Toronto's new Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, Slack plans to change that.
"The focus of the institute in the next few years will be on fiscal autonomy for large cities in Canada," says Slack, who was a municipal finance consultant and adjunct professor for 20 years before establishing the institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies in 2005.
Canadian cities depend on property taxes, transfers from other governments and user fees - sources that haven't changed in decades - but their responsibilities have changed substantially in response to offloading from federal and provincial governments and the need to be competitive, says Slack.
"The problem with the property tax is it's not elastic. The revenues don't grow as the economy grows, in the same way as income taxes do. It would be nice if cities had an elastic source of revenue that grows with the economy."
Many cities in the U.S. and Europe have access to more elastic revenue sources such as income and sales taxes. Revenues from these taxes go up or down with the economy. Slack and her team will look at the advantages and disadvantages of these kinds of taxes at the municipal level in Canada.
Municipalities may consider imposing a municipal sales tax, for example, to support services used by commuters, says Slack. "But one of the issues is if you have a sales tax in Toronto and not in the rest of the Greater Toronto Area, people are going to change their behaviour. So, do you allow local taxing authority? Do you make sure that happens on a regional basis, so the whole GTA levies the same tax?"
The institute will look at about 10 large cities across Canada. One of the first challenges will be to put together a database on revenues and expenditures in cities. "That doesn't exist. Every city has its own financial statements but they're different from each other. We'll try to get a common database before we do the analysis."
Do you wave to your neighbour, or better still, stop to talk? Is there somewhere nearby to commune with nature? And when you feel like a swim, can you find a community pool?
The answers to these questions are important, Kathi Wilson says, because they may affect your health.
The idea that where we live shapes our health is not new, says Wilson, a Geography professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, but in Canada we know very little about how neighbourhoods shape health.
Wilson hopes to tease out the complexities of the links between community attributes and health by studying neighbourhoods in the City of Mississauga in her Cities, Health, and Neighbourhood Geomatics (CHANGE) Laboratory.
"I want to determine if the links between neighbourhood environment and health vary among neighbourhoods and which characteristics of a neighbourhood make people healthy."
Wilson and her team will conduct health surveys, interviews and focus groups in Mississauga. They will use Global Positioning Systems and cameras to inventory amenities ranging from churches to clinics, monitor ambient air quality and personal exposure risk, and will create interactive 3-D web-based maps of virtual neighbourhoods.
"The key is developing methods to measure neighbourhood characteristics and using them to find out what factors are shaping not only health outcomes, but health-related behaviours such as exercise, eating habits and smoking."
Doing qualitative research will allow her to assess how important various factors are to individuals who live in a neighbourhood, Wilson says - green space is, after all, likely to be more important to some people than contact with a neighbour.
The CHANGE lab researchers will be asking the right questions for Mississauga because the topics will be defined by the Healthy City Stewardship Centre, a collaboration led by the City and UTM faculty members. Agencies such as hospitals and school boards are making sure the research focuses on the biggest issues their communities face - such as youth obesity or providing healthcare to a diverse community.
"This is one of the few places in Canada where we have such a strong link between university research and the policy sphere," says Wilson. "But I think we can learn from international experience. In the U.K., the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit is collecting detailed neighbourhood data and is working to ensure that, within a decade or two, no one will be disadvantaged by where they live."
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