Issue 2: Planning
A Grand Unified Theory of Planning
March 19, 2025
Decisions are made about our cities, our economy, and our well-being through policies, acts, and bylaws. We adopt an official plan, create a zoning bylaw, and declare a crisis of housing, climate, or affordability. We enact municipal policies about ethics, accessibility, or conduct.
The challenge is that these policies sometimes appear to exist in isolation. There seems to be little that ties them together. Consider the following:
This timeline shows that approaches to housing, climate, and funding are, taken together, incoherent. This incoherence is undermining public confidence in our city leaders and their ability to get housing built.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen growing interest in building sustainable mass-timber buildings. We’ve seen the result of decades of underinvestment in public housing and a growing concern about sprawling suburbs and related automotive dependence across many cities. We’ve become more aware of a need to address land ownership and reconciliation and made greater connections between built form and our mental and physical health. The evidence — as indicated by council’s declaration of multiple emergencies — points us to building more homes and building them in more environmentally sustainable ways.
Yet that is precisely what council, when presented with a simple way to move even gently in that direction, declined to do.
Maybe the answer is an aspirational design policy that links seemingly disparate goals around the need to create a people-focused outcome.
For the past eight years, a group of architects, educators, and advocates has been engaged in developing the foundation for a coherent national architecture policy — one that could, if adopted, bring these disparate policies and decisions into alignment with one another, making our approach to city-building more coherent and effective. (You can read a report about the work on this effort at the website of the ROAC, the Regulatory Organizations of Architects in Canada.)
Let me expand on this. By architecture, I mean the entirety of the built environment: buildings, landscapes, roads and sidewalks, transit systems, and the preservation of natural ecosystems in which all of these are embedded — the entirety of that which is designed and which surrounds us. Human beings have, in this sense, been creating architecture since we came into being: painting cave walls, forming pathways in the forest, constructing boats and shelters.
By policy, I mean an aspirational, coherent guiding framework against which we can measure decisions, a living document that we can use to test outcomes. An example of a policy in this expansive sense is the 1956 Massey Report, which set out a vision for the scope and function of arts in this country and led to the creation of major cultural institutions, including the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Arts Centre, that would help realize that vision. Policy in this expansive sense has created accessibility legislation, providing a framework for equity that now informs how our society operates.
Potential changes to a planning act or building code should, I am arguing, be assessed against a coherent and expansive architecture policy, to see if those changes support it. Changing the building code to permit increased height in mass-timber buildings, for instance, supports a policy direction to increase housing or reduce climate burdens. Unnecessarily limiting the height of infill buildings, by contrast, does not.
If the kind of robust, coherent architecture policy that I am describing existed, municipalities would, when planning their budgets, see if funding for a new park included washrooms to ensure accessibility and equity. They would do this because the policy existed to guide their decision-making, and that policy would have been developed to help create the society we want to have.
Generations ago, planners decided that cities needed to be planned around the automobile, and that policy decision continues to wreak havoc on our cities today. We created a policy that the public would be consulted on new development; according to Real Estate News Exchange, the upshot is that often only a small, privileged group is able to participate in those consultations, giving that cohort the ability to disproportionately affect design decisions.
Since the pandemic, we’ve seen demand for downtown office space collapse in cities across the country. The future of office use is precarious, with spillover effects on the small businesses that have historically thrived thanks to commuting office workers. At the same time, the culmination of decades of underfunding for public housing, rising interest rates, skyrocketing rent, and a surge in demand for housing has meant that we are faced with the dichotomy of empty buildings we don’t need and a shortage of buildings we desperately want.
While our cities are desperate for more housing, we also want to limit sprawl and create affordable, sustainable family-sized homes — ideally, ones that are near transit and part of a 15-minute community. Ottawa has a land-use policy that encourages missing-middle infill of four- or six-storey buildings. However, the planning process for this scale of development is fraught with costly approval delays (an issue noted in an Ontario Association of Architects report from 2018). When a project for 100 homes, which should be approved in three months, is extended to eight months, that five-month delay adds $10 million in overall economic impact, about a third of which is direct construction costs. We have a necessary and well-intentioned land-use policy, but it is often bogged down in conflicting processes, undermining the broader goals of developing a well-planned, beautiful, and sustainable city. This is a gap that can be solved by a broader municipal architecture policy.
When City Council made that decision in December 2021 to limit new development to four storeys instead of six storeys, it did so to avoid friction with existing residents rather than out of a desire to create better communities. It’s a decision that was made without a thorough understanding of the impact on construction cost — which in turn affects affordability — or the missing-middle infill development goals.
These are examples of the disconnect between polices, processes, and goals: we want housing and agree on a scale and type of housing that is good for communities but then layer on complexities or create arbitrary roadblocks that make it impossible to build what we say we want. Results: a poorly planned city, expensive delays in approvals, and general dissatisfaction with the resulting, often expensive, housing. A good architecture policy could connect how we think about land-use planning and housing policy to create a nimbler approach to incentivizing transformation.
Similarly, an architectural policy could establish goals for how to create more affordable housing. As reported by the Alliance to End Homelessness, municipal governments should retain ownership of municipally owned land; this could result in the construction of thousands of affordable homes that remain part of a public asset, built and maintained for the public good. An architecture policy could set out the framework for competitions to find inspired talent to design innovative housing. These competitions could go further, pairing designers with innovative builders, supporting the construction of the sustainable housing that our cities need. Universities and research institutions could become involved, bringing practical, applied, and research insights to housing and other buildings, creating examples of cutting-edge technology that showcases Canadian talent.
An architectural policy could also set goals for environmentally responsible development to help meet the challenges of the growing climate crisis and implement high-performance building standards to ensure developments can be created affordably and sustainably, without putting more barriers in the way of planning approval.
A comprehensive architecture policy must be informed by architectural literacy. That means having architects and other experts developing and implementing policy. It also means creating roles for a city architect, who would have leadership role at council tables alongside a chief planners, general managers, and other authorities, providing guidance and advice.
A holistic architecture policy could connect how we think about our communities and provide better guidance for design, with better models for communication, design literacy, and appreciation of built form. It could set up public discussion of how outcomes should be achieved and help heal divides between NIMBYism and YIMBYism.
An architecture policy could establish goals for connecting research- and development-funding opportunities from universities, government, and private industry, creating clear pathways for the practical application of new technologies in our built environment. It could accelerate adoption of new technologies by the private sector: governments may be better prepared to accept risk and support projects that may have higher initial capital costs due to lower market availability.
An architectural policy could help guide decisions on how a city invests in arts and culture, adding value to a city’s worth as a tourist attraction and creating pride of place in its residents.
There is everything to gain by better policy and better leadership. The time is now. UP
