Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 03

May/June 2020 // Canadian Government Executive / 13 GOVERNMENT Designing a Future-Ready City More than 80 per cent of the 37 million people living in Canada are urban resi- dents. Moreover, 33 per cent of Canadians are concentrated in the country’s three largest metropolitan centres: Toronto (5.9 million); Montreal (4.0 million); and Van- couver (2.4 million). The longstanding appeal of Canadian cities is a reflection of their “legacy infrastructure” (ie., public transit, green spaces, museums, universi- ties). Well-designed urban spaces provide the openness and scale that helps to maxi- mize serendipity, collaborative arrange- ments, social learning, and inter-personal trust-building. Continuous city infrastruc- ture improvements also stimulate creative innovation, foreign capital investments, and novel consumer experiences. In addition to having one of the highest urban population concentrations among the G7 nations, Canada is unique in terms of the global percentage of its citizens living among the world’s best cities. Van- couver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal consistently rank among the top ten cit- ies globally in terms of their cultural vibrancy, institutional integrity, and liv- ability. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian medium-sized cities were also globally competitive in areas like economic potential, human resourc- es, business openness, and foreign direct investment. For instance, Hamilton (On- tario), Kingston (Ontario), and Fredericton (New Brunswick) featured prominently in the FDi American Cities of the Future 2017/18. Hamilton, a quintessential “steel town,” is an interesting example of a city that displayed considerable adaptive capa- bility when confronted with de-industrial- ization. Local leaders achieved this transi- tion by developing new specializations in knowledge-intensive economic activities. Sustaining these advantages will require adequate resourcing to optimize syner- gistic relationships between sustainable land-use development, multi-modal trans- portation planning, policy innovation, and community engagement. A successfully managed transition will also require an action-oriented, interpretive framework to foster sensitivity regarding the potential impacts of second and third-order conse- quences. Canada’s adaptive capabilities can be further strengthened with inte- grated government initiatives supported by inter-agency collaboration (ie., strategic intelligence sharing, joint threat assess- ments, employee secondments), and lead- ership development opportunities. With the proper execution of strategic leader- ship, Canada has more than a fighting of withstanding today’s urban governance challenges while preparing the future- ready policies that will need to be scaled- up tomorrow. Local Leadership: Vancouver’s Broadway Plan Launched in March 2019, the Broadway Plan is a comprehensive two-year process that encompasses 485 city blocks in some of Vancouver’s distinctive neighbour- hoods: False Creek Flats, Mount Pleasant, Fairview, and Kitsilano. The study area is British Columbia’s second-largest job centre and it overlaps the unceded ter- ritories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. The primary goal of the Broadway Plan is to support growth while optimizing opportunities created by the Broadway Subway, a tun- neled extension of the Millennium Line SkyTrain along the Broadway Corridor. It represents an historic opportunity to bet- ter coordinate public space design, transit- supportive land use, affordable housing needs, high-wage job growth, micro-mo- bility networks, and park space. Creating a long-range strategic vision that represents the aspirations and needs of current (and future) city residents is not Economic Recovery Task Force) and inde- pendent think tanks (ie., C.D. Howe Insti- tute) have established working groups to distill expert policy advice and to design pandemic “exit” strategies. Anchoring these desperate discussions to an urban governance framework will instill them with a much-needed strategic focus. With that in mind, a first-order question that should guide contemporary policy dis- cussions is: What is the adaptive capacity of today’s mission-critical infrastructure, governance institutions, business mod- els, leadership practices, labour laws, and training regimes? To strengthen Canada’s adaptive capa- bility, traditional city-making factors like effective governance, high-quality infra- structure, and vibrant cultural spaces will be important but so too will sophisticated design thinking, scenario planning, and threat-based analysis. Urban planners working in partnership with various con- stituencies will have to reconcile the con- flicting demands of the “city we want” and the “city we need.” Underpinning these ca- pability requirements will be a distributed knowledge infrastructure that connects experts, business improvement associa- tions (BIA), emergency responders, transit planners, epidemiologists, scientists, data analysts, investors, and local community leaders with military-like precision.