Choosing Our Future: An Integrated Approach to Building a Sustainable and Resilient National Capital Region

The City of Ottawa, Gatineau/Hull and the National Capital Commission

HB Lanarc, Urban Futures Inc. [website]

Our report for the National Capital region, Demographic Projections for the National Capital Region in the 21st Century provided demographic projections as a foundation for the ‘Choosing Our Future: An Integrated Approach to Building a Sustainable and Resilient National Capital Region’ process. Establishing a demographic foundation as the starting point to this sustainability process was important in two contexts, one functional and one pragmatic. The functional importance of a demographic foundation is that it is the people currently in the region and those who migrate to it who will ultimately determine when and how the region will be both sustainable and resilient. The pragmatic importance is that, to a large extent, in the diverse and open economies of metropolitan regions such as the National Capital Region demography represents the independent variable in a regional sustainability and risk management strategy; a variable to be worked with rather than the target of policy.

Managing Change in the Calgary Region

The Calgary Regional Partnership

Urban Futures Inc. [report]

This report documented the process and outputs of research that produced a suite of demographic and economic projections for the Calgary Regional Partnership Area over the 2006 to 2076 period. With a population of 1,238,626 residents in 2006 (thirty-seven percent of Alberta’s total), the study area represented the economic and demographic heart of Southern Alberta.

The suite of projections prepared for this research included projections of growth and change in the region’s population, economy and associated land uses. The purpose of preparing a seventy year projection was to articulate a baseline that demonstrates where various scenarios would take the region in terms of its future population and employment as part of the region’s long-range sustainability plan.

Employment Lands Strategy, City of Surrey, 2007 to 2036

City of Surrey

Urban Futures Inc., Cushman & Wakefield LePage, Inc. and Stantec [report]

The nature and complexity of the relationship between employment and land use requires considerable research to understand the processes that will shape and change employment lands in the coming years. The focus on developing a better understanding of the dynamics between employment and land use change for an Employment Lands Strategy is particularly important in the development of the projections of employment and demand for employment lands. For the City of Surrey this project considered local and regional employment change by detailed occupation classification as a baseline for developing projections of potential land demand and strategies to manage the City’s employment lands over the coming three decades.

People and Places: Projections of Demographic & Economic Change in the Lower Mainland, 2007 to 2041

Metro Vancouver

Urban Futures Inc. [website]

As part of Metro Vancouver’s update of the region’s Livable Region Strategic Plan, this research documented projections of demographic and economic change for the region to 2041. As part of the consultation process, the projections were intended to provide a framework for the discussion of strategies to manage a broad range of change that can be anticipated for the next three and a half decades nationally, provincially and locally.

A Context for Change Management In Metropolitan Vancouver: Changing People in a Changing Region

The Greater Vancouver Regional District

Urban Futures Inc.

Traditionally, urban planning focused on the future of the built form of communities. Given the future orientation implicit in planning, and the history of urban areas, planning was for growth, or to deal with growth. Growth management came to represent the approach of communities pursuing collective goals (generally through land use strategies) to manage and direct population and economic growth in the urban environment.

Increasingly, it has become apparent that growth, while often part of the dynamics of urban communities, is neither the focus of, nor the reason for, the need for management of urban resources. The process of urban change, some of it brought on by growth, but much of it resulting from other process at work in urban areas, is truly the raison d’etre of urban management. It is apparent that growth management is simply too limited a concept, in both that it implies that without growth, management is not necessary, and that much of what must be managed is not the result of growth.

Two general products were produced from this research. The most important, in terms of magnitude of effort, was a trend projection of the spatial pattern of housing, population, labour force and employment change by eight major sub-regions in the GVRD. In order to prepare a spatial projection, it was necessary to begin with a macro (regional) projection of population, housing, labour force and employment change, which represent the second product produced for this project. The final product was a series of reports presented to the GVRD outlining methodology, assumptions and findings of each component.

Risk Management Scenarios for Transportation Planning in the Lower Mainland

Richmond Airport Vancouver Rapid Transit Project Management Ltd.

Urban Futures Inc.

Historically A single scenario (the GVRD’s Growth Management Scenario) has been used in both the calibration and projection stages of transportation modeling and planning in the Lower Mainland. Unless there is absolute certainty that pattern of growth is being realized (for calibration), and will occur (in projection), this reliance on a single scenario of regional development precludes assessment of both the risk and the robustness of any plans relying on this data.

This project was concerned with the development of a minimum set of scenarios that could be used to describe the general magnitude of risk associated with changing land uses for transportation planning in the region over the coming decades.

The products themselves were a series of model driven scenarios generated at the traffic zone level inputs for input into the regional EMME2 transportation demand model and further to the infrastructure financing model. The approach involved a demographically based projection of age specific population and economically based projection of employment by sector for traffic zones within the region. From this point, as changing transportation infrastructure inevitably result in pressures for bordering land uses to change, an alternative set of land uses were modeled for the RAV corridor as inputs to the EMME and financing models.