Markus Moos

Does Design Matter? The Ecological Footprint as a Planning Tool at the Local Level

This paper provides a comparative environmental analysis of three subdivision designs for the same site: an ecovillage, a new-urbanist design and an up-scale estate subdivision. The comparison is based on ecological footprints (EF). Based on built form alone, the higher-density subdivisions resulted in lower EF. Consumption data were limited to the ecovillage, since this is the actual use of the study site, but comparisons were made with regional US averages. The study suggests that consumption contributes more to the overall footprint than built form. Qualitative information was used to explore how consumption is influenced by urban design and self-selection. Despite the challenges associated with data collection and conversion, it is argued that EF has utility for planners and urban designers because it enables assessment of built form from an environmental consumption point of view. The problem of the 21st century is how to live good and just lives within limits, in harmony with the earth and each other. Great cities can rise out of cruelty, deviousness, and a refusal to be bounded. Liveable cities can only be sustained out of humility, compassion, and acceptance of the concept of enough. (Donella Meadows, as cited in Beatley & Manning, 1997, p. 1)

The Characteristics and Location of Home Workers in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver

This study analyses the distribution of home workers across the three largest urban regions in Canada and shows how they differ across sex of home worker, household type, income level, occupation and industry. The highest proportion of home workers is in art, culture and recreation occupations followed by management, the field dominated by men. Women home workers make the financial, secretarial and administrative occupations the third-largest group of home workers. The spatial distribution of home workers follows a sectoral form. While the characteristics of inner-city and suburban home workers differ, the differences are the same as for commuters. Rather than creating a completely new locational pattern, home work appears to reinforce existing urban forces of centralisation by professionals and continued decentralisation by the middle classes and those seeking larger estates, such as those in management occupations. The study suggests that the increasing trend towards home work is not dispersing cities, but allows greater locational flexibility within already-existing urban spatial patterns.

From gentrification to youthification? The increasing importance of young age in delineating high-density living

This paper considers the importance of age in delineating urban space, the latter operationalised as high-density living. Many cities have experienced an increase in inner city living contributing to gentrification. Today, inner cities contain more amenities, public transit and housing options than in the past but there are also growing affordability concerns owing to rising prices. Especially young adults, sometimes dubbed Millennials, are making location decisions in a context of lower employment security, higher costs and continuing high-density re-development that now extends into suburban areas in some cases. The analysis in this paper shows evidence of a youthification process that results in an increasing association of high-density living with the young adult lifecycle stage. The higher density areas remain young over time as new young adults move into neighbourhoods where there are already young people living, and they move out if their household size increases. Youthified spaces have become characterised by small housing units that are not generally occupied by households with children. Additionally, some areas are exhibiting generational bifurcation as both older and younger adults live in some higher density areas. Youthification is driven by a combination of lifestyle, demographic, macro-economic and housing market changes that require further investigation. The youthification process is not replacing, but occurring alongside, gentrification and points to young age as a delineator of high-density living becoming more important over time. However, immigration, measures of social class and household size still remain the most important explanatory variables of high-density living.

The sustainability of telework: an ecological-footprinting approach

Abstract This paper demonstrates the importance of a comprehensive framework to assess how telework affects sustainability. Sustainability-policy evaluation rarely considers substitution effects despite broad recognition that overall lifestyles must be analyzed to gauge how policy-induced behavioral changes translate into net environmental impact. Casestudy data indicate that telework has far-reaching, complex, and varied effects on lifestyle practices, with potentially important environmental implications. Because adjustments occur across numerous consumption categories, the assessment of telework’s environmental dimensions must move beyond single-issue studies and single-dataset analysis. Ecological-footprint analysis, in combination with qualitative data, can suggest solutions to sustainability problems.

Suburban ways of living and the geography of income: How homeownership, single-family dwellings and automobile use define the metropolitan social space

Current research depicts suburbs as becoming more heterogeneous in terms of socio-economic status. Providing a novel analysis, this paper engages with that research by operationalising suburban ways of living (homeownership, single-family dwelling occupancy and automobile use) and relating them to the geography of income across 26 Canadian metropolitan areas. We find that suburban ways of living exist in new areas and remain associated with higher incomes even as older suburbs, as places, have become more diverse. In the largest cities the relationship between income and suburban ways of living is weaker due to the growth of condominiums in downtowns that allow higher income earners to live urban lifestyles. Homeownership is overwhelmingly more important than other variables in explaining the geography of income across 26 metropolitan areas.

WORKPLACE RESTRUCTURING AND URBAN FORM: THE CHANGING NATIONAL SETTLEMENT PATTERNS OF THE CANADIAN WORKFORCE

ABSTRACT: This article examines the relationship between emerging work arrangements and national settlement patterns. While growth is centralized in large cities, social commentators continue to suggest that workplace restructuring—facilitated by technological progress—encourages more dispersed settlement patterns, evoking concern about the environmental sustainability of the trend. Multivariate analysis using Canadian census data shows that with the exception of self-employed professionals, the home workers, and self-employed in nonmanual occupations have a lower tendency to reside in large cities than otherwise similar wage and salary earning commuters. However, household mobility and temporal trends suggest that workplace restructuring is not dispersing workers away from large cities by inducing mobility, but that take-up is higher in more remote areas. It is argued that workplace restructuring permits more dispersed national settlement patterns than if workers needed to move to large cities for proximity to employment growth. The article reflects on the implications of the findings for urban sustainability policies that promote compact urban forms and the policies that emphasize consumption amenities of cities to attract mobile workers.

The Probability of Single-family Dwelling Occupancy Comparing Home Workers and Commuters in Canadian Cities

Changing socioeconomic conditions are increasing the flexible workforce, such as home workers that are believed to internalize the need for home-work space in their housing consumption. Analysis of census data in thirteen Canadian metropolitan areas shows that households where one or both maintainers work from home have a greater propensity to reside in larger single-family detached houses than comparable households with maintainers who commute to work. The home-work variable increases the probability of single-family dwelling occupancy more than age, immigration, and household size, demographic variables generally highly associated with single-family dwelling occupancy. Although issues of causality cannot be empirically resolved here, if home work requires more space, it is one of the factors that would influence the tendency to continue to reside in the larger single-family dwellings. These dwellings have greater environmental impacts than more compact housing types that planners promote as part of their sustainability goals.

Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy

there are alternatives and that there is agency and different ways of being for those who live in the city. There is also the possibility that in a time when neo-liberal trade policies and globalization are increasingly seen to be threadbare and even destructive, that the material foundation for the book’s argument is slipping. The analysis of the neo-liberal state offered could well have produced some different political arguments, against heightened securitization for example, for more civic spaces, for fewer privatized public spaces and even for open master planned estates, not the walled and policed “domestic fortresses” described in the book. So, while a useful set of arguments and examples, this book does not deliver on its broader claims to present an analysis of a pervasive trend towards “Fear and the New Home Front” within a global “Domestic Fortress”.

Growing Food in the Suburbs: Estimating the Land Potential for Sub-urban Agriculture in Waterloo, Ontario

This study uses Geographic Information System analysis to measure the land potential for urban agriculture in four sub-urban neighbourhoods in Waterloo, Ontario. Findings show that 49–58% of land measured has potential to support urban agriculture. In older post-war sub-urban neighbourhoods, the land potential is primarily in the form of private yards. Contrary, newer sub-urban neighbourhoods, incorporating new urbanist ideals, have smaller yards but more public green space. Challenges and opportunities for urban agriculture will differ between new and older sub-urban areas due to differences in neighbourhood design. The findings have implications for planning practice in terms of linkages between neighbourhood design and urban agriculture potential. Promotion of urban agriculture could be beneficial in post-war sub-urban neighbourhoods, which experienced decline in several North American cities. Conceptually, consideration of sub-urban agriculture opens up the possibility of exploring a novel dimension of the now internally diverse sub-urban landscape and the changing functions of suburbs within metropolitan areas.

Housing and location of young adults, then and now : consequences of urban restructuring in Montreal and Vancouver

...................................................................................................................... ii Preface ........................................................................................................................ iii Table of