URBAN FOCUS AND REGIONAL PLANNING

Murray V. Jones

This short statement will include comments on the topic from the experience of the author in two urban-centred regions-Toronto and Ottawa. The first experience, in Toronto, was gained at the executive planner’s desk; the second, from the observation post of a local govern- ment study,

The assertion is that each urban centre or focus has a varying area of influence depending on a number of factors, and that it does, or should, provide a basis for an administrative organization for regional planning.

The first part of the assertion has been well documented and needs no further proof. From the beginning of urban settlement there has been an area of idhence or interrelation which is wide or narrow depending on the size and function of the centre; the area of metropolitan settlement patterns means that areas of influence or interdependency are very wide indeed. For some purposes it would not be too difficult to divide whole territories into a series or cluster of metropolitan regions.

The second part of the assertion does not seem to be as valid except as a theoretical statement; regional planning has remained either an ineffective mechanism or is not operative at all. That such a paradox should exist-interdependent urban regions having ineffective, or no regional planning machinery-means that we have been attempting to secure desirable ends by means that are faulty and incapable of leading to any unified objective.

I think we have two outstanding obstacles to effective “urban-centred regional planning.” The first is the persistent but still naive notion that regional planning can be effective within the context of numerous “autonomous” local governments. The second notion is that the planning “authority” can be outside of the direct political structure. Agreement on these points depends on whether you think regional planning is essential, and whether you think its administration can be delegated to advisory bodies. At least my prejudices are clear.

From the Toronto experience several aspects of the problem are worth mentioning to illustrate the issues involved. The need for local govern- ment reorganization was emphasized by an area-government type agency, the Toronto and York Planning Board. In this case an ad hoc planning body did not attempt to perpetuate the myth that “planning” in a large urban-centred region could be exercized as an independent function. There was, however, lack of agreement as to the extent of the regional

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planning jurisdiction of the metropolitan government formed in 1953. An arbitrary planning area much larger than the administrative jurisdic- tion of the Municipality of Mt:tropolitan Toronto was created, but the regional planning agency was given independent corporate status. At first the thirteen municipalities outside Metropolitan Toronto but within the planning area were not represented on the planning agency.

The Toronto experience, therefore, represents a curious mixture of principles and practices: a large urban centre has been provided with partial intergovernmental coherence; and, this urban centre provides the political base for regional planning covering many jurisdictions outside the metropolitan federation; but, there is a distinct separation between the political and planning bodies which is not overcome by the staff of the planning agency acting “as if” they were directly responsible to the Metropolitan Council.

I noted several qualifications which need elaboration. Ln the first place the constraints operating to lirnit the local government reorganization in Toronto were due in large part to the fact that the thirteen local units federated were all in the same county (York) and either wholly urbanized or in the process of becoming part of the urban centre. The political unfeasibility of including parts of adjoining counties (Peel and Ontario), which were also in early stages of urbanization, was never seriously questioned. A similar conclusion was reached by Carl Golden- berg in his recent Royal Commission report on Metropolitan Toronto but perhaps for different reasons. Recently the provincial government has appointed a special commissioner to report on possible reorganization within Peel and Halton Counties (all the temtory between Toronto and Hamilton) while the Ontario Water Resources Cornmission has an- nounced a master plan of water and sewer services for Peel County based on estimates of population growth not contemplated by other “planning” authorities. The present situation can only be described as confusing. The urban centre (Metro Toronto) is about to spawn a ‘little Metro,” based on a services plan sponsored by an autonomous provincial agency, covering an area which is only partially within the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Area but covered by a proposed official plan which does not contemplate the OWRC services plan. In any event, the proposed official plan is sponsored by an advisory body to the Metro- politan Council, which must adopt the plan and have it approved by the Minister of Municipal Affairs before it has any formal effect. But, the Metropolitan Council does not have representatives on it from half of the municipalities in the planning area, and in any event the plan cannot control provincial (or local) services installation in the thirteen municipalities in the “fringe.”

Somewhere in this story there is a moral to be found-at least it might provide some basis for discussion. h4y contention will be that

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urban focus and regional planning must have coordinated policy planning at the provincial level of government as its starting point or frame of reference.

The second qualification has to do with the constitution of the regional planning agency and its terms of reference. In Ontario the most common form of regional planning organization is the joint planning board and the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board is a special adapta- tion of this form. Joint boards, as the name implies, are formed by two or more municipalities, with one of the municipalities being the desig- nated municipality-the one responsible for adopting the official plan for the joint planning area-and usually the largest urban centre. While there are several of these joint boards in Ontario, they are notoriously ineffective. The reason is not hard to find. Each member of the group must put its self-interest above that of the whole group (planning by assessment), there are no positive political incentives in having one jurisdiction legislate for all, and the joint board rarely even provides an intelligent forum for intermunicipal (regional) discussion, let alone acting as a formulator of regional policies.

The latest palliative in Ontario is “county planning-regional planning with both urban and rural focus. County planning can either prove to be the best justification of retention of county government, or, suffer all the frustrations of joint planning boards if not organized properly. Up to this point in this statement it would be fair to summarize that I am not too optimistic about effective regional planning whether attached to an urban centre or to many varied jurisdictions.

I do not propose to dwell on the state of affairs as I found them in the Ottawa area but to list the changes which I proposed should be made.

Briefly, area or regional planning in Ottawa is carried on to a limited extent by a national agency, the National Capital Commission, but its power is capable of being exercised omly through acquisition of property and investment of capital funds in roads, parks, and other works associated with federal government investments in the Ottawa area. Regional planning as it affects private property is under the jurisdiction of the Ottawa Area Planning Board, which in practice means the City of Ottawa. It is instructive that, at the public hearings I conducted in Ottawa, one municipality which had been part of this joint planning area for years was surprised to find this to be so,

The urgency of effective regional planning in the Ottawa area was evident. The urban population is increasing rapidly and now has begun to settle outside the dubious “greenbelt,” but no reception areas have been designated, no size of urban unity established, no integrated servicing plan adopted. A massive transportation plan is about to be published which might be quite unfounded within the context of a comprehensive regional plan. The list could go on and on.

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My primary concern in Ottair-a, in an administrative sense, was to maximize financial and technical resources, rather than dissipate them through independent actions of fifteen units of local government, and to bring together in one body the responsibility for physical and financial planning. That body would be the executive committee of a regional council. I found that most decisions on urban expansion were being made by rural councils simply not equipped to handle the complexity of the problem and motivated from the wrong direction, that is, looking upon urbanization as a function of local tax rates, or pride in progress, or both, rather than from a view of the needs of the regional economy, jobs, housing types, and costs, etc. To put it bluntly, what I found in Ottawa was the antithesis of the notion of urban focus and regional planning. The urban centre only becomes a springboard for regional planning when the urban centre along with the balance of the region is given direct responsibility for such planning through a regional govern- ment having sufficient statutory and financial authority to make plans and carry them out.

There are a number of related aspects of the report on Ottawa’s reorganization which might be considered. I will only mention now that I found the administrative separation of the central city from its hinter- land an impossible roadblock to any kind of sensible planning for a dynamic urban area, that the technical planning responsibility should rest with the senior department heads of the proposed regional govern- ment, and that citizens’ advisor). groups at both the regional and local (district) level were highly desirable but not as corporate bodies known as planning boards.

These two experiences teach us, in terms of the assertion I used at the beginning of these brief comments, that,

( i ) the growth of urban centres can only be planned within an area, metropolitan, or regional context;

( i i ) such planning must be a central function of government and can rarely be carried out effectively by cooperation among a multiplicity of local governments;

(iii) reorganization of local government is therefore the first step to rational urban development control;

(io) regional planning through extraterritorial control by one govern- ment over other governments of equal status is not a desirable long-term solution;

( o ) the planning function must be placed in direct relation to the policy-making body and not delegated to a separate board tending to foster political irresponsibility; and,

(ui) policy coordination at the provincial government level is a necessary prerequisite to rational planning at the local government level.

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This leads to a second and related suggestion, that a regional council of this kind, for the planning of economic and physical development (these two matters are also inseparably related, as the Northern Virginia procedure recognizes) should be made up mainly, if not wholly, of members of the elected councils of the local governments of the area. To the possible objection that these people may not know enough, the answer is, surely, that they are nevertheless the ones who have the authority to make policy. A technical committee of the Regional Council can be formed of the key administrators and specialists of the local governments; special technical subcommittees can also be formed; and, in any case, the Regional Council needs an adequate professional director and staff.

This, in turn, leads to a third suggestion. If regional programming and budgeting are to be successful, it is never going to be sufficient to rely primarily on outside technical consultants, whether from senior govern- ments or private firms. The planning process must be one operated mainly by resident officials themselves. In the long run, the only adequate and acceptable programs are those resulting from thorough teamwork among the community’s political and technical leadership. Help from outside is an important contribution, especially if it contributes to the improved training, experience and efficiency of the resident leaders and specialists. A sum of money spent by a senior government toward the administrative costs of establishing a regional council and resident staff and enabling the local government personnel to participate in the plan- ning process and to obtain in-service experience is likely to go much farther than the same amount spent for outsiders’ reports that are left behind for non-participating personnel to study and sell to the public. The constructive role of the outside consultant, including the senior government, is to contribute to an involvement of local personnel and an improvement of their techniques for doing the job themselves.

A fourth suggestion is already implied. A regional program, especially when considered in the light of financial requirements, must be compre- hensive-not a patchwork made up of separately conceived programs prepared in watertight departments and special-purpose agencies. In our desire to get urgent regional programs carried out, as in coping with sanitation, transportation, conservation, and recreation, we have resorted to a great deal of what someone has called “ad hocery.” We can avoid much waste of time and money by developing immediately the proper organization and techniques for comprehensive programming and budgeting.

The province as well as the municipality is deeply concerned with regional programs. It is as urgent for the province to decentralize its activities as it is for the municipalities to cooperate or merge on a regional basis. The clearest statement on this point, to the best of my

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knowledge, is in the Manitoba Report on Local Government Organization and Finance (Michener Commission). It proposes that there should be a regional council of municipalities in each of a number of defhed regions. It would have a headquarters and a secretariat in a regional centre. The same regional centre (the same building) would house the regional offices of provincial departments dealing with all matters requiring regional programming. Thus the province could assure co- ordination of its own departmental programs in each region. (The Michener Commission recommends that a senior provincial official in each region should have this coordinating responsibility.) Thus also it could assure coordination with the programs of each regional council of municipalities. The importance of this kind of coordination in budget- making is obvious. In most provinces at present, municipalities as well as the province itself are seriously handicapped not only by their own fragmentation and isolation but by the province’s own lack of a means to develop an over-all regionaJ program. In relation to Ontario, this obstacle to development was ably stated by Dr. Ralph R. Krueger at the Provincial Conference on Regional Development and Economic Change, 1965.

This formula for regional centres-to facilitate provincial decentrali- zation, municipal cooperation, and provincial-municipal negotiation- also provides a place for the federal government to establish its liaison with regional development, to observe where necessary and to negotiate when provinces and municipalities wish to take advantage of federal programs, as, for example, in housing, renewal, transportation, anti- pollution, and other measures, It provides a regional centre where provincial and local governments may negotiate on most vital matters and where all three together may negotiate when necessary, instead of continuing to rely, as so often in the past, on a frustrating, expensive and delaying round of separate meetings in Ottawa and provincial capitals. One of the best means of achieving and sustaining a workable provincial autonomy may be by shifting the centre of gravity to efficient regional centres and developing strong regional programs under the aegis of the provinces. The federal involvement would be expressed relatively more often and more usefully, ( a ) in aiding and strengthening provincial-municipal programs based on provincial-municipal priorities, and ( b ) through tri-level negotiations at the provincial or regional centre.

One of the most constructive measures that the federal government could take at once, as a strategic contribution to strong provincial- municipal programs, would be to offer to finance a substantial part of the cost of preparing comprehensive plans, in each regional community, for the whole range of physical development: transportation facilities, housing, renewal, and recreational space. The municipalities themselves, through the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities, have

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been urging the federal government very persistently to adopt this method of financial assistance. The following statements appeared in the Federation’s 1964 Submission to the federal Cabinet under the heading, “Federal Aid as it Affects Provincial-Municipal Programming”:

For the reasons already stated in this submission, such federal facilitating aid would be consistent with, and would indeed encourage, the fullest exercise of provincial and municipal sovereignty in the preparation of progrms. The Federation attaches considerable importance to this proposal. From the viewpoint of all Canadian taxpayers, no form of aid could be more justified as a means of assuring a wise use of federal, provincial, and municipal funds and a speedier achievement of the goals underlying the National Housing Act-and, indeed, the many other forms of federal and provincial aid already available.

Geographically and psychologically, in this large federal country, Ottawa is always far away. The objective should be: concentrate each negotiation as completely as possible in the province, even in the district, in which the programs are being prepared. By its very nature, the planning of community development requires a deep patriotic concern for the urban and regional interest. . . . If program-making at the local level, with provincial help, is to proceed smoothly and quickly, any federal participation in the programming must fit into an e+tious wmmunity-oriented system of negotiation, with the image of Ottawa as a regulatory authority playing a minor role.

Such federal aid for comprehensive planning may already be authorized in the rather broad language of Part V of the National Housing Act; but, in practice, the federal government’s interpretation of Part V faus short of “community planning” in the broad sense, including all forms of physical development and the technical and financial planning pertaining thereto.

The need to assist the movement toward strong provincial-municipal programs will probably shift federal attention quickly, as in the United States, from mere ‘lousing” or “industrial development” or “trmsporta- tion” to the comprehensive “community development,” with special emphasis (a) on the urban-centred regional community, and (b) on the now scattered areas of rural poverty and small-town decay where there is a need for industrial development and for a new “urban focus” to provide adequate educational, economic, and social services to meet modem standards.

Such changes in federal and provincial methods are a practical necessity if successful regional planning, including budgeting, is to be a reality.2

Finally, we should look particularly at budgeting for physical and economic development in the many regions of Canada which are not

2It is of interest that the Northern Virginia Fiscal Survey, described in this paper, was financed in part by an Urban Planning Assistance Grant from the Federal &US- ing and Home Finance Agency, under provisions of Section 701 of The Housing Act.

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now, or not yet, generally thought of as urban-centred. In our major metropolitan areas, there is already an “urban focus.” In many areas of the Atlantic provinces, eastern Quebec, eastern and northern Ontario, and the western provinces, part of our problem of economic, physical and financial planning is to find out how to establish a satisfactory “urban focus”-essential if we are to create communities which have a sound economic base and meet modem standards for educational and heaIth services, recreation and cultural facilities.

In these areas, where much of our poverty exists and where com- munities are perishing by attrition, the problem of regional planning presents a serious challenge. Such areas must be mentioned in this context because it is obvious that the tools of financial analysis and comprehensive long-term budgeting are indispensable in such areas as a supplement to planning for industrial location, schools, housing, recrea- tion, and health. All of our programs are in peril if we delay financial analysis or separate it from economic and social planning. Budget- making, far from being a secmdary function, is possibly the most crucial exercise-the indispensable catalyhc operation-in all our efforts to make regional planning successful.