How Canada Can Build the Sustainable Cities We Need for the Future

Think about when you feel the most vulnerable. Is it driven by your fears? Your emotions? Uncertainty of the future? Everyone experiences vulnerability and has their own methods to overcome barriers, woven with threads of risk and crisis, through resilience and aid from our individual support systems. 

Similarly, the cities in which we live experience vulnerability, particularly as they are faced with a growing population, a changing climate, the emergence of smart cities, and the scarcity of resources. Our cities need a resilient approach to be prosperous amidst an increasingly complex and uncertain future.  

The Government of Canada has prioritized reducing chronic homelessness, lowering air pollutant concentrations, and promoting active or shared transportation in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Municipalities are well-positioned to achieve these goals through proactive policy development and infrastructure projects. Our fastest growing municipalities (‘our municipalities’) – Kitchener, London, Halifax, Ottawa, and Edmonton (excluding Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver census metropolitan areas) – are particularly susceptible to development pressures. We can gain insights from global leaders in sustainability as best practice examples.

What Canadian Cities Can Learn from Oslo, Tokyo, and Stockholm

To keep up with the needs of a growing population and restore housing affordability in Canada, over 22 million new housing units will be required by 2030. In the face of similar demands, Oslo and Stockholm have been successfully driving an increase in housing development in their urban cores and near public transport nodes, primarily through policy implementation as set out in their municipal plans.

The creation of local area development plans has helped advance housing production for particular areas, allowing them to be adaptive to current and projected housing needs and demands. These plans also offer mixed tenure and density and incorporate other SDG 11 targets. To supplement these plans, public-private partnerships such as OsloBolig and Bostadsförmedlingen were created. New homes are purchased from developers and offered to individuals at a lower cost to remove the challenges and barriers to entering the housing market. The partnerships continue to work beyond this by helping to improve the efficiency of the construction process by cities supporting developers who propose uniform and standardized designs or by using prefabricated housing that reduces construction costs while reducing planning and production times. This housing push caused missing, insufficient, and disconnected urban green spaces, but these ill-effects were met with successful policy reform.

In Canada, at least 15% of the urban population has insufficient access to green spaces. Our municipalities only have an average of 8.2% of green spaces, compared to 53% in the foreign cities examined. Therefore, using a similar approach to housing, leaders need to establish plans with strong policies to develop good quality outdoor green spaces and public spaces that are adaptable to a variety of user groups and activities, while also preserving and valuing their existing spaces.

Cities such as Tokyo are also implementing SMART technology in their green spaces to encourage connectivity and improve safety as well as planning practices. Tokyo’s Greenery Program requires the greening of at least 20% of the roof and open space for newly constructed, renovated, or extended buildings over a certain size. While our municipalities have similar dedication requirements, they are not nearly as stringent, ranging from 2% in Ontario to 10% in Alberta. To increase our access to green spaces, we can increase efforts to preserve our cultural and natural heritage spaces.   

How Sustainable Cities Can Combat the Challenges of the Future

A greater emphasis on cultural and natural heritage – a core aspect of Canada’s identity – is needed for a sustainable future. We often see the preservation of natural heritage through the protection of national parks and reserves, as Canada aims to protect 30% of land and waters by 2030. The preservation of cultural heritage is materialized through historical sites such as the district of Old Quebec, L’Anse aux Meadow, and numerous museums.

However, immense potential lies in our Indigenous cultural heritage, which is often overlooked. Indigenous populations have been guardians of Canada’s biodiversity. Through their alignment and connectedness with the natural environment, and knowledge passed down through generations, lands that are preserved by Indigenous communities, such as the new Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve, are showing less decline in biodiversity. Canada’s rich Indigenous history continues to resonate in the present day with a substantial Indigenous population sowing the seeds of a collective future. Canada can be the beacon of light for the future of sustainability by supporting Indigenous communities and reconciling the past through conservation and preservation.

Preserving our natural heritage and expanding green space in our cities brings the additional benefit of increasing their resilience to climate change. We are expected to see increases of 6.3°C in temperature and 24% in winter precipitation by 2100, along with 25% more wildfires in the next decade. Nature-based solutions are central to Oslo’s and Stockholm’s approaches to reducing flood damage and urban heat island effects. Oslo is undertaking a Trees Project which consists of planting 100,000 more trees and developing a Green Portal database of the urban forest to support planning and management.

While this seems challenging in increasingly dense urban environments, evolving designs of green roofs or walls and vertical forests enable high densities of vegetation in small areas. Green spaces can also contribute to improving surface water quality through natural filtration capabilities. Tokyo has taken an infrastructure-centric approach to natural disaster resilience, with high 2030 targets for emergency response accessibility rates (100%) and fire resistance rates (70%). Utility pole removal, wooden building renovations, and high-ground community redevelopments are required to achieve these, and Canadian municipalities should plan for these high targets from the offset to minimize renovations and long-term costs. The most disaster-prepared cities have assessed the risks and vulnerabilities associated with events like heat waves and severe storms to develop precise action plans that suit their local context.

Amidst growing public concerns for the environment, Canada has established targets to reduce 30% of waste and 40-45% of carbon emissions by 2030. Our municipalities can greatly influence environmental impacts through procurement and construction by assessing, regulating, and defining criteria for the environmental load and lifecycles of materials to expand the use of eco-materials, increase recycling, and circularize waste streams. Emerging digital tools and SMART technologies can support decision-making processes, asset management for increased service lifespans, and monitoring of energy performance, air pollution, and waste.

By adjusting their energy resources and transportation networks, cities have accelerated the transition towards clean energy through the increased purchasing of clean energy and biogas, expanding local renewable energy production (i.e. solar panels), and waste heat recovery. To further our efforts toward clean technology, we must also adopt sustainable transportation measures. Our transportation sector has been shaped by urbanization, and yet, presents an opportunity for quick and easy changes.

By 2030, Canada is expected to increase the proportion of electric vehicles (EVs) with associated infrastructure and invest $14.9 billion in public transit systems. With similar goals, Tokyo has over 18,000 charging stations and aims to increase this threshold to 150,000 by 2030 in addition to a seamless, electric public transit system. Oslo has transformed its city into one that encompasses the implementation of electric public transportation, the expansion of walking and cycling paths, and increased accessibility for EV infrastructure. Oslo consists of one of the world’s largest electric bus fleets and has incorporated electric ferries across its fjords. In addition, Oslo has mandated that all new residential buildings must be equipped with EV charging infrastructure.

While these strategies can help Canada navigate towards a sustainable transportation system, these solutions alone are not enough to create the change we need. The paramount of what distinguishes these cities is their establishment of higher-level approaches to ensure that these solutions remain successful. For instance, Tokyo has secured public-private partnerships to provide funding for their transportation systems, which allows them to continue to electrify their transit and invest in new innovations such as the world’s first maglev system. On the other hand, Oslo offers financial incentives and subsidies to encourage a shift from conventional cars to electric vehicles. This demonstrates psychological insights where changes in consumer behaviour cannot solely rely on alterations to the surrounding environment. The reality is that consumers need incentives to change the cognitive restraints that dictate their current decision-making. 

Canada Must Act Now on Sustainable Cities

While the future is saturated with uncertainty and we cannot determine the underpinnings of human behaviour in response to change, WSP’s analysis of megatrends can guide how our municipalities can grow in an impactful way. As we face a collective turning point in our communities, the following must be done to future-proof our cities: 

• Elected officials must focus their platforms on the SDGs and ensure their implementation. 
• Adequate federal funding and incentives, as well as legislative leadership, must be provided to provinces and municipalities to reward them for making a difference. 
• Provinces need to revise provincial acts and building codes to mandate that municipalities go above and beyond to ensure our cities are sustainable.
• Municipalities need to be proactive and take matters into their own hands by passing local by-laws that push for transformative action. 
• Private sector representatives need to partner with each other and municipalities to help foster innovation.  

By taking these actions, we can minimize or remove our vulnerabilities and build the sustainable cities of the future.