Last December 13, students in Queen’s University Urban Planning Program presented the result of a project, Canada’s Resilient Capital: Ottawa in the Next Half Century.  The project was devised and executed in cooperation with the City, under the supervision of David Gordon. (The clients are identified as John Smit and Alain Miguelez.)

Their Report (181 pp.) and Executive Summary (3 pp.) are now available from here: http://www.queensu.ca/geographyandplanning/surp/project-courses. Here are the very informative slides (70, 1.2 MB) that were used during the presentation.

They examined the long range plans of 27 cities around the world, looked for best practices for city resilience and identified the primary drivers of growth under four headings: Environmental, Demographic, Technological, and Economic, 41 in all.  These were then seen as either Opportunities or Vulnerabilities which can form the basis of scenario planning; a 7-step process is suggested.

City staff intends to launch such a scenario planning process, leading up to the next Official Plan (2023?)

The report proper ends at p111.  Appendices include 1-pagers about each of the cities examined and questions that were put to the presenters at the December presentation.  Through the latter we learned that not much is found in these plans about health or food, and few have a monitoring plan to check on their effectiveness:

Q: To what extent in looking at your plans do they mention the effectiveness of the plans?

A: In the majority of cases the plans we looked at were fairly new so feedback on the effectiveness of the plan’s policies were limited. We also noticed that only a handful of plans actually set up a monitoring or evaluation system. More often than not there was no mention of an evaluating system (at least in the case of demographic drivers). Whenever I did come across one it was considered a huge asset to the plan.

Erwin – 15 Jan 2017