When pondering Oakville, Toronto's wealthy western suburb, the phrase "global village" is not a term that commonly comes to mind. Nevertheless, during this year's Places to Grow Youth Engagement Project, a team of seven Oakville youth used this exact slogan as a founding philosophy behind the vision they developed for their downtown.
Places to Grow is a five-year pilot project initiated by the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. Now in its third year, it aims to develop young people's understanding of planning principles and challenge them to examine issues facing their communities — including one of the biggest challenges that their generation of southern Ontarians will have to deal with: growth. Nine groups (totaling 63 young people) from different communities across the Greater Golden Horseshoe joined forces at an all-day design workshop to devise, develop, and design creative new plans for their neighbourhoods. The added challenge: each community must incorporate housing and employment for 2,000 new residents.
Whether hoping to freshen up and diversify stuffy old planning models, or just to give these kids an incentive to stick around in the 'burbs, Places to Grow is just one among a number of planning projects in Toronto's suburbs that have tapped into youth ingenuity and more multigenerational participation. Mississauga launched Conversation 21, incorporating youth in drafting their strategic plan, and in 2005 Vaughan became the first city in Canada to create a youth position on city council.
While these efforts are being made, it's still not easy to excite youth about a process they've been traditionally left out of, notes Andrea Winkler, an urban planner with Urban Strategies who was hired to work on Vaughan's new Official Plan. "If you look at the age gap, there's definitely a 'how do we talk to each other?' element to it," she says. For this reason, in the year-long public visioning process Winkler helped to coordinate a number of strategies to entice youth to contribute, including the use of social media.
With the encouragement and guidance of planners on the project, short films were made by a number of Vaughan high schools, and one class even created a podcast articulating their ideas for a revamp of Vaughan. These tools can now be shown to city councillors and at public consultations, so that "even if they weren't always there, we could be inserting this into the discussion," Winkler notes.
Places to Grow has also taken advantage of new media in hopes of drawing in and connecting youth. Video and stop-motion photography have been incorporated into various stages of the project, and during the three months leading up to the design workshop, the youth shared research and exchanged ideas through a secure online hub. By the time they got their hands on the scale foam models provided at the workshop, they were already well versed in contemporary urban issues, from growth to transit to green economy.
At the workshop, I watched as Ontario Deputy Premier George Smitherman learned about the importance of mixed-use buildings from 17-year-old Cassie Tooley, whose group designed a series of wavy-roofed structures for integrated residential and commercial use in Markham/Richmond Hill. Her group's whimsical architecture no doubt posed a challenge to the resident hot wire foam cutter, a professional with planningAlliance, whose station at the back of the room bustled with participants animatedly explaining their visions for funky and functional architecture.
The "green" theme was more than prevalent, as new parks popped up and green roofs speckled all nine community models. Agriculture and food sovereignty were discussed, with community gardens and farmers' markets pushing parking lots underground.
Perhaps not yet jaded by current realities like slow City policy or NIMBYism, the youth were not about to shy away from idealistic or controversial ideas. The Toronto group, focused on the area around Yonge and Finch, even planned to eliminate two lanes of traffic on Yonge to make room for bike lanes and better pedestrian infrastructure. Meanwhile, Oakville's "global village" mantra aimed to increase social capital in the now predominantly Caucasian city. "There's so many more opinions, so many more people out there, there's so many different stories," said 17-year-old Feroz Qayyum. Increasing and diversifying the number of "stories" in Oakville may be the exact attitude residents and policymakers are going to have to adopt if they're going to manage Ontario's smart growth agenda.
What's next for the valiant efforts and ingenious ideas so carefully plotted by our youth? The resounding hope is that they will be incorporated into official plans and policy. Places to Grow has started setting up meetings between youth and policy makers.
In Vaughan, there's still time — a draft of the Official Plan won't be released until the end of the year, so youth can take this chance to heed the slogan of the Vaughan Youth Cabinet, and be heard.
After all, says the matter-of-fact Qayyum, "it's going to be us that are living there anyways, so we might as well have a say in it."