[caveat.doctor]

Originally Posted by Nowhere

There isn't much the city can do to stop sprawl, since the provincial government forced the city to allow more sprawl than Jim Watson wanted. Queen's Park requires the city to have enough available land for 15 years of sprawl.

That wasn’t quite my point - what I mean is, even within that mandated development area, the City still has the ability to shape what actually gets built. Assuming that the City did adopt better development requirements (as Urbanarchit and Truenorth00 have articulated above), anyone who still wanted sprawl-as-usual would have to go much further out of “town”, as compared to cities that don’t have such large municipal boundaries, thus limiting desirability and demand.

Originally Posted by YOWetal

This all looks interesting and echoes a lot of previous commentary by many in various threads. Is there a North American best practice we could emulate? Not to be too skeptical but I wonder if some of this is realistic even if voters were willing to adopt it pay for it etc.

There’s often good North American case examples at https://www.strongtowns.org/. I moved here from the DC area and worked briefly with Montgomery County’s planning department, they have a pretty good blog about some of what they’re up to: https://montgomeryplanning.org/blog-design/. Lots of similarities in a national capital context. Here’s a recent post about what makes good and bad (both walkable, and profitable) development near transit that’s apt as we roll out the C-Line and T-Line extensions: https://montgomeryplanning.org/blog-...veness-part-2/

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Effectively, you want to know what great urban planning was? It's what every Canadian city had a century ago: streetcar suburbs. To this day, those old streetcar suburb hoods are still the best places to lives. Main street with streetcar upfront with some apartments and mixed use blocks. Small detached or semis on the sidestreets. Easy walk to retail, to transit and even schools for kids.

Essentially this - that pretty sums up my neighbourhood near the Civic Hospital: sprouted out along the Holland Av streetcar, a complete range of apartments to homes, rental and owned, walkable to the Wellington St strip, parks and schools that my kids can (eventually) walk to themselves, roads on a grid you never feel you’re forced to take the “long way” to get around, or getting bored always walking the same route (and still quiet enough to play street hockey) and fairly good transit (as long as they don’t cancel routes).

To oversimplify, the City could just the same development and zoning standards that led to what’s covered in Ottawa’s Mature Neighbourhood overlay.