It’s time to become a ‘Planner as Advocate’: Starting with Bill 23

Planners and designers tend to play several roles in municipalities — planner as facilitator, as regulator, as policy advisor, as technician, as negotiator. It’s a complicated role to navigate. Planners are also visionaries, wanting the best for the communities they serve. Planners also increasingly need to become — and are becoming — advocates.

If you’re a city planner or follow planning-related news, you already know all about Bill 23 or the ‘More Homes Built Faster Act’, now that it has been passed. Bill 23 removes large sections of Ontario’s Greenbelt, which protects us, our prime farmland and biodiversity, to make this land available to developers to build more unaffordable sprawl. It also limits the decision-making power of our municipalities to plan and build in socially and ecologically responsible ways (i.e. denser mixed-use development within urban boundaries, which is more affordable for residents and municipal governments).

I’m not going to dive into the details here — many incredible groups and investigative journalists have done that already (see Environmental Defense, Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition/Just Recovery Simcoe, Wellington Water Watchers to name just a few). What I want to do here is call on all planning-related professionals to bring advocacy and activism into your professional roles.

With more uncertainty about our future(s), the policies we set in place now, especially before 2030’s climate targets for a chance to avoid runaway climate change, will likely have bigger impacts than ever before. This is especially true of planning policies, because they converge at the intersection of climate change adaptation and mitigation, public health, digital technologies, population growth and migration, and social inequities, especially among Black and Indigenous communities — all the most pressing questions of our time.

This is why Bill 23, only the latest of alarming policies coming from Ontario’s provincial government, is so concerning. It will significantly impact all of these issues — and not in a good way. Analysts and researchers, advocates and activists, are all raising the alarm because this government continues to act against best practices, evidence and community decisions. Luckily, in this particular battle, we’ve got broad support from residents and municipalities across Ontario.

We need planners and planning-related professionals in this fight. If you haven’t already, I’m calling on you to start with Bill 23. If you are already a ‘planner as advocate’, you have mine and your community’s thanks — and you’ve got to keep going.

The stakes are too high to remain polite or neutral.

This is especially the case when it comes to engaging youth in planning and design processes, and decision-making more broadly. Planners are routinely putting into motion processes that are determining youth’s futures more than anyone else’s — designing the communities that they will inherit and the places they will call home. Youth — in all this group’s diversity — are arguably, the primary stakeholders of (sub)urban planning.

At Urban Minds, our goal is to bridge the gap between youth and the adults who are building their cities, their communities. This is not just about gathering input or surveying youth; this is about empowering young people to co-design and co-create their places in ways that broaden participation and belonging in those places for everyone. Youth must have a place in placemaking, a voice in their communities. This is core to Urban Minds’ mission.

Planning-related professionals have a unique role to play right now (I suspect that if you clicked on this article, you have at least an inkling of this already). As the importance of urban design, land-use planning and transportation to climate action and affordability become clearer in popular discourse, planners are becoming increasingly important too. Those who (re)build cities can push for responsible policies, communicate and engage the public to support climate actions with co-benefits and speak up against the government (mostly our provincial government it seems) when they are proposing irresponsible policies.

Advocating against Bill 23 and other policies that will harm and disadvantage future generations is a fight for intergenerational justice and sustainability, as well as a show of solidarity to young people. It shows that decision makers, city builders and adults care about their futures at a time when government inaction on intersectional crises is making them lose hope.

Engaging youth shows that we care about their priorities; advocating to protect their future shows that we are truly in solidarity.

Planners need to become advocates for the communities they work with/in: starting now, with Bill 23.

Kelly Gingrich is an Outreach Coordinator at Urban Minds