Urban Policy: Final Reflections
Many of the policy issues I’m most passionate about — such as housing affordability, climate change, and transportation — are perfect examples of urban policy issues. Over the past six weeks, I’ve learned how all orders of government and non-governmental actors work collaboratively to co-create urban policy. To reflect on what I’ve learned, I wanted to share some key lessons that I’ve found to be the most insightful takeaways from this course.
We began the course by first considering the question: what makes a city? While a city can be defined in many ways, through its municipal boundaries, population characteristics, sociological patterns, or economic measures, the word “city” can often be conflated with the term “urban”. However, urban policy is much more than what happens at city hall. While local policy refers to decisions made by local governments to address local problems, urban policy refers to decisions made by any level of government.
In considering the municipal outlook on urban policy issues, it’s true that provincial governments have a large degree of authority over municipal responsibilities. While provinces are responsible for setting out the service requirements and quality standards attached to new policies, much of the success of a particular policy lies in its implementation. As we learned from Munk alumni working in municipal governments across the province, how municipalities choose to design and implement services can make a meaningful difference in the outcomes they achieve.
Boundaries of city regions are often completely arbitrary. Toronto and all of the “regions’’ it belongs to come to mind — the Greater Toronto Area, the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, the Greater Golden Horseshoe and the Toronto-Waterloo Innovation Corridor, to name a few. This complexity complicates how regional problems — those that cross municipal boundaries — are dealt with. To deliver transit and transportation and to tackle problems like climate action and inequality, coordination is required across municipal boundaries. These regional policy challenges can’t be meaningfully addressed by one municipal government acting alone.
As I discussed in my last post, civil society organizations are essential players across Canadian policy discourses. In the final weeks of this course, we had the opportunity to work on a research project in collaboration with a Toronto-based charity to analyze a live policy issue. This required students to grapple with a complex policy issue: social assistance transformation in Ontario. In completing this project, our class was exposed to the degree of interaction between orders of government necessary to achieve such a sweeping transformation. I was grateful for this experience, which helped to enrich and further solidify my understanding of the role that charities play in influencing policy.
Finding myself at the end of this course, I’ve come to appreciate how complex urban policy and urban governance in Canada are. With a better understanding of the relationships between all orders of government and non-governmental actors and how they collaboratively shape urban policy, I feel more empowered to make a difference in the policy areas I’m passionate about.
