Urban Policy Reflections
Throughout the last 7 weeks of the course, my view of urban policy expanded and it’s easy to see how complicated urban policy is. Throughout each week, we learned how each the levels of government is involved in urban policy making, and this was especially relevant through our project with Maytree.
My group evaluated the institutional and legal barriers the City of Toronto would have to encounter to make a bid to be a Service System Manager (SSM). Our research emphasized how all levels of government are involved in urban policy, whether it is through the federal government providing funding to the province with strings attached that constrain the municipal government/service delivery agent, or the provincial government’s own piecemeal legislation and funding models in which multiple ministries govern different aspects of wrap-around supports. Not to mention the siloed structure of both the City and Province where different ministries and divisions are responsible for delivering different components of wrap-around supports.
The Maytree project taught me many skills relevant to being a policy analyst and allowed me to understand first-hand how urban policy is shaped. This was evident with the guests in our class last week, policy professionals from the City of Toronto, Province, and Maytree, who all had different understanding or interpretations of what the social assistance transformation in Ontario will look like. While we were learning from these guests, they were also learning from each other. This gave us all great experience working within an active and rapidly evolving policy topic, where there are many key stakeholders, and many people who may be confused. It made evident the many key stakeholders that shape urban policy, and reinforced one of the first key messages we learned in the course — that urban policy isn’t just what happens at city hall.
Overall, throughout this course I learned so much from my peers and alumni, and was able to understood urban issues in new ways. Everyone in our class had unique educational backgrounds and lived experiences and I was able to see urban policy in terms of public transportation, housing, climate change, and poverty. It highlighted to me how these important issues can intersect and impact how we see and experience our urban environments.
