Smart Growth in Canada’s Provincial North

ABSTRACT

Smart growth promotes urban sustainability by encouraging increased densities, mixed use, walkable design, and access to diverse transportation and housing options. This study applies literature-derived indicators to examine urban change in the city of Prince George; British Columbia’s northern capital. Findings illustrate that key growth nodes have largely performed (e.g., densified) at or below the level of their surrounding neighbourhood over time despite a robust set of policy tools associated with smart growth. This research is one of few to examine smart growth in a northern urban context, and situates the concept within the slow growth/no growth realities of many rural and remote regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Growth management
• smart growth
• northern city
• urban planning
• node

Highlights

• Examination of Smart Growth policy in a northern urban center.

• Identification of Smart Growth indicators used in planning and urban development literature.

• Provides an assessment method for examining change at a sub-community scale.

• Nodal areas did not outpace performance of surrounding neighborhoods from 2006 to 2016.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Land-use mix was calculated using the entropy equation discussed by Frank et al. (2007) for each of the neighbourhoods and nodes: $H=-1{\sum }_{i=1}^n{p}_i\times \frac{ln\left(p_i\right)}{ln\left(n\right)}$, where H = mixed land-use index, n = categories of land use, and p_i is the proportion of land per category.According to the index, a value of 0 indicates homogenous land-use while a value of 1 indicates heterogeneous land use within a defined area.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the University of Northern British Columbia (Grant number 6005514) and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant number 430-2018-00861)