The Ontario Greenbelt: Shifting the Scales of the Sustainability Fix?

Abstract

The government of Ontario, Canada, has passed legislation to protect large parts of the southern portions of the province from most development. An extensive plan for a Greenbelt that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area and other regional growth centers was introduced. This article looks at the new policy as a spatial strategy that shifts the scales of environmental and growth management policy in Ontario. The legislation also sets the framework for a state spatial project; that is, a set of changes in how the regional state internally operates. The current Greenbelt legislation is a new step in a longer term development by which governments in Ontario have attempted to regulate the relationships between cities and regions, town and hinterland. Overlapping strongly with what is usually called the Toronto bioregion between the Niagara Escarpment, Oak Ridges Moraine, and Lake Ontario, the Greenbelt reorganizes space in southern Ontario in ways that would further ecosystem policies and practices in the area. Theoretically guided by newer debates on rescaling and regionalism, and based on close reading of the planning and policy documents on the Greenbelt as well as a series of expert interviews, we argue that the current Greenbelt legislation is an act of up-scaling traditional urban-regional regulation in southern Ontario, which we shall call extended metropolitanization. Such rescaling recasts traditional political conflicts in new terms. We conclude that extended metropolitanization in southern Ontario has been a process that has brought nature, the state, and governance together into a new regional sustainability fix.

El gobierno de Ontario, Canadá, ha aprobado una ley para proteger grandes partes de los territorios del sur de la provincia de ulterior desarrollo. Se ha presentado un plan extensivo para un Cinturón verde que circunde al Gran Toronto y otros centros de crecimiento regional. Este artículo presta atención a la nueva política como una estrategia espacial que cambia las escalas de política ambiental y de manejo del crecimiento de Ontario. La legislación también fija el marco de referencia para un proyecto estatal espacial, esto es, un conjunto de cambios de cómo debe operar internamente el estado regional. La actual legislación del Cinturón Verde es un nuevo paso en un plan de desarrollo más largo mediante el cual los gobiernos de Ontario han intentado regular las interrelaciones entre las ciudades y regiones, pueblo y su entorno. En una fuerte superposición con lo que usualmente se denomina la bioregión de Toronto entre la Escarpa del Niágara, Oak Ridges Moraine, y el Lago Ontario, el Cinturón Verde reorganiza el espacio en el sur de Ontario en forma tal que reforzará las políticas y prácticas ecosistémicas en el área. Guiados teóricamente por debates más nuevos sobre reescalas y regionalismo, y en base de una lectura atenta de los documentos de planificación y política acerca del Cinturón Verde, así como en series de entrevistas a expertos, argumentamos que la legislación actual del Cinturón Verde es un acto de mejorar la regulación urbana-regional tradicional en el sur de Ontario, el cual denominaremos metropolitización extendida. Tal re-escalamiento reasigna tradicionales conflictos políticos en nuevas formas. Concluimos que la metropolitización extendida en el sur de Ontario ha sido un proceso, que ha juntado a la naturaleza, el estado y gobernanza en una nueva fijación de la sostenibilidad regional.

Key Words:

• greenbelt
• regionalism
• sustainability fix

关键词:

• 绿化带
• 区域化
• 可持续性解决

Palabras claves:

• cinturón verde
• regionalismo
• fijación de sostenibilidad

Notes

*The research for this article was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the project entitled “Metropolitan governance and international policies: The cases of Montreal and Toronto.”

¹ The Greenbelt Study Area was larger than the eventual size of the Greenbelt and included lands under the jurisdiction of the Greater Toronto Area regions of Durham, York, Halton, and Peel; the cities of Toronto and Hamilton; the tender fruit and grape lands as designated in the Region of Niagara's official plan; the Niagara Escarpment Plan; and the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan (MMAH 2004).

² The 416 telephone area code is used to describe the area within the City of Toronto, and the 905 area code refers to suburban areas outside Toronto (including the Niagara Peninsula, Hamilton, and Oshawa). In politics, the 416 area traditionally has strong ties to the Liberal and New Democratic Party, whereas the 905 area has been a Progressive Conservative stronghold.

³ There is terminological imprecision here with regard to the use of the term metropolitan/métropolitain in English and French. See Boudreau et al. (2006, 2007) for a discussion of this terminology in various literatures.

⁴ The Growth Plan defines complete communities as meeting “a person's needs for daily living throughout an entire lifetime by providing convenient access to an appropriate mix of jobs, local services, a full range of housing, and community infrastructure including affordable housing, schools, recreation and open spaces for their residents. Convenient access to public transportation and options for safe, non-motorized travel is also provided” (MPIR 2006, 41).

⁵ In Ontario, the municipalities are divided into different tiers or levels. A lower tier municipality refers to a town, township, city, or village and is part of a higher level of municipal government. An upper tier municipality refers to a county, region, or district and has a number of local municipalities within its jurisdiction.