The City of Toronto has a new draft Official Plan to shape our City's future. |
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Toronto enjoys a quality of life today that is the envy of people around the world. But what about tomorrow? How can we ensure that we maintain this enviable position? We must consider the things that contribute to our quality of life in order to preserve and enhance it for the future. That is why the City of Toronto has created a new draft Official Plan.
A major milestone
The new Official Plan is a major milestone in the short history of the new City. Building on all the work of the past three years, the new Official Plan is a blueprint for a healthy future and a strategy for directing growth in the City of Toronto over the next 30 years. It recognizes that as a "built-out" city, Toronto's future is about re-building and re-urbanizing - about "growing up" because we have exhausted the opportunities to "grow out". It is not a "harmonization" of all the former plans; it is a new plan for a new city.
The new Plan is a long-term policy document, strategic and high level in its approach to future development, but clear in its vision. As the document states, " The vision of the Plan is about creating an attractive and safe city that evokes pride, passion and a sense of belonging - a city where everybody cares about quality of life." The strategy for Toronto's future focuses growth where it can realize the greatest social, environmental and economic benefits. Some parts of the city, about 75 per cent of its geographic area, will mature and evolve but will see only limited physical change.
Other parts of the city, about 25 per cent of its geographic area, will change and grow, and grow in ways that benefit local communities, the city and the region. A major achievement of the new Plan has been to capture this growth strategy for the city within eight general land use designations. It is also typical of most plans for major cities, even in Ontario, in that it does not prescribe density numbers.
The new Plan also contains secondary plans for 22 areas in the city, needed to provide further direction for major growth areas and approximately 230 site- and area-specific policies.
Together with the public, Council and our corporate partners, the new Official Plan builds on significant public input during the entire Toronto Plan process. Beginning with the Official Plan Launch in April 1999 and guided by the Official Plan Council Reference Group, staff met and consulted with hundreds of individuals, groups and organizations on the new Official Plan. It is the culmination of extensive consultations with a broad cross-section of community and corporate stakeholders. Over 133,000 visits to the Toronto Plan Web site and hundreds of e-mail and written submissions are indicative of the level of involvement and interest the new Official Plan has received.
Our story
On January 1, 1998, the new City of Toronto was created through the amalgamation of one regional and six local municipalities - Metropolitan Toronto, York, East York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, North York and Toronto. One of the new Council's first major decisions, in April of 1998, was to ask that a new Official Plan be prepared to replace the plans inherited from the former municipalities. Council recognized the need to bring the City together around a dynamic vision in order to chart a course that could carry the country's largest city and the province's capital forward into the new century.
It began in March 1999, when Council adopted a framework to guide the creation of the new Official Plan, called Toronto Plan. Council recognized that there was a need to "break the mould" of our current plans and search for fresh strategic approaches to city building.
In April of 1999, we launched the Toronto Plan program by sponsoring a major forum on the future of the City. It brought together City Councillors, the public and local and international experts to learn about what needs to be done to ensure that Toronto responds to economic and social and environmental challenges in a way that improves on the quality of life we enjoy today. Extensive research and public consultation began in earnest immediately following the forum.
In the spring of 2000, a major discussion paper, Toronto at the Crossroads: Shaping our Future was released. Based on consultation and research to date, the Directions Report set the table for a public debate about the choices facing the City. The Directions Report emphasized the connections between the health of the city and the surrounding region and the need to invest in the three pillars of our quality of life: community, economy and environment. It outlined a new approach to land use planning based on looking at the City through three "lenses": stable, incremental change and major change. It put forward a "game plan" for implementation using campaigns and opened the door to debate and discussion on how we should shape our city in the decades to come. The Directions Report challenged people to envisage a great city, but also cautioned that "Toronto will be as good as we choose to make it."
The Directions Report was discussed at town hall meetings, meetings of ratepayer associations, in the media, at various stakeholder and reference group meetings, and through feedback forms on this Web site. Two of the five Official Plan newsletters provided information about the key challenges facing Toronto and the recommended policy directions to address these challenges that were identified in the Directions Report.
The Official Plan was approved by City Council in November 2002. On July 6, 2006, the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) issued an Order, bringing the majority of the City of Toronto's new Official Plan into effect and repealing most of the seven municipal Official Plans that the new City of Toronto inherited.
