The negative impacts of urban sprawl have been well documented and may include increased dependence on cars, worsened air and water pollution, and loss of wildlife habitat, farmland, and forests (Han, 2019). 

The conventional image of the Canadian suburbs is often associated with homogenous, sterile, and linear landscapes that contain little diversity in terms of their demographics. One draw of a more “complete” or “mixed housing” community is the ability to draw in and accommodate a broad range of people Grant & Scott, 2012). A complete community looks to intensify mixed housing types, rather than sprawl, and is associated with accessible services such as transportation or food (Grant & Scott, 2012). 

One paper reports that suburban areas in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario shared similar characteristics of “high rates of homeownership, high average incomes, and a greater than average share of households with children” (Grant & Scott, 2012). These characteristics also can correlate with the ability to work from home, especially with more jobs turning remote due to COVID. Unfortunately, working from home, which is often considered to be a sustainable solution to reduce commuting and car reliance, is found to be largely associated with a desire to own a larger detached home Grant & Scott, 2012). This works against planner’s attempts to densify suburban areas.

The York Region Vision Plan outlines the York Regional Council’s commitment to “strong, caring, safe communities”. The vision plan  details four areas of focus: economic vitality, healthy communities, sustainable environment, and good government. For the purposes of our research, we focused on the first three areas of interest as they contain geographically relational data. 

Figure 1: A recreated table of the York Region Vision Areas of Interest. Italicized points will be directly included in our research.

As seen above, many of the community indicators that the Vision plan aims to meet or assess are either self-reported or not publicly available data. As such, we opted to follow the intentions of the three areas of interest while interpreting them so that open data could be used. 

This study is conducted by Clara Dunlop and Patrick Gong.