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0:00
across Canada many urban areas have expanded outward at a remarkable pace driven by decades of lowdensity development highway construction and planning policies that prioritize cars over compact design the result suburbs that stretch for miles long commutes and city budgets strained by the cost of maintaining distance infrastructure but urban sprawl isn't just about land area it's about how we build and in this video we'll explore Canada's most sprawling cities based on actual
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development patterns we're looking at places where suburban growth has reshaped entire regions from Calgary's ever moving city limits to Winnipeg's rapid road expansion to the greater Toronto area's vast network of car dependent suburbs we'll break down the history behind the sprawl how it took root and what it means today from traffic congestion and rising emissions to housing affordability and infrastructure costs and we'll even take a look at cities like Vancouver where
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planning constraints have helped limit Spraw's reach make sure you like and subscribe and let's get right into
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it calgary is often called Canada's most sprawling major city and it's with good reason set on open prairie with no natural barriers there's little to stop it from spreading outward the Rocky Mountains are over 80 km away and there's no ocean or major body of water forcing compact growth as a result Calgary has grown relentlessly over the decades pushing its edges further and further out ask any longtime Calgaryian and you'll hear stories about roads that once marked the edge of the town now
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surrounded by housing highways and big box stores those edges never held for long and unlike cities like Toronto or Edmonton which are ranked by independent municipalities Calgary absorbed many of its surrounding communities through annexation it expanded not just in population but in physical size becoming a single sprawling municipality covering over 825 square kilm that's larger than New York City but with only a fraction of the population about 1.4 million people the result a lot of land per
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person and a lot of time spent behind the wheel so what's fueling Calgary's relentless outward push well for decades it was growth rapid oil driven and largely unconstrained as a wave of new people arrived developers met the demand with subdivisions built on cheap land at the edges of the city calgary's planning system made it easy to expand outward zoning laws separated housing from shops and workplace creating large lowdensity areas that could only function with a
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car today about 75% of Calgary's new population growth happens in these sprawling suburban zones neighborhoods made up of mostly single family homes big box shopping plazas and business parks many are designed as bedroom communities where daily life depends on driving and as the suburbs have grown so has the city street network you see between 2016 and 2021 Calgary added over 550 kilometers of new road and the consequences of Calgary sprawl show up in daily life they're pretty hard to
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miss you see this is a car dependent city around 80% of Calgarians commute by car and only 12% use public transit jobs are often scattered in business parks or industrial zones far from where people live which means long drives on busy roads like Deerfoot Trail or Stony Trail traffic congestion is a routine and Calgary's per capita fuel consumption ranks among the highest in the country the layout of the city also makes it tough for transit to catch up you see
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Calgary does have a light rail system the sea train which we've talked about previously but its lines are designed mostly for commuters heading downtown new suburbs meanwhile are popping up faster than transit lines can be extended as one city councilor put it transit can't keep up when we approve new suburbs so easily and all that driving has big environmental costs you see Calgary's greenhouse gas emissions from transportations are substantial directly clashing with its recently
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adopted climate goals and the city's outward expansion has paved over wetlands grasslands and wildlife corridors in places like Riverstone new homes are being built right up against former natural areas there's also the financial cost of it a city report estimates that continuing to build lowdensity suburbs will cost Calgary an extra 16 billion over the coming decades mostly infrastructure and services you see roads sewers transit and water lines well they all have to be stretched out
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to the fringe of the cities and for the average homeowner that works out to about $500 more in taxes every year for the next 60 years urban planners call this sprawl subsidization new neighborhoods require major investments while older parts of the city struggle to get repairs and upgrades the farther a city spreads the more expensive it becomes to maintain calgary knows this and the city is starting to respond new plans aim to shift growth inwards and encourage denser developments and reduce
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reliance on cars but the demand for suburban homes remain strong they're more affordable per square foot and they continue to appeal to families calgary like many cities is caught in a sort of tugofwar between past habits and future
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priorities heading north we reach Edmonton Calgary's Alberta counterpart and another city shaped by sprawl at first glance Edmonton might not seem like a sprawl capital but take a closer look the city itself covers over 760 km that's bigger than Toronto yet it's only home to about 1 million people which is just a third of Toronto's population that translate to very low density and like Calgary much of Edmonton's growth has stretched outwards not upward drive through the city and it becomes clear
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vast suburban neighborhoods extend in every direction in the far south areas like Elorley and Heritage Valley keep pushing into farmer farmland the northwest and eastern edges are doing the same more homes more roads and more distance over the time edmonton has expanded its boundary through annexation absorbing land and in some cases entire communities to make room for growth most recently it annexed land from Bowmont bringing even more rural land into the
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city fold but unlike Calgary Edmonton is surrounded by satellite cities i'm talking about places like St albert Sherwood Park and Spruce Grove you might expect that to slow Edmonton's expansion but instead the sprawl has just leapfrogged those boundaries spilling into nearby municipalities and creating a patchwork of suburban development across the region and what makes Edmonton sprawl especially significant is its familiar formula you see it's cheap land car focused planning and
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decades of steady outward growth you see after World War II Edmonton boom the oil economy took off military bases expanded and the dream of suburban living a house a yard and a car became the new norm new neighborhoods were designed around curved streets and cute sacks all feeding to major arteries like Calgary Trail and 97th Street funneling traffic towards the city core or more recently towards the Anthony Hyundai Drive the full ring road completed in the 2010s that same ring road has become a
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blueprint for expansion as new interchanges open nearby farmland quickly gave way to housing subdivisions and retail centers the pattern is predictable build a road then build the neighborhood you see between 2016 and 2021 Edmonton added roughly 335 km of new road and that's on top of upgrades to existing ones yet over that same period population growth lagged behind in fact the city built about 3.5 m of new roads for every new residence a clear sign of horizontal expansion and
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not densification the result is a landscape that depend heavily on cars over 86% of Edmonton commuters drive to work one of the highest rates in Canada transit use is under 10% despite efforts to expand the LRT system the problem is structural many of the city's newer neighborhoods or communities further out in the southwest are far from job centers and many of those jobs aren't downtown instead they're scattered across industrial parks and office zones that aren't well served by transit the
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city's layout has created long commutes and low density developments in some of Edmonton's outer suburbs there are fewer than 50 people per square kilometer density so low that traditional public transit simply isn't practical you see the cost of Edmonton's sprawl goes far beyond long drives every new suburbs requires more than just houses as mentioned before it needs roads sewers water lines fire stations libraries and parks but with this low population densities there are fewer taxpayers per
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kilometer of pipe or pavement that stretches the city's budget and according to the Neptis Foundation between 2001 and 2011 Edmonton's population grew by 24% while its urbanized land area grew by 18% on paper that looks almost proportional but it hides a key detail a lot of that population growth came from infill in the downtown core out on the edges the city was building far more infrastructure per person than ever before and that means growing maintenance costs for decades to come
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the environmental impact follows the same pattern edmonton's transportation emissions are a major contributor to its overall carbon footprint thanks to the city's heavy reliance on personal vehicles and like other lowdensity cities Edmonton also suffers from spatial mismatch where people live in one part of the city and jobs are in another and I've been repeating this all throughout this segment and that creates longer commutes more congestion and more emissions one of the more striking
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aspect of Edmonton's growth is its sheer scale you'll hear people say you could fit entire cities like Chicago Philadelphia or Toronto inside Edmonton's boundaries and it's true but while those cities have millions of residents Edmonton has just over a million its density is only about 1,360 people per square kilometer compared to 4,500 in Toronto and nearly 3,800 in Montreal the result sprawling neighborhoods with large lots wide streets and plenty of green space which
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while pleasant come with a cost that said Edmonton is trying to turn the corner the city's 2020 city plan lays out an ambitious goal to double the population without expanding the footprint that means focusing on infill mixeduse development and transitoriented growth especially around a new LRT station the plan also ties into climate targets aiming to cut per capita emissions and improve walkability and you can already see changes in the downtown core and inner suburbs new
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midrises updated streetscapes and denser nodes designed to reduce car dependency still it's a slow shift even today proposals keep coming forward to expand the urban boundary and annexation talks with Loo County hint at the same old pattern
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now we head east to the wide prairies of Manitoba where Winnipeg holds a surprising title canada's most sprawling city relative to its growth at first glance that might seem unexpected winnipeg isn't the biggest city in the country but its development pattern is hard to ignore between 2016 and 2021 the city's population grew by just 6.6% a modest increase yet during that same period Winnipeg expanded its road network by nearly 12% adding over 1,000 kilometers of new streets that's more
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than any other metro area in Canada even outpacing Toronto a region six times larger in real terms that means for every new resident Winnipeg built almost 20 m of road a staggering figure and according to Local Logic's sprawl index this gave Winnipeg the highest sprawl score in Canada nearly three times higher than the next city on the list the housing data tells the same story a Statistic Canada report found that 15.2% of all new homes in Winnipeg during that
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period were built in urban sprawl zones far higher than in any other major cities like Vancouver which had virtually none in short Winnipeg is growing outwards and fast so why is Winnipeg so sprawled part of the answer is geography the city sits on flat open plains with no mountains lakes or oceans to limit its growth there are no green belts or strict urban boundaries so the city has simply kept building outwards field by field subdivision by subdivision but there's also a
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historical and political story further into the heart of [Music] Canada this is Winnipeg largest city of the western plane and capital of the province of Manitoba you see in 1972 Winnipeg underwent a major municipal amalgamation called Uni City merging the city with surrounding suburbs and even rural areas that created one large municipal government and removed any barriers between city and suburb sprawling into adjacent land became not just possible but administratively easy since then
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Winnipeg has steadily expanded in the post-war era early street car suburbs gave way to car-based development and the suburban model took hold urban geographer Christopher's story explains that as household gains income many Winnipeggers left their inner city neighborhoods which were sometimes seen as declining and bought homes on the outskirt often just as they could afford a car the result well it brought dispersed population even though most jobs did not move from 1996 to 2016 the
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percentage of Winnipeggers living within 5 kilometers of downtown dropped from 36.8% to 28.4% yet nearly half of the city's jobs remain in that downtown zone with 88% within 10 km of city hall it's a clear mismatch people live farther away but we're closer to the center making longer commute a daily reality for many if not all but all that sprawl comes with many consequences and not just in how far people live from the city core one of the clearest effects is car dependency between 1996 and 2016
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Winnipeg added 20,000 new car commuters by 2016 nearly 79% of residents drove to work and that number has since climbed to over 84% the impact on emission is direct personal vehicles now account for about onethird of Winnipeg's total greenhouse gas emissions it's a pattern reinforced over decades a city built around driving where long commutes and daily car use are simply built into the urban fabric transit struggles to compete and Winnipeg lacks a subway or
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even a light rail system and while the city has introduced bus rapid transit corridors most neighborhoods especially in the suburbs still rely on regular buses and many of those suburbs are built with curved streets and cute sacks making routes inefficient transfers are also common travel times are long and in a city that sprawls so widely that's a tough sale for anyone with other options only about 9 to 10% of Winnipeggers actually use transit to commute which is
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among the lowest rates for major Canadian cities the financial cost is also huge according to a striking analysis by local architecture firm Number 10 Winnipeg's urban footprint nearly doubled between 1971 and today growing 96% while its population grew just 37% in other words the city grew three times faster in an area than in people and if Winnipeg had simply maintained its 1970s density its footprint today would be 30% smaller that matters because fewer people spread
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over more lands means higher infrastructure costs every new kilometer of streets or pipes has to be maintained and I've repeated this many times but that goes to the taxpayer that has to pay the number backs that up and since 2010 the average Winnipeg taxpayer is now responsible for 10% more road length just to maintain the same level of service and Winnipeg faces a growing infrastructure deficits you see the aging road strain sewers and repairs they just outpace the available funding
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the city also found that denser older neighborhoods like Woolsley or Osborne Village generate far more tax revenue per square foot than in newer suburbs like Isle Lakes or White Ridge but simply sprawl costs more and it returns less but even then it's not just about the money it's about health and quality of life you see in 2017 Canada's chief public health officer Dr theesa Tam directly linked urban sprawl to sedentary lifestyles and rising obesity rates winnipeg checks many of those
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boxes and long winters already make it hard to stay active but in car oriented suburbs walking isn't just inconvenient it's often impossible many suburban communities have no grocery stores schools or shops within walking distances every errand becomes a car trip drive-throughs are easier to access than fresh fruit but despite all these challenges there are signs that Winnipeg is starting to shift course the city has adopted a new development plan that encourages at least 50% of new growth to
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happen as infill that is within already built up areas and not on the outskirts and there's real momentum behind that goal in the year 2000 Winnipeg issued permits for just 119 new apartment units but by 2019 that number had climbed to over 3,100 that's a significant shift towards higher density housing there are also new suburban subdivisions being built with slightly denser formats or mixed-use elements and efforts to redevelop large underused parcels within
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the city limits these are small steps but they do show a growing recognition that sprawl unchecked is just unsustainable still Winnipeg remains a classic case of Canadian sprawl as one local observer put it this is a city with no visible limit to how far it can spread unless serious change are made and the next challenge isn't just infrastructure or emissions it's cultural winnipeg's future will depend on whether people can be convinced that a townhouse near downtown or a mid-rise
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condo with transit access can offer just as much values as a detached
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home moving forwards though urban sprawl isn't just a big city issue in fact one of the fastest sprawling cities in Canada might surprise you and I'm in fact talking about Saskatoon with a metro population of just over 300,000 Saskatoon often flies under the radar in national planning debates but in recent years it has quietly become a textbook case of prairie sprawl between 2016 and 2021 the city added about 410 km of new roads more than Vancouver Montreal or
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Ottawa only Winnipeg Toronto and Calgary built more and that's a remarkable amount of infrastructure for a city its size saskatoon's population did grow in that period by about 10% but once again geographic expansion outpaced demographic growth like many prairie cities Saskatoon has no natural barriers to limit its spread the surrounding farmland is flat accessible and easy to convert into subdivisions and that's exactly what's happened on the outskirts of the city entire new neighborhoods
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have sprung up seemingly overnight today they're full of single family homes curving residential streets cute stacks and big box retail hubs is the classic suburban model scaled to the prairie to its credit Saskatoon planners have tried to innovate some new neighborhoods follow the complete community model mixing housing types adding commercial nodes and improving walkability but despite those efforts the overall outcome remains low density development and the number shows it in 2016
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Saskatoon's population density was only about 1,660 people per square kilometer within the city even less dense than Winnipeg and dramatically lower than cities like Montreal or Vancouver so why does Saskatoon sprawl one big reason is affordability and growth management saskatoon has been one of Canada's fastest growing cities in percentage terms thanks to a mix of resource sector jobs agricultural strength and immigration from smaller communities to keep housing costs in check the city has
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intentionally released land for development at its edges making suburban homes more attainable than in Canada's larger metros but there is a trade-off the more the city builds outwards the more it reinforces car dependency saskatoon's public transit system is bus only and ridership remains relatively modest for most residents driving is the default especially when key destinations like the University of Saskatchewan or industrial job zones are located far from newer residential areas and as new
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suburbs take shape the road network keeps expanding and even in a smaller city like Saskatoon the consequences of sprawl are becoming clear while traffic congestion isn't yet on the scale of Toronto or Vancouver it is rising especially on key commuter routes like the bridges into downtown as more people live farther out commuter lengths and choke points become more frequent luckily though the city has already acknowledged that simply widening roads isn't a long-term fix there's also the
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growing strain on infrastructure as mentioned before growing larger only means more maintenance costs the city reports have made the case for shift denser infield development building within the existing footprint could save millions of dollars over time the impact of sprawl isn't just physical or financial it's social as well as many of Saskatoon's newer suburbs are self-contained designed with safety and family life in mind but they're also often described as isolated or lacking
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in vibrancy you'll hear a familiar refrain from younger residents there's not much to do in insert any suburb name except mow your lawn meanwhile historic core neighborhoods like Broadway or Riverdale are seeing a resurgence and they showed that there is demand for urban living especially among young professionals and students in many ways Saskatoon is a cautionary tale a midsize city growing quickly with sprawl already creating problems usually associated with much larger urban centers but
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without the same financial resources to solve
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them next we head to Canada's capital region Otto Gatnau but urban sprawl has taken a unique shape shaped as much by policy as by geography you see in the 1950s Otto became one of the first cities in the world to try and contain sprawl with a green belt created in 1956 the Otto Green Belt is a ring of protected rural land and about 20,000 hectares of forest wetlands and farmland and this is designed to encircle the city's core and stop urban expansion in its tracks and for a while it did work
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through the 1960s and 70s development was largely contained within the belt or directed to a few designated salai towns beyond it the green belt was held up as a model of forthinking among urban planners but as Ottawa grew especially after the 2001 amalgamation that merged the city with its surrounding suburbs the model started to break down and development leaf frog the green belt today Ottawa's suburbs have spread outwards into sprawing communities like Canada and Stisville in the west
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Barhaven in the south and Orleans in the east all beyond the green belt's edges in effect the city has become a kind of donut a dense core a ring of protected grain and then another outer ring of lower density suburbs between 2016 and 2021 about 7.5% of new housing in the Ontario portion of the Ottawa metro area was built in urban sprawl zones areas beyond the established footprints to support this growth the city added roughly 340 kilometers of new roads much
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of it in its car oriented outer suburbs and while Ottawa's population grew by about 8.5% a large share of that growth was absorbed in sprawling developments outside the green belt these neighborhoods are dominated by single family homes big box retail and of course long commutes across the river in Gatnau the Quebec side of the capital region similar patterns are unfolding new subdivisions continue to push into exurban zones transforming former cottage country into permanent suburbs
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sprawl is raging outwards especially into sectors like Elmer and Masawi and sadly often without the same degree of planning coordination as on the Ontario side so while the Ottawa Gatnau region may have been built on a planning legacy it hasn't escaped the pull of suburban growth the green belt once a bold barrier to sprawl now sits between two expanding zones as the capital continue to grow outwards in all direction what makes auto sprawl especially noble is
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how it has been shaped and in some ways complicated by the very policy designed to prevent it the green belt there's no question the green belt preserved a vast swath of farmland wetlands and forests even today you can find working farms and quiet nature trails just minutes from downtown Ottawa a rare asset for a capital city but while the green bell succeeded in protecting land it also pushed development further out than it might have otherwise gone rather than
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allowing some control growth just beyond the city core planners directed it well past the green belt to place like Canada Bar Haven and Orleans the result is a city where tens of thousands of commuters live 15 to 25 km from the downtown core for example Canada is over 22 km west of Parliament Hill and Orleans is about 16 km to the east this distance multiplied by thousands of daily car trips has created traffic congestions on a few key arteries especially highway 417 westbound and the
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174 corridor in the east public transit does exist and Ottawa has invested heavily in it the transit way built in the 1980s and '90s was an early example of bus rapid transit in North America more recently the city launched the O train light rail system which is designed to reduce car use and connect major hubs but serving lowdensity far-flung suburbs by transit remains a serious challenge today about 79% of commuters in the Auto Gatnau region drive to work while prepandemic transit
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ridership hovered around 18% it dropped during CO and while it's recovering the radial design of the transit system focused on getting people downtown doesn't work well for suburbto suburb commutes and that's another key piece of Ottawa sprawl story it becomes a semi-polyric city in other words not all commutes go to the downtown core areas like Canada have become employment hubs in their own rights home to tech companies and research spark it's even often called Silicone Valley North that
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means more cross suburban driving which is even harder to serve with transit on the Quebec side Gatnau sprawl has also accelerated especially in areas like Elmer Buckingham and Masawanji while the Gano Hills to the north provides some natural limit much of the expansion has been across flat exurban land bringing new pressure to build and expand bridges across the Ottawa River as community grows in both direction the consequence of this bilateral sprawl are increasingly visible there's a usual
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list of loss of farmland rising infrastructure costs longer commutes and increased emissions but in Ottawa it's also leading to a kind of urban split socially and economically suburban neighborhoods like Bar Haven or Stitzville tend to be newer wealthier and more homogeneous while older areas inside the Green Belt like Vanet Herring Gate or Carer more diverse and often under pressure from gentrification and redevelopment community advocates also have raised concerns about resilience
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during recourse the city's most recent official plan adopted in 2021 included a controversial expansion of the urban boundary adding new land for development but at the same time it also introduced a much more ambitious vision one focus on intensification and the creation of 15minute neighborhoods communities where most daily needs can be met within a short walk or bike ride the plan sets a target by 2046 more than half of all new homes should come from infill
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redevelopment or highdensity housing near transit rather than from building new suburbs on undeveloped land it's a bold goal one that hinges on making denser more walkable urban life more accessible and attractive ottawa also has its expanding LRT system which is a major part of that strategy by building transit corridors through and beyond the core the city hopes to focus growth along those lines creating a more sustainable transit oriented region rather than letting the suburbs continue
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to spread unchecked but there are new challenges on the horizon one of them is the rise of remote work especially in the federal sector with fewer people commuting downtown daily there's growing concerns that far-flung suburbs or even rural exerbs will become more appealing reinforcing car dependency and fueling sprawl just outside the city limits which is something the government is trying to
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curb moving forward though there's no discussion of Canadian sprawl without mentioning Toronto or more accurately the GTA as of 2025 the GTA is home to about 6.7 million people making it Canada's largest metropolitan region and over the past seven decades it has witnessed some of the most extensive and rapid suburban expansion in the country's history from the 1950s through the early 2000s growth in the GTA was nothing short of explosive the city didn't just grow it spilled outward in
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every direction consuming vast tracks of farmland across the golden horseshoe the densely publicly crescent around the western edge of Lake Ontario what sets Toronto sprawl apart is its sheer scale and speed within just a few decades the region transformed thousands of hectares of agricultural land into subdivisions highways shopping centers and office parks and while Toronto's urban core enjoys a reputation as walkable and transit friendly its outer reaches tell
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a different story a sprawling car ccentric landscape you see the post-war suburban boom was driven in part by infrastructure especially the roll out of Ontario's 400 series highways you see when highways 401 400 427 were built in the 1950s and60s they opened the door quite literally for large-scale development and developers follow the roads building subdivisions that offered space affordability and a quick drive to downtown at least back then former townships like Scarboro North York
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Missaga and Mark exploded in size missaga alone went from a patchwork of rural villages to a major city of over 700,000 people by 2021 and the boom didn't stop there by the 1980s and 90s growth had pushed even further outwards to places like Brantom Ajax Pickering and Milton all seeing doubledigit growth year after year this created a region with one of the largest continuous urban footprints in North America from Hamilton in the west to Clarington in the east and north past New Market the
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GTA stretches roughly 100 km across driving through it can feel like one endless landscapes of home strip malls and logistic hub all stitched together by a vast webs of highways by the early 2000s concerns over sprawl were mounting southern Ontario's prime farmland was being paved over commute times were rising and public infrastructure was again under pressure in response the Ontario government took action in 2005 it introduced the Green Bell Plan which protected about 800,000 hectares of
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farmland forests and wetlands surrounding the GTA a year later the Places to Grow Act and the growth plan for the greater Golden Horseshoe followed aiming to curb sprawl by focusing growth in existing urban areas these policies didn't stop development but they did redirect it by the 2010s Toronto saw a shift towards intensification with new highrises and condos towers sprouting up and not just in downtown but in emerging urban nodes across the suburbs places like Maramp
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Center and Missaga City Center between 2016 and 2021 the Toronto metro area added about 658 kilometers of new roads second only to Winnipeg that may not seem dramatic as a percentage increase since the GTA already had a massive road network but in absolute terms it's a signal that region is still expanding at the edges while only about 5% of new housing was built in designated sprawl zones during that time the size of the GTA means that still translated into over 6.6,000 6,000 new homes on the
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fringe more than in any other city in Canada so even though infill and density now dominate the numbers the outer suburbs are still growing especially just outside the green belt or in pockets that were excluded from it one of the biggest issues in Toronto is its traffic congestion the average commute is about 34 minutes one way the longest in Canada and for people living in exerbs like Barrier or Ashawa that number can easily double highways like the 401 and the QEW are notoriously
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congested and the 401 through Toronto at times up to 16 lanes wide is one of the busiest highways in North America and despite constant expansion traffic has only gotten worse a classic case of induced demand where building more lanes just brings in more cars transit though is a bright spot only to a point though you see Toronto has the highest transit commute share in Canada with about 23% of commuters using transit but that figure falls sharply once you leave the
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city core many 905 area suburbs were built around cars not buses so we have wide roads long distances between shops and fewer options for people without a vehicle go Transit the rail does connect many of these suburbs to downtown but the system is radial great if you work in the core but not designed for suburb to suburb commuters which is increasingly common the GTA is investing in new LRT lines go electrification and all day service but is still playing catch-up with a region built on
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lowdensity car oriented design and then of course there's housing for years sprawl was seen as a way to keep housing affordable just move further out and you could find a detached home at a lower price and that did work for a while but now even for other suburbs like Milton or Ashawa prices have climbed dramatically and the cost of commuting in both time and money is taking its toll at the same time decades of zoning created housing system with lots of detached homes and condo towers but not
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enough of what planners called the missing middle town houses low-rise apartments and midrises that could offer more affordable options and walkable neighborhoods that's finally starting to change but the shift is of course slow and environmentally the GTA sprawl has left a lasting mark the region has lost vast areas of farmland forests and wetlands especially around the Oakidge Morane paved surfaces means more storm water runoff which increases the risk of flooding and the long commutes means
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that transportation is now the region's largest source of emissions surpassing even electricity the Ontario Green Belt introduced in 2005 was meant to protect vital ecological areas in farmland and to slow sprawl but political pressure to open green belt land for development especially in 2023 just shows how fragile that protection really is and beyond land loss sprawls also means larger homes that use more energy and car-based lifestyles that increase emissions that's part of why Canada
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remains one of the highest per capita carbon emitters among G8 countries a direct link between how we build and how much we pollute yet Toronto also offers a counterpoint a glimpse of how cities can grow up instead of out over the past two decades the city of Toronto proper I mean the actual urban core has undergone an intense vertical transformation condo towers now define the skyline especially in areas like downtown North York Center and even in suburbs like Missaga City
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Center which has grown into a dense urbanized node of its own this densification has made a real difference more people are now living close to transit walking to work or shops and avoiding long suburban commutes a Frasier Institute study found that over half of Toronto's recent housing growth came through infill and redevelopment not sprawl that means the region isn't just spreading outwards it's also becoming more compact and the benefits are already clear those tens of
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thousands of residents in new downtown condos if they weren't living there many of them would likely be driving in from suburbs every day so without that growth Toronto's already strained highways could be even worse looking ahead Toronto's future will depend on how firmly the region sticks to its anti-spraw policies the growth plan for the greater Gordon Horseshoe sets among targets for urban intensification and it designates urban growth centers where development is supposed to concentrate
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now let's head to Montreal Canada's second largest city and a city shaped in a unique way by geography you see unlike Calgary or Ottawa Montreal sits on an island which you might think would naturally contain sprawl and for a while it did you see the island of Montreal itself is relatively dense and its early investment in public transit like the Montreal Metro in the 1960s have helped slow down suburban flight compared to other cities but Sprawl still found its
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way in just off island you see over the past few decades the greater Montreal region has seen significant suburban expansion es particularly on the northshore and the southshore suburbs like Laval Nong and Prasar were once small towns but today they've grown into large cities of their own in many ways extension of Montreal's urban footprint it started decades ago you see in the post-war era street cars and railways shaped early suburb growth much like in other Canadian cities but after bridges
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like the Jacquelce Bridge in 1930 and the Champlain Bridge in 1962 were built the door was open to a way of a suburbanization families chasing the North American dream a house a yard and a quieter lifestyle we've talked about it before and that could be a possibility by moving off the island and as highways like the 15 13 20 and 40 expanded so did the BBS in the last 25 years sprawl around Montreal has accelerated dramatically studies using a metric called weighted urban
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proliferation found that the fastest growth in sprawl occurred after 1990 a time when the city's population began rising again after years of stagnation much of that new growth wasn't in the urban core it was absorbed by the off island suburbs even on the island itself sprawl has quietly crept in in areas like the West Island green fields were turned into subdivisions in older neighborhoods small post-war homes were replaced by larger lowdensity replacements actually reducing
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population density in some cases that's one of the clearest sign of sprawl more land consumed per person still Montreal's core city has some important advantages its transit system especially the metro which opened in 1966 and a network of commuter trains have long provided alternative to driving and that shows up in the numbers in 2016 about 70% of commuters in the metro regions were by car while 22% were by transit that's a lower car usage than Calgary Edmonton or even Ottawa but make no
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mistake 70% is still high and almost all of that driving comes from the off island suburbs if you look at Laval Brasau Baneville and other commuter towns card use is extremely high and transit service is limited in many of these areas and then there's the geography montreal's island layout means that commuters from off island suburbs funnel through a handful of key bridges the Champlain Bridge recently rebuilt as the Samuel de Champlain Bridge and others like the Jaci and Mercier handle
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massive volumes of traffic every day the Laval bridges to the north are just as crowded and when something goes wrong a snowstorm an accident or just construction traffic could grind to a halt for hours montreal may have more transit origin core but its regional sprawl has created a highly fragmented car dependent outer ring and geography means that there are limited paths in and out that combination off island growth and trunk point commuting is now one of the metro's biggest
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transportation challenges sprawl in Montreal also has a unique linguistic and cultural dimension you see historically Montreal's population wasn't just divided by geography but by language and culture anglophone Montrealers were more likely to settle in the west island or off island suburbs to the west while franophhone communities dominated the east end the northshore and much of the southshore as suburbs grew so did their distinct identities laval just north of the
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island became a large city with a strong franophhone character while places like Beaconsfield or Kirkland on the Southshore maintained more anglophone roots over time these cultural lines have softened but some argue that sprawl reinforced socioultural separation residents in far-flung suburbs often became less connected to the cultural life of the city especially during Montreal's economic downturn in the 1970s through the '90s the environmental impacts of Montreal sprawl has also been
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significant the off island regions included some of Quebec's richest agricultural land known as part of the province's North American pantry and sensitive wetlands along the St lawrence and Ottawa rivers much of this land was slowly paved over by suburban developments while Quebec's land protection and sore gul prevented the kind of rampant destruction seen around Toronto planners still lament the loss of green space while corridors and the rise in car pollution in fact Montreal's
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summer smog often originates from the ring of congested highways that circle the city packed with suburban communers but Montreal is starting to take meaningful steps in recent years new suburbs have been built with denser formats more town houses and multi-unit dwellings rather than rows of single family homes and perhaps most notably the city launched the Express Metropolit also known as the RAM a new electric light rail system designed to connect sprawling suburbs directly to downtown
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the Ram's first line opened 2023 can take someone from Gas to downtown Montreal in just 18 minutes a gamecher for commuters if widely used and keyword being if the REM could significantly reduce car dependence and help curve the worst effects of sprawl montreal's governance structure also played a role in 2002 a large-scale municipal merger created a short-lived mega city combining the island and several off island suburbs into one administration the idea was coordinated planning across
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the whole region but by 2006 many of those suburbs voted to demerge leading to the fragmented system we see today where local governments often have competing priorities which makes it harder to implement regionwide anti-spal strategies that said there is a regional vision the Greater Montreal Planning Authority introduced a metropolitan land use and development plan which sets targets for densification and transit oriented growth it warns that if left unchecked Sprawl could urbanize hundreds
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of additional square kilm by 2031 something planners are actively trying to prevent to put Montreal sprawl in perspective one city compared it to Zurich Switzerland since 1960 Zurich has kept its sprawl increase to about three-fold thanks to its strict growth boundaries and excellent public transit montreal by contrast saw a 26-fold increase in sprawl from 1971 to 2011 especially on the island's edges and the lesson in all this planning works and so does transit and Montreal may finally be
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taking that lesson seriously new condo towers in places like Navaz downtown revitalization near Longer Metro and growing transit investment all suggest a shift towards a more compact model one where the region grows inwards and upwards not just outward so from coast to coast or rather from the Pacific mountains across the prairie flatlands to the St lawrence Valley Canada City have all wrestled with the same question how do we grow we've seen how Calgary Edmonton stretched wide under open skies
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how Winnipeg became a quiet giant of low density how Saskatoon mirrored its bigger cousins with fast Hispanic suburbs how Otto's green belt shaped a unique kind of leaprog sprawl how the Toronto region exploded outwards then tried to reen back in and how Montreal balanced dense living with off island expansion these stories share some common roots the postwar dream of space and home ownership the rise of the automobile and decades of policy or sometimes the lack of it that made it
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easier to build out than up and the impact of that sprawl well they show up in our daily lives whether you're stuck in traffic on the Dawn Valley Parkway crawling over a bridge from Laval or inching along Deerfoot Trail in Calgary that time spent commuting is the modern tax of sprawl transit struggles to keep up and low density neighborhoods often get minimal service making the car not just a convenience but almost a necessity that dependence on driving has
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a real cost both financial environmental and even social the farther people live from jobs and services the more isolated they can become especially if they don't drive and the promise of affordability fades when transportation costs fuel and long commutes are factored in for cities the math doesn't add up either more sprawl means more roads more pipes and more infrastructure that means higher costs and lower people per square kilm in Winnipeg the urban footprint nearly
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doubled while the population grew only 37% calgary faces a $16 billion cost to services new sprawling developments a price that hits every taxpayer and environmentally sprawl is part of why Canada has one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the developed world bigger homes to heat longer distances to drive and more paved surfaces replacing natural land we lose the green fields that feed us the wetlands that protect us from floods and the trees that cool
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our cities socially sprawl can feel isolating too big houses and quiet crude sacks sound idealic and for some they are but they can lack the energy of urban life bumping into a neighborhood at the park walking to the cafe down the block or stumbling across a festival on your way home the only time you see your neighbors in sprawl is when they're backing out of the driveway but this isn't supposed to be a doom and gloom story across Canada we're seeing real change for example Vancouver which is
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boxed in by mountains and sea showed what happens when growth is forced to go upwards it's now one of the densest and least car dependent cities in the country meanwhile places like Calgary Winnipeg and Toronto are starting to rethink their futures they're investing in public transit revisiting zoning rules and promoting gentle density adding town houses laneway homes and lowrises where only single families once stood there's also a cultural shift that's happening younger generations are
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often more open to apartment living which means they're more likely to ride transit and less interested in owning a car cities are even finding ways to retrofit old sprawl turning malls into mixeduse hubs adding transit lines to suburban corridors and creating walkable centers out of former bedroom communities because the goal isn't to undo everything it's to build on what's already there and make it more livable more efficient and more connected so what did we learn the urban sprawl was
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the defining pattern of the 20th century but in the 21st we may be entering the stage of urban sustainability the next chapter depends on the choices city make now the infill plans in Winnipeg the climate strategy in Calgary the transit revolution Montreal and the protection of Toronto's green belt if it stays protected that's what the decisions look like sprawl happened by design and reversing it will require just as much intention understanding how we got here
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the highways the subdivisions the policy the dreams it's key to building a future that's smarter greener and more inclusive if you learned anything today if you enjoyed the video make sure to like comment and subscribe and I'll see you on the next
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