Open Collections

Street, Savonnae

University of British Columbia

This thesis aims to develop an evaluation tool for comprehensive and baseline measurements of equity in planning by conducting a content analysis of the ways equity is currently expressed in municipal official plans of the 30 most populous mid-sized cities across the Province of Ontario, Canada. The findings of the research suggest that explicit indications of equity are rare despite its identification as a key element of sustainable city planning. Rather, equity is mostly expressed through measures that implicitly advance efforts to address specific drivers of social inequity, but through an indirect approach necessitating broad evaluative tools. When accounting for the implicit and explicit ways that equity is addressed, a wide variety of cities are including dimensions of equity in their municipal official plans and they are doing so across a spectrum of equity dimensions. However, explicit equity actions are much more circumscribed. This is likely due to the circumstance that planners in mid-sized cities in Ontario face, wherein plans are embedded in complex multi-level governance directives. This circumstance creates some unique challenges in the municipal official planning process that may limit capacity to directly address equity concerns. To strengthen equity evaluation as a tool for urban planners in mid-sized cities in Ontario, this study recommends that evaluation guidelines should be directed by provincial government regulations and guidance materials and that these evaluations should include explicit equity measures.

Text

2023-05-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84529

Planning

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/