Workshop in Planning Practice

In this course, students are expected to apply the insights, skills and techniques acquired during the first year of study to a number of case studies and assignments drawn from different planning contexts. As in a professional office, students work in teams to obtain experience in cooperative action and in the management of time and effort. Projects are selected in order to expose students to the complexity of real problems, and to suggest the range of policy and planning issues which students might encounter after graduation. Senior practitioners in the Toronto region work with students in the Workshop.

Our full report, Seniors' Mobility Study for West Hill and L'Amoreaux is available for downloading at
http://www.canurb.com/aging/

Executive Summary:

Today, senior citizens make up a larger percentage of Canada's population than at any other time in the country's history. The vast majority of the baby boom generation, the single largest cohort in Canadian history, will become senior citizens in the next decade. These demographic realities pose many challenges for planners, designers, and policy makers. In particular, mobility and access to essential services within existing neighbourhoods and communities present serious challenges.

In a recent article in the Ontario Planning Journal titled Mobility Under Attack: Are Older Canadians Ready to Live without their Cars?, Glenn Miller, Gordon Harris and Ian Ferguson raised concerns about the ability of Canadian suburbs to provide for citizens that have lost the faculty to drive. Using the information in this article and other literature as a point of departure, our research team developed an assessment tool for planning staff to identify challenges to mobility for senior citizens at the neighbourhood scale.

Two sites in Scarborough, L'Amoreaux and West Hill, were used in the development of a preliminary assessment tool, which was created using a combination of site visits, GIS analysis, and interviews with planners, community workers, and senior citizens. Using this research experience, we refined our questions and developed a final assessment tool. The tool has four categories of inquiry: Urban Landscape, Pedestrian Environment, Public Transit, and Policy Tools. We have created a checklist to show which combination of methods can be used to answer each question: Observation, Consultation, or Secondary Research.

We applied this seniors' mobility assessment tool to L'Amoreaux and West Hill. This report highlights the results of the assessment, and provides recommendations for improving seniors' mobility in our study areas. The paper concludes with suggestions for scaling up the tool for application in a broader variety of neighbourhoods and jurisdictions.

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Page created by Sabrina Lau.
Updated 18 February 2007.
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