UEP hosts visionary planning conference with Canadian officials

Tufts Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning last Friday hosted a conference on the future of city planning in Quebec and New England.

The conference, “Planning for the Possible,” was funded by the Government of Quebec and the Government of Canada, according to UEP Associate Professor Justin Hollander. Participants included scholars and government officials from both Canada and the United States. Conference organizer and UEP graduate student Peter Ciurczak explained that the conference encouraged participants to think beyond current planning ideas.

“What we were trying to do was kind of create a space where we could talk about visionary planning, the kind of planning that resulted in works like the Emerald Necklace, the Olmsted Parks -- planning that doesn’t focus on only what’s probable, but planning that actually takes a look at what would happen if we designed the best we could,” Ciurczak said.

Hollander explained that he has done research on urban planning issues in Canada and Quebec, and was inspired to bring people together from both Canada and the U.S. after attending a lecture by Julian Agyeman, the conference’s keynote speaker and a UEP professor at Tufts.

“I had gone to a lecture he delivered, and he was talking about this new and powerful idea about how, for the history of urban planning, people had always been really visionary and bold, and had come up with these great ideas for how cities could change and be better, but that in recent decades, that energy, that passion has really dissipated,” Hollander said. “We came up with this idea of doing a conference, using the geography of New England and Quebec as a focus to try to start to explore the questions of possibilities.”

Hollander noted that both his research and the conference revealed the way in which government structure impacted planning decisions.

“In Quebec there’s a lot more centralized authority, so local governments don’t have as much say in the community,” he said. “What I was impressed with was that bigger-picture thinking at the provincial level has created a framework where you don’t really have the same problems of housing abandonment that are manifested in New England cities like Springfield and Bridgeport.”

An additional difference between the two areas is the diversity of their respective populations, according to Hollander.

“We are a much more diverse region than Quebec is, and so we have certain ways that we kind of manage our diverse areas, and there’s a lot to talk about how we can do a better job, how we can better empower the disadvantaged communities to be able to create more just outcomes,” Hollander said. “Quebec is not so diverse in terms of ethnicity, but they have what they call the Quebec question -- the special status of Quebec in the Canadian system -- and there’s this minority Anglo population that has really struggled in recent decades, and so they have their own kind of problems. The conference was an opportunity to try to talk about these things and kind of share these best practices.”

Ciurczak added that the scholars discussed these dynamics when trying to expand the idea of what was possible.

“A lot of [the conference] was a focus on sustainability, increasing transit to impoverished or low income and challenged neighborhoods -- the things that would make a city feel more like a whole, bring more people into how a city functions [and give] them an idea of how to do so through creative applications of finance and expanding transit,” he said.

Overall, Hollander said the conference will hopefully allow him and other participants to enhance dialogue and strengthen connections between planning institutions in the two regions.

“There is this kind of corridor from Montreal to Boston, and they want to strengthen that corridor,” he said. “They want to strengthen communication, exchange of ideas and commerce along that whole corridor, and so that’s kind of how they became interested.”

Hollander plans to continue his work with Canada and Qu?bec, and hopes to hold another conference in the future.

“It was a really great community to be part of, and we’re hoping to continue to find ways to enhance Tufts’ relationship with Qu?bec and Canada,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of commonality.”