18-Geom-B6 Land Use Planning and Environmental Management · May 2014
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams, May 2014 — 04-Geom-B6, Land Use, Planning & Environmental Management. Three hours; closed book (any non-communicating calculator permitted). Format: seven questions of equal value (20 marks each); the paper directs that answering any five (5) of the seven constitutes a complete exam (100%), and the first five as they appear in the answer book are marked. All seven questions are solved in full below so the set serves as a complete study resource. Answers are framed in the Canadian planning context (Statistics Canada’s census-geography definitions; the Canadian Institute of Planners; provincial planning legislation, official community plans and regional growth strategies), consistent with the Engineers Canada / EGBC syllabus for this exam.
Reference texts: G. Hodge & D. Gordon, Planning Canadian Communities: An Introduction to the Principles, Practice and Participants (Nelson, current ed.) — the standard Canadian reference for this exam code; I. McHarg, Design with Nature (1969) — the sieve/overlay method underlying GIS site analysis; J. Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991); Statistics Canada, Census Dictionary (population centre, census metropolitan area and census agglomeration definitions); Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) materials; World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Brundtland Report, 1987); provincial planning statutes (e.g., Ontario Planning Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. P.13; British Columbia Local Government Act) and representative official community plans / regional growth strategies (Metro Vancouver, the Greater Golden Horseshoe Growth Plan).
Question 4 uses the exam’s terms “urbanized area” and “metropolitan area.” In current Statistics Canada usage the closest official equivalents are the population centre (which replaced the older term “urban area” in 2011) and the census metropolitan area (CMA). The answer uses the official Canadian terms and notes the correspondence, rather than importing the U.S. Census “urbanized area” definition.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
The term edge city was coined by Joel Garreau (1991) to describe a new form of urban concentration that grew up on the suburban edge of large metropolitan regions in the automobile era. An edge city is a large concentration of offices, retail and employment — a true business and activity centre — located not in the historic downtown but out at a suburban highway node, typically at the intersection of freeways or beside an airport, in territory that a generation earlier was residential suburb or farmland.
Characteristics of an edge city. Garreau proposed rough quantitative markers: at least 5 million square feet of leasable office space and at least 600,000 square feet of leasable retail space, more jobs than bedrooms (so it is a net importer of workers by day), and a place perceived as a single destination — and a place that was nothing like a city as recently as 30 years before. Beyond the numbers, its defining features are:
Automobile-oriented and highway-anchored. The edge city is organised around the car and the freeway interchange, not around a transit-served pedestrian core; access is by expressway and the internal environment is dominated by roads and parking.
Low-rise, dispersed, campus form. Development is spread out in office parks, business campuses, big-box retail and malls set in large surface parking lots, rather than the dense, contiguous street wall of a downtown.
Abundant free surface parking. Parking is plentiful and free, reflecting and reinforcing the car dependence — the opposite of the constrained, priced parking of a traditional core.
Multi-functional but privately managed. It concentrates employment, shopping and services (and increasingly hotels and entertainment), but much of the “public” realm is privately owned and managed (the mall, the office campus) rather than a public street grid.
No single historic centre or unified government. It usually lacks a traditional civic core, clear boundaries, and often a single municipal identity — it may straddle several municipalities and have grown without a master plan.
How edge cities differ from traditional urban centres in Canada. A traditional Canadian downtown (central Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Halifax) has a dense, high-rise, contiguous built form on a public street grid; it is served by and organised around transit and walking; it has a historic civic and cultural core with public squares and institutions; parking is scarce and priced; and it sits within a single, established municipal government with a long planning history. The edge city inverts almost all of these: dispersed low-rise form, car/freeway orientation, free surface parking, privatised space, no historic core, and fragmented or absent governance. It is worth noting that the pure Garreau “edge city” is more a U.S. phenomenon; in Canada, stronger regional planning, protected greenbelts and deliberate transit investment channelled much suburban office and retail growth into planned suburban activity centres / regional town centres (Metrotown and Surrey City Centre in Metro Vancouver, North York Centre and Mississauga City Centre in the Toronto region). These are the Canadian analogue — suburban employment nodes — but, unlike the unplanned American edge city, many are transit-served and were consciously designated in a regional growth strategy, which softens the sprawl characteristics.
