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What is the Lake
Ontario Greenway?
The Lake Ontario
Greenway is an approach to the waterfront of
Lake Ontario that integrates the protection and
regeneration of the environment with community
quality of life and economic revitalization. It
is a powerful idea, backed up with a strategy
and hundreds of projects, that signals a new
sensitivity to human uses of the special places
that occur at the interface between the land and
water.
The backbone of the
Greenway is the Lake Ontario Waterfront Trail –
launched in 1995. It is currently 350km in
length and when complete will stretch 600km
along the entire Canadian shore of the Lake from
Niagara-on-the-Lake to Kingston. It connects 26
communities and hundreds of natural areas,
parks, promenades, marinas, yacht clubs, museums
and festivals.
The Greenway passes
through the largest city in Canada – Toronto,
with a population of 2.5million people. The
Greater Toronto Area has close to 5 million
people and the fastest growth rates in the
country. So on either side of Toronto there are
many suburbs – both old and new, as well as
extensive countryside beyond - including the
vineyards, soft fruit and apple orchards of the
Niagara Region and Northumberland County.
How did the Greenway
get started?
In 1988 the Canadian,
joined a year later by the Ontario, government
established a Royal Commission of Inquiry into
the Future of the Toronto Waterfront to address
– typical of most waterfront cities on the Great
Lakes and indeed around the world – the
difficult transitions of a post-industrial
waterfront. The Commission was headed up by one
of Toronto’s most popular politicians, former
Mayor David Crombie. The integrated,
ecosystem-based approach that he espoused, and
the waterfront principles he developed, caught
the imaginations of decision-makers and the
public alike. Over the next few years, there
were requests to extend his work beyond the
immediate Toronto waterfront to take on first
the GTA and later the entire Lake Ontario
waterfront.
How does the Greenway
work?
When the Royal
Commission finished its work, the Province
established a successor agency – the Waterfront
Regeneration Trust – to implement its
recommendations. Two years ago, we made another
transition out of government to become an
independent, not-for-profit charitable
organization.
Our position inside or
outside government has not altered our basic
approach. The Trust is the guardian of the
vision, and provides overall leadership and
coordination in several ways. Our key activities
include:
-
logo, branding and
signage program for the Trail
-
a multi-stakeholder
greenway strategy published in 1995, a
guidebook and map book for the Waterfront
Trail, and a recent progress report called a
Decade of Regeneration (2000).
-
a toolkit of resources
such as guidelines for design, signage and
maintenance of the Trail, a habitat
restoration manual, and many others.
-
events on the Trail
such as the Trail Launch in 1995, a Trail
Relay and a Summers Journey based on a series
of local events.
-
coordination of an
informal Lake Ontario Waterfront Network.
-
annual Partners’
meetings to share information, set priorities
and celebrate successes.
-
overall communications
such as a website and newsletters.
-
coordination of major
capital funding programs.
Our local partners –
municipalities, conservation authorities,
community groups and private landowners – are
responsible for:
There is also a regional
scale of activity, the four municipalities of
the Niagara Region are an example, where
coordinating committees provide an intermediate
scale to work on trail alignment studies,
linkages between municipalities, trail brochures
etc
What have we
accomplished over the past decade?
Over 100 projects of all
kinds – different types of trails, re-use of
cultural heritage, protection and restoration of
natural habitats, remediation of brownfields,
new residential and mixed use developments and
more
Regional and local
partnerships – over $40million on the Trail and
associated projects
What have we learned
from the past decade?
In preparing our recent
progress report – Decade of Regeneration - we
identified 9 lessons for success that clearly
emerged from reviewing the work of the past 10
years.
1. Develop regional
(lake-wide) and community visions
The community-based
vision established by the Royal Commission and
the personal leadership of David Crombie were
essential ingredients for the greenway idea to
catch fire. This lake-wide vision also provides
an important context that enhances the value of
individual efforts within the greenway.
Furthermore, we have
found that it is essential that local visions be
established to express the unique possibilities
of individual waterfronts, to develop detailed
strategies, and to stimulate community
partnerships for implementation.
2. Look beyond your
boundaries
Over the past decade,
communities around the Lake have benefited
enormously from networking and sharing
information, not only with each other, but with
other waterfront communities around the world.
For example, a small
town called Trenton on the eastern side of our
Greenway developed a Trenton Renaissance program
that is modeled on one that I visited a few
years ago called Alleghan Renaissance in
Michigan.
3. Set the stage with
ecosystem-based planning
In 1990, the Crombie
Commission’s Watershed report popularized the
“ecosystem approach to planning”. Our experience
shows us that planning processes must be
transparent, they must provide meaningful
opportunities for the involvement of all kinds
of people, and they must integrate environment,
community and economy.
On waterfronts, this
also means looking upstream to the watersheds,
and so our work includes the restoration of
healthy watersheds, as well as open space and
trail connections.
4. Use milestone
projects to build momentum
Good plans are
important, but so are bold moves. Many
communities can now point to one or two key
projects that got the ball rolling and created
the impetus to do more. Sometimes it’s a
consolidation of land, a revitalized park, a new
policy, or a project of great beauty – like the
award-winning pedestrian and bicycle bridge
across the Humber River in Toronto.
5. Design with heritage
in mind
Waterfronts are places
of great meaning, because it’s here that nature
meets culture – where early settlement occurred
in so many communities. So we find a rich
heritage on our waterfronts, and we have learned
that respecting and integrating this heritage as
we make land use changes is key to reinforcing
the unique sense of place in each location.
6. Add value with
connections
Our connections are of
three kinds: First, the linear ones along the
entire waterfront – where the synthesis of the
whole results in much greater value than the sum
of the individual parks and pieces of trail.
We are also making lots
of connections throughout the region,
particularly up the river valleys to the
headwaters moraines and escarpments, to create
what will eventually be a major network of green
infrastructure throughout the region. You may
have heard of the Bruce Trail on the Niagara
Escarpment – it was the first major regional
trail to be established in Ontario. We intersect
with it in Hamilton and parallel it in the
Niagara Region.
Finally there are the
local connections that enable people to walk or
cycle from their homes and businesses to connect
to the regional trails like the Waterfront Trail
and river trails.
7. Make it happen with
creative partnerships
Very, very few
waterfront projects involve only a single player
– you cannot do this work alone. Everywhere we
have seen creative partnerships among
governments, citizens, businesses, industries
and service clubs. Each brings a unique
perspective and contribution, and each gains a
variety of shared and individual benefits.
For example, in this
case you see the Rotary Clubs from each side of
Duffins Creek coming together to celebrate a
collaboration to build a bridge across the creek
– an important link in the Waterfront Trail but
also a community connection between the two
municipalities – Pickering and Ajax – on either
side of the river.
And this case shows a
partnership between a major waterfront industry
– Lasco Steel – that provided an easement to the
Town of Whitby to create a beautiful stretch of
trail set in a greenway.
8. Secure strategic
public investment
Public funds, including
the Provincial Jobs Ontario Capital funding in
the mid 90s and the Federal Millenium Fund more
recently, have proven to be an excellent
catalyst to get waterfront projects started and
lever additional resources. For example,
investments of $12 million from the Jobs Ontario
Capital fund between 1992-95 stimulated nearly
100 projects worth $36 million around the Lake.
9. Attract private
resources
With everything else in
place - a shared vision, innovative leadership
and strong, strategic planning – private sector
investment can be attracted. This is
particularly important in areas of changing land
use and market conditions, where public sector
investment in infrastructure and parks can
create the right climate for companies to invest
in redevelopment.
For example, in
Burlington, the revitalization of a run-down
waterfront park resulted in a boom in
restaurants and other businesses in the downtown
waterfront. The number of restaurants alone
jumped from 15 in the early 90’s to 40 by 2000.
Clearly the progress of
the past decade gives us reason to be optimistic
about the next one – and provides us with a rich
mix of ideas, information and experience. But
our review also highlights where we need to
continue to focus efforts to ensure a healthy,
sustainable future.
What are our
priorities for the next decade?
The challenges are
clear, the population of the GTA alone is
expected to rise from 5 million today to over
6.7 million by 2021. Land use changes will
continue to affect the waterfront through
conversion of former industrial lands and the
development of new housing. These inevitable
changes provide opportunities for
revitalization. But they also pose challenges in
meeting the housing, transportation and
recreation needs of the growing population
without destroying the goose that laid the
golden egg – i.e. the natural and historical
values of the waterfront and watersheds.
It can be done, but it’s
not business as usual – we have to continue to
develop new approaches, new methods and tools,
and to develop even more effective working
relationships. Our call to action for the next
decade revolves around the following 4 areas:
1. Share the vision with
a new generation
Waterfront regeneration
is an ongoing process of transformation.
Similarly, we need an ongoing process of
nurturing new leaders, and giving the next
generation the opportunities to adapt today’s
vision, philosophy and tools for regeneration to
meet their own needs. We’ve done a lot of work
with community leaders over the past decade, but
we are mindful of the need to pass on the baton,
and ensure succession to the next group of
people.
2. Complete, enhance and
promote the Waterfront Trail and Greenway
The Waterfront Trail has
proven to be an important symbol of a new
attitude to the waterfront – a catalyst for
regeneration and a project that ties all the
others together. Our vision for the Lake Ontario
Greenway is a call to action over a 50 year
timeframe. We have created about 350 km of trail
and we want to improve and expand it to over
600km over the next 5 years. Completing the
Trail and continuing to implement new greenway
projects will build on the investments of the
last decade and optimize their value. We can see
the potential benefits emerging now – tourism,
recreational amenities, local job creation,
cultural heritage protection and environmental
regeneration – encouraging us to keep going.
For all the work that
we’ve done, we find that many residents and
visitors still don’t know about the Waterfront
Trail and Greenway – we plan to increase our
efforts in promotion, communications and media
awareness.
3. Restore environmental
quality
We’ve had great success
in making the waterfront more accessible. A
“hidden agenda” in bringing people to the Lake
was to increase their awareness of its needs. We
still have problems with fish consumption
advisories, closed beaches, algae blooms, and
habitat degradation, so there’s lots to do and
we are currently developing a water campaign to
involve the public in helping to restore
environmental quality.
4. Address the
challenges of “smart growth”
I think Canadians are
lagging behind Americans in realizing that we
have a problem with urban sprawl, perhaps
because it’s taken us longer to reach a crisis
point in the development areas, and our
downtowns are still livable. This year, our
Provincial government launched a smart growth
initiative, and we believe that the work we have
been doing on the Lake Ontario Greenway provides
an excellent model for many aspects of smart
growth - protecting what is important to us –
agricultural lands, natural areas, and heritage
districts, while providing opportunities for new
development and redevelopment in the right
places. As we continue to accept new residents
to the Greater Toronto Area, the parks, trails
and habitat areas included in the Greenway are
essential amenities to ensure quality of life
and sustainable transportation options.
I do hope that this Lake
Ontario Greenway case study will provide you
with some inspiration for your own work, and
look forward to discussing it with you over the
next couple of days.
I’d like to finish with
one of my favourite quotes. It comes from the
past chair of the one of our regional committees
in the Kingston area, Ian Wilson, who said to me
when I interviewed him for the Decade book:
“Waterfront regeneration
is a project that will never be completed –
that’s part of the beauty of it. It’s a matter
of having a long term plan and seizing the
moment whenever it presents itself to do the
bits and pieces that will add together to be
something truly wonderful. To be part of
something in your time that will make a
difference in times to come.”
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