Producing Regionalism: Regional Movements, Ecosystems and Equity
in a Fast and Slow Growth Region
Gerda R. Wekerle and Teresa V. Abbruzzese
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
HNES 109, York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3J 1P3
Corresponding Author: Gerda Wekerle
gwekerle@yorku.ca
Abstract
Urban development pressures, preservation of environmentally sensitive areas and
regional planning are the focus of current debates on regionalism in both fast and slow
growth regions. Based on two cases- a campaign to preserve ecological integrity and
reduce sprawl on the Oak Ridges Moraine in the Greater Toronto Area and Rochester’s
anti-sprawl campaign for regional equity- the paper examines how two anti-sprawl
campaigns brought to the fore alternative constructions of regionalism. In the fast
growing Toronto region, citizen mobilization and upper tier intervention resulted in a
legislative base for regionalism. In the slow growth Rochester region, the city had limited
success in gaining regional redistribution. Such divergent outcomes relate to differences
in intergovernmental relations, the city’s influence on the region, receptivity of suburbs to
smart growth, and the potential for values of nature preservation and justice to mobilize
regional coalitions.
Keywords: regionalism, regional governance, regional planning, ecosystem planning,
regional equity, sprawl, social movements, Oak Ridges Moraine, Toronto, Rochester
1
An interest in regions and regionalism is not new. However, there is a revival of
interest in regionalism with the growing attention to the urban region ( city and
surrounding suburbs) as a critical functional unit in today’s global economy and a search
for policies to promote regional competitiveness within a globalized economy (Frisken
and Norris 2001; Katz 2000). Debates on regionalism have tended to focus on the core
values of efficiency and economic development. Counterposed to this is an emphasis on
regional policies that will even out social inequities within a region, specifically between
cities and their suburbs (Dreier et al. 2001). A third strand of scholarly work that is
generally not considered in discussions of regionalism is ecosystems planning and
management which occur at a regional scale and also call for regional coordination of
public policies and regional land use planning responses.
In all three of these literatures, there is a new focus on how regionalism is
contested and constructed by actors from outside the market or the state. In the UK,
state-driven regional spatial planning and economic development is being politically
challenged by activists supporting parallel networks of regional movements
(Jones and MacLeod, 2005). In the US, social justice coalitions have organized for fair
housing and taxation policies to even out disparities in resources and services of core
cities, inner suburbs and developing suburbs (Orefield, 2002). Anti-sprawl movements
have sprung up on the exurban fringe of many cities to champion various forms of smart
growth and urban growth boundaries (Ozawa 2004; Lapping 2005; Flint 2006; Schmidt
2008). Grassroots communities have mobilized to control urban development in
environmentally sensitive areas and have become active participants in forging regional
land use policies that preserve nature (Mason 2004).
2
This article examines the commonalities and differences in the production of
regionalism by collective movements in two cities, one in Canada, another in the US, on
opposite sides of Lake Ontario. We compare two very different approaches to bringing
about regional perspectives in public policy and their outcomes. In the context of a fast
growing region, we analyze an exurban-initiated campaign to control sprawl and preserve
the ecological integrity of a natural feature, the Oak Ridges Moraine in the Greater
Toronto Area (Figure 1 about here). This developed into a regional movement based on
alliances among exurban and urban, civil society and state actors that were successful in
obtaining legislative change at a regional scale integrating ecosystem and development
planning. Within a declining economic region, the city of Rochester’s urban-led
campaign to limit sprawl and mobilize for regional equity floundered in the absence of
support from suburban residents, regional and state governments. We examine the ways
in which growth or lack of growth in the region make a difference in receptivity to claims
for the preservation of regional nature and regional redistribution.
From 1989 until 2002 when the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan (2002)
was passed by the provincial government, exurban residents across the Toronto region
mobilized to publicly challenge development proposals at local council meetings, public
protests and in direct action campaigns At the same time, the city of Rochester was
attempting to forge a region-wide anti-sprawl movement. This emphasized concerns for
regional justice absent in the Moraine campaigns focused on preservation of natural
heritage. From 2001 to 2005, the research team undertook a multi-method study of
Toronto involving participant observation at municipal council meetings, provincial
public consultation exercises, citizen rallies and protests; analysis of government
3
documents, NGO position papers and newspaper archives; and interviews with municipal
and provincial planners, and representatives of environmental and homeowner
organizations. Research in Rochester included a field visit in 2001 and interviews in the
fall of 2003 with political staff in the mayor’s office, municipal staff and planners in the
city and county, and representatives of advocacy groups. This comparison highlights
some of the key factors that resulted in the success of the Moraine campaigns as the
failure of the Rochester effort.
Framing regionalism
Urban regions are portrayed as key sites of contemporary state institutional and
spatial restructuring (Brenner, 2004; Haughton and Counsell, 2004). According to Bruce
Katz (2000, p.3), “The fundamental premise of regionalism is that places have
relationships and connections to other places that should not be ignored.” These
relationships cross jurisdictional boundaries and are said to require cross-jurisdictional
solutions through new forms of regional coordination, land-use planning and governance.
These themes are said to constitute a new regionalism (Frisken and Norris, 2001).
A significant structural shift in political organization and planning practice
distinguishes the old from the new regionalism. The old regionalism stems from the
1920s and two rival metropolitanist and regionalist traditions (Fishman, 2000). It places
emphasis on the central city as the dominant urban form, and the suburbs as subordinate
to the city. It is associated with government and structural approaches to regional
coordination and planning and policies to decentralize the power of the city through
scattered settlements in towns linked by highways and surrounded by greenbelts. It
focuses on governance and coalition building that seeks to collaboratively involve
4
private, non-profit, and public interests. In recent times, there seems to be widespread
aversion to upper tier government intervention in imposing regionalism, particularly
through the creation of regional government and regional governance structures.
Implementation of regionalism, at least in the context of US cities, relies on incentive
frameworks and incremental, ad hoc partnership arrangements around specific problems
such as the coordination of regional transportation systems (Wheeler, 2002).
According to Benjamin and Nathan (2001), the revival of regionalism in the
1990s focused on core values of efficiency (in the delivery of services); competitiveness
(for global capital and urban restructuring); equity (between inner city and suburbs) and
community. In their view, “redistributive metropolitanism gives primacy to equity;
functional regionalism emphasizes efficiency; economic regionalism places economic
development or competitiveness first” (Benjamin and Nathan 2001, p.39). Redistributive
metropolitanism emphasizes the need for policies to coordinate central-city and suburban
economic development to reduce disparities of income and tax bases (Swanstrom, 2001).
When applied to city regions, proposals for social justice simultaneously address
disinvestment in core cities and growth on the urban periphery (Rusk, 1999; Orfield,
2002), as well as targeting racial segregation and the unequal provision of services,
infrastructure and tax sharing (Bullard, et al. 2000; 2007).
New regionalist frameworks also inform initiatives addressing growth and
fragmentation in metropolitan regions through spatial planning and managing
metropolitan growth through policies such as smart growth (Wheeler, 2002). These
holistic planning approaches attempt to integrate issues of land use, transportation, the
economy, environment and equity. They herald a revival of a spatial focus in regional
5
planning and attention to place within a region (Wheeler, 2002). Yet, generally missing
from new regionalist debates are the environmental problems that cross jurisdictional
boundaries, such as air and water quality, and the preservation of large ecosystems and
watersheds that may cross even national boundaries requiring policy responses at a
regional scale (Cortner and Moote, 1999). Environmentalists introduce concepts such as
biodiversity, protection of species at risk, and principles of ecosystem planning to
ongoing debates about growth management and regionalism.
Contrasting Regional Governance and Regional Economies
Debates on new regionalism have taken very different forms in US and Canadian
cities. In Canada, municipalities are incorporated under provincial authority and have no
constitutional standing. Canadian provinces exercise authority in areas of region-wide
importance and have the jurisdictional power to impose more structural change on local
governments than do state legislatures in the United States (Sancton, 2001). In Ontario,
between the mid-1970s and 2001, various attempts to create forms of regional planning
and governance floundered (Frisken, 2007; Wekerle, et al. 2007). Over the past thirty
years, the provincial government focused on coordination rather than intervention in
growth management in the Greater Toronto Area. Regional planning was limited by
various factors: competition for growth between regional governments and member
municipalities; municipal councils’ right to decide the nature and rate of development
within their boundaries; and the fragmentation and competition within provincial
ministries with interests in the GTA (Frisken, 1993). Lately, the provincial government
has taken a more interventionist stance by providing a legislative base for growth
management policies with the passage of the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan
6
(Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, 2002), followed by the Greenbelt
Plan (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, 2005), and Places to Grow
Plan (Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure and Renewal, 2006).
The city of Toronto, with a population of 2.48 million, remains the strongest city
in the region and is the economic hub of Canada. It is also the most diverse city in
Canada, with 49 per cent born outside of Canada and 43 per cent visible minority
population (Statistics Canada 2007). Since amalgamation with its first-tier suburbs in
1998, it is the largest city in Canada and is a one-tier level of government. The growing
suburbs and an exurban fringe are governed by a two-tier system that includes
municipalities, four regional and three county governments. In contrast to many suburban
municipalities, Toronto has experienced a fiscal crisis since amalgamation, largely due to
provincial downloading of transit and social costs.
Between 2001 and 2006, the Greater Golden Horseshoe, stretching from Hamilton
to Oshawa, gained 630,000 people- an increase of 8.4 per cent. Six of the 15 census
metropolitan areas that had growth rates higher than the national average were in the
Greater Golden Horseshoe, including Barrie (+19.2%), Oshawa (+11.6%) and Toronto
(+9.2%) (Statistics Canada, 2007). The Toronto Region, with a population of
approximately 5.1 million in 2006, had a 20 percent growth rate over the past ten years,
and is ranked as one of the fastest growing large cities in North America (GHK Canada,
2002).1 Forecasts indicate that the population of the region will reach 7.4 million by
2031 (GTA Steering Committee 2000).
1
It is only surpassed by such US cities as Portland Oregon which grew by 26.3 per cent between 1990 and
2000, Dallas (29.3 per cent), Houston (25 per cent), Denver (30 per cent), Atlanta (38.9 per cent and Las
Vegas (83 per cent) (GHK Canada 2002, 13).
7
Suburban and exurban municipalities experienced the highest growth rates, with
towns and cities north and west of the city of Toronto, like Milton, Brampton and
Vaughan, growing by 71, 33 and 31 percent respectively over a ten year period (Statistics
Canada, 2007). In response to sprawl and infrastructure costs associated with growth,
some municipalities have committed to a new regime of growth that favors more compact
development and increasing densities. For example, the Town of Markham has been the
regional leader in supporting new urbanist principles, with one of the town’s most highprofile projects, Cornell, now entering its third phase of construction. Commitment to
sustainable growth has also shaped its newest project- Downtown Markham- a 243-acre
mixed-use master planned site that combines smart growth and new urbanist principles,
with energy-efficient building techniques (Van de Ven, 2007). Recently, the Town of
Oakville (20 miles south of Toronto, and part of the GTA) has proposed a high-profile
greenfield development for 50,000 people that preserves 900 hectares of natural heritage
corridors through a natural heritage systems-based idea of planning as a model of ‘green
planning’ (Gombu 2008).
In US cities, municipal fragmentation has been addressed by both top down (state
and national policies) and bottom up approaches (interlocal agreements and cooperative
arrangements) (Benjamin and Nathan, 2001). Bottom up approaches involve voluntary
agreements between local business and civic groups and joint projects relating to
economic policies and regional growth management that cross jurisdictions (Frisken and
Norris, 2001; Wheeler, 2002). In some states, regional councils have formed to develop
programs such as tax- base sharing (Orfield, 2002) and state-wide planning for urban
growth boundaries and environmental preservation (Wheeler, 2004). Oregon has been the
8
exemplar of state-wide intervention in growth management (Ozawa, 2004), although
recent legislation has overturned growth management plans in place for over 30 years. In
the US, federal funding of infrastructure projects has encouraged voluntary coordination,
but only state governments have the power to change laws for regional planning or to
mandate tax-base sharing or fair share housing laws (Frisken and Norris, 2001). State
governments may indirectly exercise power over local governments by creating new
regional or subregional entities to provide services and compelling localities to act with
or through them in order to receive state aid. Thus, support from the top is often key to
regional reform (Benjamin and Nathan, 2001).
Although the Rochester Metropolitan Area, consisting of the city and six counties,
had a population of 1.1 million in 2002, the population of the city of Rochester was only
219,773 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2006). Since 1950, the city has lost 34 per cent of its
population. From 1990 to 2004, the city lost 37 per cent of its tax base and first – tier
towns are also experiencing a decline (Rusk 2005), although a couple of towns, (e.g.
Henrietta), are among the fastest growing in the region. There are more people living in
adjacent suburban Monroe County (735,000 residents in 2002) than in the city of
Rochester. Rusk (2005) concludes that outer-suburban growth occurs at the expense of
the central city, inner suburban towns and villages.
Upstate New York as a whole has had a slow growth economy (Pendall, 2003a).
Mayor William Johnson Jr. (2004) describes Rochester as part of the 59 US cities that
exhibit the “shrinking city syndrome.” A decrease in the city’s population has led to a
shrinking tax base overall and a declining commercial tax base. In 1990, only 19 per cent
of families in the region lived in the city of Rochester but these constituted 58 per cent of
9
all families living in poverty in the region (Pendall, et al. 2001). The city and surrounding
suburbs are also highly segregated by race. Seventy-seven per cent of the region’s
African American population lives in Rochester, whereas in the region surrounding the
city, most jurisdictions are almost exclusively white (Pendall, et al. 2001).
The six-county Rochester Metropolitan area (MSA) has also been thinning out as
population continues to convert greenlands to suburbs (Pendall, et al. 2001).
The population of Monroe County has declined slightly, yet the amount of land used for
development has increased by 80 percent (City of Rochester, 2004). This continuing
outward spread has resulted in higher costs of constructing and maintaining infrastructure
for an ever more dispersed population.
“The Moraine Needs Habitat, not Houses”: Campaign to Preserve the Oak Ridges
Moraine in the Greater Toronto Area
Beginning in the early 1990s, a regional movement emerged in the Greater
Toronto Area focused on preserving a physical feature, the Oak Ridges Moraine (ORM),
as an entire ecosystem. The Oak Ridges Moraine is a landform characterized by glacial
sediments, hills, kettle lakes, small towns and villages extending 160 kilometers east to
west with an average width of 13 kilometers. It crosses 32 municipalities, three regional
municipalities and four counties; 65 per cent lies within the Greater Toronto Area –and
90 per cent of it is privately owned. It is comprised of diverse ecosystems such as forests,
savannahs, prairies, wetlands, lands and streams, and plays an important role as a
reservoir and recharge area for ground water and as the headwaters of 65 rivers and
streams. More than half the Moraine is used for agricultural and rural purposes and it is
subject to heavy pressures from suburban housing developments and recreational
demands from urban residents. In the mid 1990s, these development pressures
10
accelerated under a neoliberal and Conservative provincial government that relaxed
environmental regulations and planning controls on development in the region.
The fragmentation of governance on the Moraine meant that piecemeal
development approvals by lower-tier municipalities, three regional governments and four
counties threatened ecologically sensitive Moraine lands. Opposition to development was
led by exurban homeowners and urban environmentalists who articulated an
environmental vision for the region based on conservation of sensitive natural areas,
watersheds and species at risk. This challenged urban sprawl and the accelerating
processes of urbanization on the Moraine. It introduced the notion of integrated regional
planning that would simultaneously preserve nature and control development.
Forging a Regional Movement
Coalitions of middle class exurban homeowners and environmental groups
mobilized civil society, challenged and delayed local development applications at
municipal councils and through the courts, and pressured the provincial government to
pass legislation to take greater centralized control over regional planning and
environmental protection. This was an attempt to delimit the powers of municipalities
and regional governments to approve development applications on ecologically sensitive
Moraine sites. In 2000, as the extent of potential environmental destruction from
proposals to develop more than thirty thousand units of new housing units became known
across the region, residents living in subdivisions, hamlets and rural areas of the Moraine
mobilized in opposition. They opposed developers, municipal councils and planners who
approved development applications and seemed committed to growth limitation.
Alliances among mostly middle class homeowners and environmental activists from local
11
(exurban and urban), regional, national and international environmental organizations
forged a movement to save the Moraine (Wekerle, et al. 2008a, 2008b). This became a
regionally- based networked movement that shifted the debate from local environmental
issues to regional planning solutions.
Activists used the judicial system to challenge development on environmentally
sensitive lands, beginning with planning applications at municipal councils (Federation of
Ontario Naturalists, nd). When this was unsuccessful, particularly on parts of the Moraine
subject to the most development pressures, they joined judicial challenges at the Ontario
Municipal Board, a provincial land use appeal body, where developers had appealed
directly for development approvals on the Moraine. As the province was unresponsive to
demands for intervention, local groups launched legal challenges directly to the federal
government’s Fisheries Act (even though land use is a provincial jurisdiction). For
example, King Environmental Groups in King City tried to stop the York Region
government from putting through a major regional sewage pipe that opened up land for
development and threatened water levels in major streams. Such claims were
unsuccessful in the courts (Macaraig and Sandberg, in press).
Organizations such as the coalition to Save the Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM)
and the Federation of Ontario Naturalists moved beyond their earlier focus on natural
heritage to learn the language of land use planning to critique development proposals and
suggest alternative regional growth management plans. Regional planning was seen as a
means to ensure their ultimate goal- preserving nature on the Moraine. STORM made a
strategic decision to de-center the hot button issue of growth in the region, which would
12
have generated local and provincial opposition. As Executive Director of STORM,
Debbe Crandall (2001) observed:
Just that word, ‘growth management’ is probably the scariest thing that you can
say to a regional politician or any politician or anyone within the GTA. .. And so,
when you won’t deal with the real problem, which is growth management, you
have to fall back on environmental issues as to why you have to do things.
Interests of environmentalists in the region and City of Toronto politicians
converged on the need for watershed-based planning on the Moraine, the designation of
clear boundaries for settlement areas and the intensification of the core of the City of
Toronto. City politicians claimed that developments on the Moraine affected the overall
health and quality of life in the region, ecological and biological diversity, groundwater,
and water quality and quantity within the watersheds of the region (City of Toronto,
2001).
The City of Toronto had initially introduced the concepts of bioregionalism and
watersheds to planning discourse in a report of the Royal Commission on the Future of
the Toronto Waterfront (1992). City council formed an Oak Ridges Moraine Committee
(City of Toronto 2001) and declared its intention to participate at the Ontario Municipal
Board in legal challenges to development applications for the construction of 8,000
housing units on the Moraine in the Town of Richmond Hill. In a ruling of the Board, the
City was not granted standing as these development applications lay outside city
boundaries. In response, the city allocated $1.6 million to two environmental groups and
the Toronto Region Conservation Authority to represent its interests at the hearing. This
became a public platform to challenge suburban councilors’ notions of growth and
13
development in favor of an environment first approach. Hearings, which began
November 19, 1999, were front page news for more than a year. On May 8, 2001, the
provincial government halted the hearing process and enacted a six-month freeze on
development applications. The province appointed an Oak Ridges Moraine Advisory
Committee, comprised of stakeholders from development and aggregate industries,
environmental groups, regional governments, and provincial ministries to organize a
public consultation process and draft an Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan.
An intense period of citizen mobilization, from 1998 to 2002, culminated in the
passage of the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan by the provincial government.
This ecologically-based land use plan protects 62 percent of the Moraine through the
designation of natural core and linkage areas. It designates settlement areas and protects
from development core areas of ecological protection and greenland corridors to connect
habitats. Under the authority of the Provincial Planning Act, which gives the province
legislative authority to intervene and override local land use designations and zoning, the
Plan took precedence over municipal plans. These must be brought into conformity with
the provincial plan through amendments to municipal official plans and secondary plans.
This put the weight of the provincial government behind a legislated regional land use
plan. Instead of establishing a new regional agency to implement the plan, a move which
could have generated municipal and regional government opposition, the province merely
delegated responsibility for implementing the Plan downwards to the municipalities
which were required to make changes to their planning regulatory system at their own
cost (Hanna, et al 2007).
14
From a regionalism perspective, the plan for the Moraine was one of the first
urban growth management plans that utilized ecological principles to guide development
decisions (Hanna, et al 2007). By developing a plan based on ecosystem principles and
maintaining the integrity of this landform as a whole applicable across all local and
regional governments on the Moraine, the ORMCP addressed the problem of regional
fragmentation and sidestepped existing political jurisdictions (Hanna, et al 2007;
Wekerle, et al 2007). Thus, the provincial government was able to reinsert itself into
regional planning after a thirty-year absence. This centralized policymaking on land use
planning in the Toronto region in provincial hands and set the stage for the subsequent
passage of new legislation directly addressing urban growth and regional
competitiveness. The Greenbelt Plan (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and
Housing, 2005) protects the countryside with an urban growth boundary and a growth
management plan that combines requirements for suburban intensification with planning
for infrastructure (Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure and Renewal, 2006).
Regional equity issues were seldom raised in the Oak Ridges Moraine campaign,
except as complaints from the development industry which claimed that preservation of
greenlands might create land scarcity and higher prices for new housing throughout the
region, thereby affecting housing choices for less affluent residents. From this
perspective, the campaigns to preserve the Moraine might also be viewed as a typical
suburban NIMBYist (not-in-my-backyard) land use conflict where affluent homeowners
succeeded in protecting their own quality of life and property values. Robert Lake (2003,
p.1003) cautions that the language of environmentalism “is as much about the urban and
15
its exclusion as it is about nature and its preservation.” In his research on white suburban
residents, he found that
environmental discourse provides a means to speak simultaneously about the
value of natural amenities and the dangers of urbanization. Urbanization, with its
implicit racial subtext, is not only a reference to cities but is encoded as a threat to the
‘natural environment’.
A Campaign for Regional Equity: Rochester, New York
On the south shores of Lake Ontario, the city of Rochester has framed regionalism
in terms of regional equity. This draws upon ideas of redistributive metropolitanism
which argues for a fair share of regional resources through fundamental changes in the
governance of the region (Orfield, 1997; Rusk, 1999). Rochester’s Mayor William
Johnson Jr’s (in office 1993 to 2005) message to the small suburban communities
surrounding the city was: “We live in a region. It requires all the region to be strong. We
are all in this together. This is not a city problem. These are economic trends across the
region” (Campaign for Sensible Growth 2002). He outlined how the city and its innerring suburbs were slowly being abandoned: jobs and public investment in infrastructure
were going to the suburbs, basic services such as supermarkets, banks, and even funeral
homes were shutting down, the city was left with fewer resources and responsibility for
an increasingly impoverished population drawn from the wider region (Campaign for
Sensible Growth, 2002). With little investment in the downtown core, property values
decreased and jobs relocated to the suburbs, where most of the labor pool is found. At the
center of this campaign were socio-spatial and fiscal justice claims which the City of
Rochester asserted would only be met by deconcentrating poverty through opening the
16
suburbs to African-Americans so that they could have equal access to housing, public
services, safety, education, and wealth. For the city, this would reduce some of the
burden of meeting the social services needs of a concentration of poor households from a
declining tax base.
Mayor Johnson took a confrontational stance when he argued that sprawl is a civil
rights issue. He drew upon the image of the struggles of the civil rights movement to link
sprawl and regional growth management policies with systemic racism, attributing the
decline of the center city to white flight and the exclusion of minority populations from
the suburbs. Conjuring the image of the “apartheid consequences of sprawl” (Johnson
2002, p.12), suburban sprawl was portrayed as the new face of urban segregation.
According to Johnson, “not even Martin Luther King foresaw the extreme racial and
economic segregation of metro areas like Rochester 40 years after the Civil Rights Laws
went into effect” (quoted by Towler, 2005).
Mayor Johnson challenged the proponents of smart growth to focus on “the
tangled issues of where people of different races and classes live, work, and go to school”
(Johnson 2002, 13). His critique of suburban sprawl development included an indictment
of the focus on sustainability by middle class homeowners as a disguised agenda that
only served to maintain their privilege. He argued that equal opportunity for minorities
requires regional smart growth policies that create mixed-income neighborhoods
throughout a metropolitan area (Johnson, 2002). This tactic proved explosive in the
region and he was accused of unfairly playing the race card.
The critique of urban sprawl has been joined by a US-wide network of faith-based
organizations focused on how smart growth planning policies can reduce disparities in
17
social needs and fiscal capacity among communities (Kleidman, 2004; Swarts, 2003;
Orfield, 1997). In Rochester, the city’s allies were many faith communities that viewed
the fragmentation of government into 100 municipalities as a regional problem. In
October 1998, the Common Good Planning Center- a non-profit planning education
group, brought together religious, business and community agencies to develop an
education and consciousness raising campaign around sprawl. Hoping to engage the selfinterest of suburban church members, they organized lectures in suburban churches
emphasizing the impact of sprawl on church membership, quality of life and the
environment, and its human and economic costs. They argued that framing regional
planning and equity issues from a moral perspective would gain the support of
suburbanites more than the more standard approaches to regional planning.
This approach failed to resonate with the city’s churches and urban residents who
were more concerned about declining property values, concentration of poverty and white
flight than suburban sprawl. They participated in the city’s Neighbors Building
Neighborhoods planning process which aimed to revitalize city neighborhoods. Tony
Favro, Mayor Johnson’s assistant during his years in office, commented:
A few city churches with predominantly white (and suburbanite) congregations
tried to educate their flocks about sprawl. Black churches weren’t particularly
receptive to the anti-sprawl message. There were exceptions, but mostly city
churches, black and white, were interested in rebuilding the neighborhoods in
which they were located (Personal communication, August 12, 2008).
18
Rochester’s Regionalism Challenge
The City of Rochester’s comprehensive master plan of 1998 set out a Smart
Growth scenario for the entire region (City of Rochester 2004). A stewardship council,
representative of the population of the region, developed this plan for intergovernmental
cooperation to create sustainable policies for regional land use, regional economic
development and regional environmental standards (Johnson, 1998). However, instead of
uniting the city and its region, the proposals divided and polarized the Democratic-led
City of Rochester from the Republican-led counties. As Mayor Johnson (1998) noted:
Regionalism is a dirty word in many parts of Upstate New York. Some find it
politically profitable to play off cities against counties, urban dwellers versus
suburbanites, Upstate versus Downstate, rich versus poor, white against color,
jobs versus preservation. But environmental issues, by their nature, cannot be
isolated.
The city and local housing NGOs were left to promote fair housing in the suburbs, in
some cases by buying suburban sites to locate moderate cost rental and non-profit
housing or paying suburbs to build affordable housing.
These initiatives ignited passionate resistance on the part of suburban and rural
councils and homeowners. For instance, a representative of a non-profit housing agency
was run off the road near a site purchased for non-profit housing by an enraged suburban
homeowner (Personal Communication, Julie Everitt, October 1, 2003). The Planning
Director of Penfield, a suburb of Rochester, commented : “I think you’ll find most of our
citizen grassroots organized groups are more in the NIMBY [not in my backyard].” He
quoted the familiar refrains he hears from suburban residents:
19
I don’t want them building in my backyard, but if they are, it’s going to be an
expensive project. We want them to reduce densities; we want them to have
larger lot sizes; we don’t want their [minorities’] kids in our schools; we don’t
want their cars on our roads (Personal Communication, Doug Fox, October 2,
2003).
In a discussion with social justice advocates in the fall of 2003 at the Common
Good Planning Centre, a community organizer commented that the association of the
smart growth movement with fair housing issues had been interpreted by some suburban
homeowners “as a form of communism” dictating an alternative lifestyle that did not fit
the spatial vision or class-based aesthetic of elite groups. Similar sentiments were also
voiced by Mark Gregor, a manager working for the City of Rochester. As he noted:
My own opinion is that there are many people that are just almost clueless about
what’s going to happen in the next five years in this community if we don’t begin
to organize our development patterns. The sitting County Executive referred to
smart growth as communism at one point…and there are a lot of people in the
suburbs would agree with that (Personal Communication, October 3rd, 2003).
Even the city’s attempts to influence county government have not been
successful. As Tony Favro explained, “When Mayor Johnson ran for election to the
County executive, suburban residents were concerned that, if elected, he would force
upon them a metropolitan form of government and higher taxes that would pay for the
city’s decaying public services and infrastructure” (Personal Communication, October 1st,
2003). There were fierce racist attacks on the Mayor on radio call-in shows, and Johnson
was subsequently defeated in his bid by a white female Republican candidate.
20
Suburban residents have also used planning and zoning tools to maintain their
privileged and exclusive neighborhoods, under the guise of environmental preservation.
As Doug Fox noted in Penfield, the major issue that mobilized homeowners over the past
decades is a campaign to raise $10 million for a bond issue to purchase the development
rights to eight farms. While farmland preservation would seem to be an issue of
sustainability, this was done to make the land unavailable for higher density and lower
cost housing development. Affordable housing has been kept out by zoning, as minimum
lot sizes increased to five acres. Although population size has remained stable, developed
land has increased 14-fold. This form of fiscal zoning serves only to develop affluent
communities that skim the cream from metropolitan growth while accepting as few
metropolitan responsibilities as possible (Orfield, 1997).
The Sierra Club of Rochester (2005) documents how pro-growth Republican
county and state governments contribute to sprawl through infrastructure funding. A
single purpose agency, the Monroe County Water Authority, has an ambitious expansion
plan to send water pipes over all of Monroe County and adjacent regions. This not only
accelerates development, but such wealth-generating infrastructure benefits suburbs
rather than the city (Pendall, et al. 2001; Gasteyer and Gray, 2005). The city of Rochester
obtains more limited funding from other levels of government for programs such as food
stamps and public housing. The Sierra Club has called for states to adopt urban growth
planning as a precondition for infrastructure funding (Gasteyer and Gray, 2005).
Rochester’s regional equity campaign may be responding as much to the
competitive city paradigm as to claims for a just region. The city argues that its
competitiveness as a city would be enhanced if low-income populations could be
21
dispersed throughout the suburban region. Although framed as an anti-sprawl campaign,
opening the suburbs to minority populations and lower income households to afford them
better access to housing, quality schools and public services does not address sprawl per
se. It only increases the demand for suburban housing, even if it is “fair housing” at
somewhat higher densities. Without clear intensification and transit policies, this proposal
for poor dispersal also does not address broader needs of low-income working class and
minority households, nor does it consider the environmental impacts of continued
suburban expansion.
The Rochester regional equity campaign never came to grips with the realpolitik of
the region- a conservative, Republican, and virtually all-white political regime in the
county, supported by a conservative Republican state legislature in opposition to a
declining city with Democratic leadership and a predominantly African-American
population. Educational campaigns and appeals for voluntary coordination between city
and counties did not make much impression on this political reality. The attempt by
Rochester’s mayor to frame sprawl and growth politics as a civil rights issue was viewed
by suburbanites as an aggressive tactic that used race to polarize the issues and attempted
to force a metropolitan form of governance on unwilling suburbs.
Conclusions
What can we learn about regionalism and cities from these contrasting approaches
in the Toronto area and Rochester? (Table 1 about here). In both instances, regionalism
was actively promoted through collective action by introducing values other than
economic competitiveness to the regional debate. Movements for the preservation of
existing landscapes and for regional equity and sprawl limitation challenged the
22
rationality of the marketplace and land development by demanding state intervention.
Our research shows that regionalism can enter through the political back door. When the
public is focused on preserving landscape amenities rather than fighting growth
management, regional planning may gain acceptance, and even a legislative base. The
province of Ontario seized the political opportunity offered by widespread suburban
support for preserving the Moraine to implement its own agenda to impose regional
growth plans on municipalities. In contrast, the governance structure in Upper New York
State, based on home rule, allows greater autonomy for growth-focused suburban and
rural municipal governments to reject regional proposals for smart growth, fair housing
and tax-base sharing, especially when these come from city-led movements and are
framed as a racial issue. The Moraine campaign was built on decades-long attempts at
regional planning to deal with growth in the Toronto region and several precedents of
inter-municipal cost-sharing (Frisken, 2007; Wekerle, et al 2007). This was absent in
Rochester which has had a long and unsuccessful history of community organizing to
address racial segregation between city and suburbs.
In the Toronto region, growth in population and in the economy has resulted in a
boom in development applications are subject to judicial challenges. This created
opportunities for public debate and alternative proposals. In Rochester, the slow and
inexorable shrinkage of the city’s population and tax base is not judiciable. With no state
legislation requiring regional redistribution, and a state government unwilling to
intervene, Rochester was left to make its case with moral arguments based on a civil
rights frame.
23
Public support for progressive regionalism may also be affected by the regional
economy. A growing and prosperous Toronto region was prepared to limit development
on environmentally sensitive lands, as long as the Greenbelt Plan allocates sufficient
space to accommodate the next thirty years of growth (Ontario Ministry of Public
Infrastructure and Renewal, 2006). A prosperous and progressive city was able to support
and provide resources to exurban residents and NGOs challenging development as usual
in the suburbs. The stagnant and declining economy of the Rochester region created an
environment where the sharing of regional resources was feared and actively fought by
suburban residents. Whether this is for economic or racial reasons, or a combination of
both, is difficult to sort out as these are so entangled, especially under conditions of
population and economic decline.
In both urban areas, regionalism as a policy was not left to state agencies to
promote, but was actively supported by alliances that operated across the wider region.
The campaign to save the Moraine was more successful than Rochester’s campaign for
regional equity. It was led by and more in line with the interests of suburban and exurban
residents, while Rochester’s attempts to achieve regional equity were seen as city-led and
the antithesis of suburban interests. A similar outcome in both Toronto and Rochester
was that suburban/exurban interests were able to preserve low-density development by
defending place. However, arguments to preserve the low density, dispersed character of
sprawl to save nature from development (as on the Moraine) were more effective in
gaining public support and legislative change. Arguments to change the character of
sprawl by shifting its class and racial composition tended to fall on deaf ears and failed to
mobilize support from the wider region (in Rochester). The preservation of nature is
24
much less threatening than policies to promote regional equity that require a complex and
fundamental restructuring of both city and suburbs. Benjamin and Nathan (2001) caution:
“ making social equity the primary goal of regional reforms can be
confrontational…Regional reformers who pursue equity should seek it as a result, not as
a cause or main motivator, of regional action.”
Yet Rochester has something to teach Toronto and proponents of the new
regionalism. It highlights that suburban smart growth policies can also be a disguised
attempt to maintain middle class privilege when they neglect the promotion of equal
opportunity throughout the region. The predominant emphasis on natural heritage
preservation in the Moraine campaign also alerts us to its silences- that suburban
environmentalism focused on preserving natural amenities may also be exclusionary of
racialized minorities, immigrants and lower income groups associated with the city and
its first tier suburbs.
The outcomes of two regional campaigns in Canada and the US are rooted in a
complex array of factors that include differences in intergovernmental relations, the
relative influence of the city on the region, history of regional planning, receptivity of
suburbs to smart growth, and the mobilizing potential of issues of nature preservation
versus visions of the just region in bringing together urban and suburban interests.
Integrating divergent conceptions of regionalism remains a gap in current debates and
approaches to the implementation of regionalism.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Liette Gilbert for editorial assistance and to L. Anders Sandberg, coinvestigators in a study of citizen activism and planning on the Oak Ridges Moraine
25
funded by SSHRC grant # 410-2002-1483. We also thank Gary Sands for his insightful
comments, and Pierre Filion and Laura Reese. Rajiv Rawat created the map.
Gerda R. Wekerle is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York
University and Coordinator of the Program in Planning. Her current research focuses on
exurban movements and growth politics.
Teresa V. Abbruzzese is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York
University. Her current research interests include globalization, transnationalism, and
cultural identity.
26
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Table I: Regionalism Movements in Toronto and Rochester Regions
Oak Ridges Moraine
Campaign,
Toronto, Ontario
Regional Equity
Campaign
Rochester, N.Y.
Similarities and Differences
Sprawl is delinked from
population growth; suburban
willingness to address sprawl
may be related to population
and economic growth in
region
Population Growth and
Regional Economy
High growth region
4% Growth Rate2 2001
9.2% Growth Rate3 2006
sprawl: 9,100 acres/year; 4
diversity in suburbs
Multi-level Governance
Municipalities as creatures of the
province; regional cost-sharing;
Toronto a strong city in the region
with stake in suburban sprawl;
province intervenes in regional
planning
Key Actors in Regional
Campaigns
Coalitions of environmental
organizations, suburban
homeowners, local stewardship
groups, and urban activists; the
City of Toronto, regional
governments, provincial
ministries
Slow growth region
minus 4.6% Growth Rate5
2000;
minus 5.3% Growth
Rate62006
12th highest sprawl rate in
US7 ; homogeneous suburbs
Home Rule allows greater
municipal autonomy; city
has limited influence on
county; shrinking tax base
and no regional costsharing; county has higher
population and greater
political power; state does
not intervene in planning
An urban-led campaign,
spearheaded by Mayor’s
office, with support from
municipal planners, faithbased organizations, and the
Common Good Planning
Centre
Framing the Campaigns
Preserve nature across the whole
Moraine; ecological sustainability
at scale of bioregion; sprawl and
growth addressed indirectly
Equity and equal
opportunity across the
whole region; sprawl as a
civil rights issue
Political/Planning Response
Provincial legislation to protect
the Oak Ridges Moraine; the
Greenbelt Plan and growth plan;
municipalities must conform to
these regional plans and
implement
Resistance from
suburbanites to smart
growth, metropolitan
governance or tax base
sharing.
Decline of Rochester linked
to inter-municipal
competition, and party
politics. Need for upper-tier
government intervention to
address political
fragmentation and regional
planning issues
Regional grassroots
mobilization more effective
than city-led campaign;
suburban leadership and
support essential to make
change in suburban land use
planning and nature
preservation; upper-tier level
of government onside in the
ORM campaign
Suburbanites protect own
territory of low density from
development; preservation of
nature and landscape
amenities more successful in
mobilizing suburban/exurban
residents than ethical claims
for regional equity
Preserving the Moraine
creates new state space for
province to centralize
regional planning and
implement smart growth
policies with widespread
support from suburbanites
2
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:S2pqVFvmrHEJ:www.toronto.ca/demographics/pdf/profile_tor_bulletin.pdf+toront
o%27s+population+growth+rate+in+2003&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=ca
3
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/data/profiles/community/Details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CMA&Code1=535
__&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=Toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=35&B1=All&Custom=
4
http://www.greenbeltontario.org/pages/urbansprawl.htm
5 http://www.monroecounty.gov/planning-planning.php
6 http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3663000.html
7 http://rochesterenvironment.com/urban_sprawl.htm
31
32
33