2070: Canada's Cities in the Future - The Drescher Drop
Agenda 2030 is the government’s roadmap to the future. But what does that mean for Canada’s cities?
The world is changing, but are Canada’s cities keeping up? As a Canadian and a tech journalist, I wanted to find out what the future of Canada’s cities might look like. I also wanted to find out what was holding our cities back.
That’s why I started this investigative series. Over the next few months, I hope to answer some fundamental questions about Canada’s urban future.
- How do we want to live in 50 years?
- What contemporary challenges are holding back progress?
- What’s the vision of our political leaders?
- What’s the most realistic future for our nation’s cities?
I set about digging and researching. I interviewed many people, including city councilors, academics, and tech entrepreneurs.
Truth be told, this project never really ended. There’s a lot of information and when dealing with the future, there are a lot of unknowns. Nevertheless, I wanted to share my excitement for this subject with you.
Here is 2070: The future of Canada’s cities. An investigative newsletter series that you can access right from your email. There is also an accompanying podcast and YouTube videos.
Let’s start with the beginning.
An Urbanized Future
Large cities are Canada’s future, according to population researchers. More people will live in big cities than in small ones by 2070, while rural living will be rare.
Large cities will dominate Canada. Toronto and Vancouver will continue to grow, but the real story will come from the rapid expansion of second-tier cities. Ottawa, Calgary, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Kitchener-Waterloo will become bustling centers. Many small towns will likely shrink or disappear, while mid-sized cities struggle or get absorbed into the new mega-cities.
It’s all part of a series of plans shared by governments of all levels. The federal government has adopted the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals framework for the future.
This recognizes urbanization as the key to sustainability. The feds have invested $750 million into urban development since 2015, with more money expected to come.
Canada's Vision for the Future
The Canadian federal government envisions a Canada where most people are concentrated in a few large population centres. These cities have rows of towering modern skyscrapers rather than sprawling suburbs, and most people get around comfortably in electrified rapid transit.
Meanwhile, high-speed electric rail crisscrosses the countryside, connecting the cities. Ribbons of highways follow the rail lines for the transport of goods from one place to another.
What about the rest of Canada?
Well, farms are still there, but that’s it. Nature reclaims the majority of the land. Planners hope to control humanity’s impact on the earth by centralizing the population.
Good for the planet, certainly, but is it good for people? How do our local leader’s visions align to this goal? Would it actually help the planet, and more importantly, is this vision even possible?
But where does this vision come from? We’ll start at the beginning, with the United Nations Agenda 2030.
Agenda 2030
Agenda 2030 is a UN resolution that aims to coordinate global sustainability efforts through an international framework of goals. It was passed by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.
Officially, the agenda is titled ‘The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.’ However, most people in the know refer to it by its more colloquial name of Agenda 2030.
The Agenda has 92 paragraphs, most of which are legal definitions and preambles. It’s paragraph 59 that contains the meat of the agenda.
Paragraph 59 sets out 17 sustainability development goals, or SDGs. These are referred to simply as the UN SDG, and they are what guide Canada’s vision for the future. After all, Canada was one of the signatories of Agenda 2030.
17 UN SDGs
Those 17 SDGs include:
- End poverty everywhere
- End hunger, achieve food security, and improve nutrition
- Ensure healthy lives and well-being for all
- Inclusive and equitable education for all
- Achieve gender equality
- Sustainable management of clean water and air
- Reliable and affordable green energy
- Sustainable growth and productive employment for all
- Innovation and future-proof infrastructure and clean industry
- Make cities inclusive and safe for all
- Ensure sustainable consumption patterns
- Urgent action to combat climate change
- Conserve and sustain the oceans and fresh waters of the world
- Protect and restore earth’s ecosystems
Those are some of the SDGs. Several of them deal with more technical or international considerations and I’ve left them out of here. The one that interests me the most is Goal 11: Sustainable Cities. That’s the SDG which informs Canada’s vision for our cities.
Focus On Urbanization
It’s the focus on urbanization that spells out what Canada believes our future should hold.
Urbanization means to grow core density by concentrating more and more people into cities. It means to stop the explosive growth of sprawling suburbs.
There are practical reasons for a focus on urbanization. Studies by the Asian Development Bank show that adding more people to a city does not change the city’s environmental footprint.
Whether a city has 200,000 people or 2 million people, its overall effect on the environment is relatively unchanged. That makes urbanization a key to reversing the environmental damage of the past century.
Canada isn’t doing too badly in this regard. 81% of Canadians already live in cities, and that number continues to grow every few years. Agenda 30 guides the government in dealing with Canada’s rapid urbanization.
That means that so long as the federal government continues to steer the ship along the course set out by UN Agenda 2030, Canada’s cities will be large, dense, urban centers in 50 years’ time.
Exploring What That Looks Like
And that brings us back to my interest in the subject. We know the big picture, but not every city is the same. Each city has its own character. There’s a different vibe between Montreal and Vancouver. Toronto is a different city than Ottawa or Calgary.
I want to know how each city will develop along the lines of Agenda 2030 but with its own unique characteristics. This series will explore 10 Canadian cities and how they’ll develop over the next 50 years. We’ll look at:
Vancouver
Calgary
Winnipeg
Ottawa
Toronto
Hamilton
Kitchener-Waterloo
Montreal
Quebec City
Halifax
We’ll find out how people will live and work and get around. What kind of technologies will people use in their everyday lives. What will housing look like? What social issues will plague cities in the year 2070?
Thanks for taking part in this exciting journey into the future. Stay tuned for the next drop!
Further Reading
Screw Facebook. Forget Instagram. Snap who? I’m all-in on Twitter and I think I’ve figured out the secret. As a writer, no other social network does what Twitter can do. And with new features rolling…
Preamble
This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom. We recognise that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan.
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