The paper centres on the content of metropolitan-scale plans of the six largest Canadian urban regions. Plans in all these regions promote intensification and alternatives to automobile use, and thus adhere to smart growth and sustainability principles. In all cases save one, reliance on nodal development is the preferred manner of achieving intensification and ensuring its co-ordination with public transit services. Meanwhile, however, results point to differences in the stage of development of metropolitan planning strategies. The paper concludes by reflecting on the wide adoption of the nodal model in metropolitan plans. It interprets this popularity as the outcome of the ability of nodes to achieve intensification and reduced car reliance objectives, while conforming to prevailing planning and institutional capacity. The effectiveness of the nodal approach and other broad metropolitan planning concepts rests in their capacity to procure a metropolitan structure for the other scales at which urban planning is practised.

No abstract

Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maintained with public ownership, it may nonetheless be at greater risk when political winds change. In as much as PLTs secure affordable tenure and community control, they may warrant greater policy/planning consideration.

Growing dissatisfaction with the prevailing dispersed urban form and its generalized reliance on the automobile has resulted in the formulation of planning models seeking to substitute dispersed development with recentralization. A survey of 301 planning documents with a metropolitan focus, originating from the 58 US and Canadian urban regions with a population exceeding one million, reveals widespread support for urban recentralization. But interviews with 55 planners, involved in the preparation of these plans and/or the implementation of their proposals, highlight actual and foreseen barriers to the implementation of recentralization strategies. The article interprets the popularity of recentralization in planning documents as the outcome of planners' attempts to reconcile their commitment to sustainable development with societal factors affecting planning possibilities. Still, we anticipate serious problems in achieving largescale recentralization due to urban development path dependencies emanating from the prevailing urban form and dynamics, institutional structures, and from the limited urban transformative potential afforded by neoliberalism.

No abstract