1.3 Growth Management Plans and the Environmental Strategy To address these seven Guiding Principles and associated goals, the City has developed five growth management plans that will direct growth over the next twenty years. The overall goal of the City's Ottawa 20/20 planning process is to manage the growth in a sustainable way, such that the wealth of resources in our care are used in an effective manner. We want to be able to use and preserve these resources for both current residents and for future generations. The growth management plans focus on the strategic priorities needed to turn the guiding principles into more concrete policy directions to guide staff and Council as they balance competing priorities. They complement each other, and when viewed together they represent an approach that addresses and balances the social, economic and environmental interests of the community, ultimately leading to a strong and sustainable quality of life for Ottawa citizens. The growth management plans are described below. Their relationship to each other and a listing of supporting plans for each is illustrated in Figure 1. The Official Plan sets out the new rules for the City's physical development. It promotes walking, cycling and transit as viable alternatives to automobiles, supports development within existing urban and village boundaries, and aims to increase residential and employment densities along the rapid transit corridors, arterial roads and on main streets. The plan capitalizes on the many overlooked opportunities to focus growth in already built-up areas such as on parking lots, vacant and underused parcels of land, and above shops on main streets. The plan commits the City to building a stronger culture of design and a greater awareness of how urban design can contribute to the quality of the City's urban environment. But growing smarter will require more than just physical changes. Ottawa 20/20 called on the residents to look beyond material structures to the range of other factors that influence the lives of its people. The result is an ensemble of strategic plans laying out new directions for Ottawa on the full range of policy issues: an Economic Strategy, a Human Services Plan, an Arts and Heritage Plan, and an Environmental Strategy. As in other cities, many businesses in Ottawa now compete globally. Cities must identify existing strengths and key opportunities in order to attract investment and a qualified work force. Ottawa 20/20's Economic Strategy sets out the City's strategy for positioning Ottawa for innovation, competitiveness and prosperity in the next two decades. The goal of the strategy is to help build a diverse community that is both prosperous and liveable, a city in which a growing economy generates high-quality jobs, investment and an improved quality of life. The strategy lays out policies for key Ottawa business markets, including the export sector, the local market and the rural sector. It analyses major economic trends such as how the new economy is changing business relationships in the region, the emergence of business "clusters", and the importance of building an "innovation pipeline" in Ottawa. The Human Services Plan is the people component of the Ottawa 20/20 sustainable growth planning process. The plan lays out strategies, sets priorities and directs investment in such areas as: community funding, recreation, arts and culture, heritage, libraries, employment and financial assistance, public health, long-term care, childcare, as well as affordable housing, police, fire, paramedic, by-law, and emergency and protective services. While its goal of maximizing investments in people to ensure a high quality of life may seem familiar, Ottawa's new Human Services Plan introduces concepts and directions tied to sustainability, innovation, creativity, and collaboration. The Arts and Heritage Plan addresses culture through two lenses: heritage and creativity. On the heritage side, the plan maps out the challenges and opportunities to be faced and the actions required to ensure the identification and preservation of local heritage through museums, archives, historic sites, historic buildings and cultural landscapes. But there is more to heritage than documents, artefacts and buildings. The ongoing research and interpretation of local heritage is as important as its preservation. On the arts side, the plan recognizes the primary need for the City to invest - and encourage others to invest - in the local arts sector, in order to sustain and build Ottawa's creative capacity. The Plan includes measures aimed at improving and developing an appropriately supported network of artistic venues, increasing public access to information about Ottawa's local arts scene, supporting community arts programs and nurturing public art. Strategies that aim to increase opportunities for Ottawa artists to work and to present their work remain key to building Ottawa as a creative and competitive city. The Environmental Strategy addresses the need to protect and strengthen local ecological features and processes, and to reduce the city's environmental impact at the global level. The Environmental Strategy will contribute to all of the guiding principles, however, its main focus will be the achievement of a Green and Environmentally Sensitive City and its goals, as follows:
Ottawa is geographically very large and is blessed with a wide range of ecosystem types and ecological processes. Urban development that is not sensitive to ecological features and processes will gradually undermine them and result in serious problems that will not only compromise human health in the long-term, but be extremely expensive to remediate after the fact. Issues addressed by this strategy include: air quality, preserving our natural habitats, promoting biodiversity, protecting groundwater, reducing soil decline and erosion, contributing to the health of the urban forest, reducing resource consumption, waste production and energy use, as well greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Strategy outlines a process for how specific objectives and targets will be determined along with the initiatives to achieve these targets and objectives. Given that our environment surrounds us everywhere we go, that all of our activities can impact the environmental quality - either positively or negatively - and that we are an integral part of that environment, that the physical components of air, water and soil (through food) filter through our bodies and those of all other organisms, the approach for our longer-term management must be developed collectively. Figure 1: The Ottawa 20/20 Growth Management Process
In April 2003, City Council adopted four of the five growth management plans for the City. This final version of the Environmental Strategy, the fifth growth management plan, will be presented to Council in October 2003. The Environmental Strategy provides a guide to decision-making both within the City of Ottawa as a Corporation and as a Community. Its overall objective is to encourage and achieve sound management of our environment in balance with community needs and economic factors. By implementing the Environmental Strategy's direction in concert with the City's other strategic plans, we will be working together to achieve a more sustainable community for Ottawa in 2020. |
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