Professor Christopher Leo joined the Department of Politics at the University of Winnipeg in 1976, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of City Planning at the University of Manitoba. He teaches and conducts research on city politics. The Winnipeg Green Party asked Professor Leo for some of his thoughts on Winnipeg politics and land use.

WGP: What do you think should be Winnipeg's land use priorities in the next few years?

CL: There are a lot of simple, straightforward planning practices that we could be following in Winnipeg to help bring our runaway infrastructure and servicing costs under control, while making the city a more interesting and pleasant place to live. There are generally no very good reasons why we're not doing these things. The most important single reason is quite simply that North American cities have, over the past three-quarters of a century, been developed on principles that sounded good in theory but haven't worked in practice, and we've been slow to break the bad habits that developed during this period.

Here's my five-step program for getting a start on breaking these habits:

1. Get serious about doing neighbourhood plans for the substantial areas within the city that are available for conventional suburban development.
   
   The development industry and the City Planning Department talked City Council into opening up Waverley West, which will greatly increase the city's infrastructure and service delivery burdens, by arguing that there was a critical lot shortage. What they didn't say was that the reason for the shortage is that the City has failed to do the planning work necessary to open up areas within the city that would be suitable for regular suburban development, but would not constitute sprawl, and would allow us to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure and service networks, instead of developing new ones. The City needs to hire more planners and put them to work on this critical task.
2. Support the transit system by paying attention to the location of new medium and high-density development.
   
   People living in apartments and row houses tend to be users of transit, if convenient transit is available. But if we permit the location of apartment buildings in the far reaches of St. James or the middle of Island Lakes as we have, we end up with apartment dwellers dependent on automobiles for all their transportation, because it's impossible to provide good transit service in those locations. An efficient transit system that draws a lot of passengers is essential to the development of a sustainable city.
3. Stop shilly-shallying about rapid transit and get busy on developing it, a job that almost everyone now acknowledges needs to be done.
   
   The establishment of an efficient, modern transit system would be a critical step toward bringing the costs of services and infrastructure under control. There are land use measures that need to be taken to ensure the effectiveness of rapid transit, but first things first.
4. Maintain and expand the good initiatives we have underway for the revitalization of inner city residential neighbourhoods and the commercial core...
   
   ...and intensify the focus on the development of housing to support the commercial heart of the city, instead of abandoning both initiatives, as the city now seems to be doing. A lively, attractive downtown, where people from all walks of life can afford to live, is central to the achievement of all the other objectives I advocate.
5. Put neighbourhood commerce, shopping-mall-based businesses and big box developments on a level playing-field.
   
   At the moment, such big box stores as those in the St. James Street strip enjoy hidden subsidies because they do not have to meet the same standards for building design or contributions to infrastructure maintenance as other businesses. The importance of giving all our business people an even break ought to be obvious to all, regardless of their political beliefs or interests.

WGP: What are some of the most effective ways of improving Winnipeg's land use decision-making system?

CL: The ills in our land use decision-making begin with our attitudes, so I need to start the answer with a digression. Individually, Winnipeg is full of talented people doing interesting things, but collectively it has a very low opinion of itself. A one-sentence summary of our self-image would read: "We have cold weather and mosquitoes, so I guess we don't deserve respect." (The "I guess" signifies that we don't think we have a right to an opinion either.)

If Californians had a similar attitude, here's what we'd hear from them: "I don't know why anyone lives here. It's a desert, we have chronic water shortages, and brush fires, and on those rare occasions when it rains we get killer mud slides. We get earthquakes, the pollution is unbelievably bad and the highway congestion is legendary."

Stay with me. This actually has something to do with land-use decision-making. The connection is that, because we don't think we deserve better, we fail to set development standards. Our core belief is that if anyone is willing to invest in this awful place, we should be filled with gratitude and not ask questions. City Council's development decisions reflect this attitude.

City Council is not always entirely wrong in taking this view. If we are negotiating with a developer for the location of a regional corporate headquarters, or a manufacturing branch plant, the developer may well have reasonable alternatives, and therefore bargaining power. Even that doesn't mean we necessarily have to meet all the developer's demands, but it does mean that we have to enter negotiations on the understanding that our partner in the negotiations may have alternatives. The office tower or factory might possibly be located in Saskatoon or Calgary.

However, when we're dealing with residential and retail development proposals we hold the cards because these are inherently local markets. A Winnipeg residential development cannot be relocated to Calgary or Saskatoon, so the developer has to deal with us on our terms. We could require, for example, that new developments be located in such a way as to support the transit system, and to make the most efficient possible use of our infrastructure and service networks. We could set design standards to ensure that we like the way our neighbourhoods and shopping districts look. In Calgary and Vancouver, developers are accustomed to facing demands and having to negotiate. In Winnipeg, the usual practice is that they get whatever they ask for.

There is an important qualification to this point: Winnipeg used to have complete control over residential and commercial development in the region, but they're losing it. In the late 1980s, development began to spill over Winnipeg's borders into such places as Headingly, Stonewall, East St. Paul and Macdonald, and in time these and similar communities have become increasingly formidable competitors. Before they were competitors, Winnipeg City Council used to let developers do pretty much as they pleased, and Winnipeg had no one but itself to blame. Now that there is real competition locally, the solution to the problem is no longer entirely in Winnipeg's hands.

As it happens, the provincial government has always been in control of the planning system. Municipalities only do whatever the Province explicitly permits them to do. Now that sprawl has begun to spill across the Winnipeg metropolitan area, it is up to the provincial government to set some guidelines for development across the region, and take measures to prevent throat-cutting inter-municipal competition. There are many ways of doing this, and none of them are easy, but we know it can be done because it is done in many other jurisdictions. If the Province takes the lead, we can have neighbourhoods we like and a city we can afford to maintain. If not, we may well end up like many American cities, especially medium-sized to smaller ones, where the downtown is a tableau of devastation, or a large expanse of empty lots, and the rest of the city trails endlessly across the prairie.

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