In the Sunday Sun this past weekend Claudette Cain wrote about the need for a "vision" for Ottawa and picked up on MPP Brian Coburn's call for three mini-growth summits to flesh out some concrete ideas and guiding principles for incorporation into Ottawa's new Official Plan, to be drafted by city council later this year.

Meanwhile, Rick Gibbons brought us up to speed on the nasty slugfest in hogtown between Mayor Mel Lastman and Queen's Park as Toronto goes through its annual "give us more money, the sky is falling" city budget exercise. Rick also noted that Ontario is looking to play an active role in directing urban growth (read: Combating Toronto's urban sprawl).

Ottawa - like Toronto and several other cities - is still battling Queen's Park over downloading costs and shortfalls arising from the Harris government's Who Does What local services realignment back in 1997. This brings us back to Claudette and Rick's columns and the pressing question I think they were both implicitly asking: If we need (and we do) a new city vision with provincial buy-in, how can we make it happen when the cities and the Ontario government are at each other's throats?

The answer is to find a common enemy. And we have one: it's the dirty underbelly of booming urban growth. An overheated job market, an insane housing situation, non-existent office space, rental vacancies at historic lows, congestion on local highways, and overcrowded transit systems are all forcing cities and Queen's Park to scream … enough!

To be clear, the battle is not against economic prosperity, rather it's the downside of this growth that will cost us big bucks (read: massive property tax hikes) in the long run.

The attack strategy in this war hinges on a concept called ‘smart growth'. Smart growth is the policy response to the fundamental question confronting growing cities: How do cities continue to create wealth without sprawling out of control into congested, polluted, impersonal, concrete jungles?

The weapons of smart growth include natural landform barriers, residential intensification, brownfields reclamation, green roof promotion, transit nodes, optimal roadway planning, and multiuse community facilities. Along with smart growth, prepare to be peppered with these terms in the months that lie ahead.

Natural landform barriers refer to initiatives that include preserving urban wetlands, natural drainage basins, established greenbelts, etc. As for growth planning, natural barriers also aid city planners in determining the outer limits beyond which growth is forbidden. From a tax point of view, this strategy ensures that infrastructure costs (sewers, hydro, etc.) are minimized. It also leads to residential intensification, by limiting suburban sprawl, cities grow up instead of out and commute times for residents are kept to tolerable norms. This effort is buttressed by optimal roadway planning including high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) and bus lanes and in some cases, variable electronic tolling to moderate peak period rush hour volumes.

As for industrial growth, brownfields are the in-thing. Instead of gobbling up acres of prime farmland for new industrial parks, developers are encouraged to utilize abandoned industrial lands or unused city core tracts (read: Lebreton flats, the City Centre area near Wellington street, the old Gloucester drive-in off of Canotek road, etc.) for mixed-use commercial and residential projects. Again, in many cases, the land is already paved with access roads and serviced for sewers and hydro, which means lower costs for developers and taxpayers alike.

Green roof promotion involves establishing small gardens/forests on top of office powers to reduce CO2 emissions as well as indoor micro-climate initiatives. Encouraging developers to incorporate such initiatives into their plans minimizes urban reforestation costs and frees up property taxes for other initiatives.

Finally, intensification leads to higher densities to support transit nodes. These nodes act as hubs for buses, even light-rail as well as commuter parking. They can be the centrepoints of communities surrounded by brownfields that include multiuse facilities that can be used 18 hours per day. Facilities like joint libraries and schools or more ambitious projects of community centres that include a pool, library, satellite city hall and a school are examples of multiuse buildings.

But these choices are not just for city planners, they require intergovernmental cooperation. For example, Ontario continues to provide a $2,000 land transfer tax credit/rebate for first-time new home buyers. While this policy was/is good for stimulation of the construction industry, it also encourages sprawl and runs counter to smart growth intensification.

Along with the ideas presented above and others that will arise from this spring's growth summit, a clear strategy for obtaining federal and provincial buy-in (in more ways than one) is essential. Smart growth can work, as long as dumb fights between governments don't throw it off the rails.