Conference report: The death and life of greenbelts: 'Local Solutions for Global Challenges', Toronto, 22–24 March 2011

Abstract

Toronto is famous among students of planning for its public transport, for being the most diverse city in North America and for being the city in which Jane Jacobs chose to make her home for decades. Perhaps in the future it may lay claim to having been the site of world's first Greenbelt Conference, 'Local Solutions for Global Challenges', and for bearing witness to an international movement to promote this longstanding planning policy. Aiming to bring all of the world's 'greenbelts together in one place for the first time', the promotional quality and hopeful rhetoric of this two-day event bore striking similarities to the propaganda and language of networks that surrounded the establishment of the greenbelt around London in the 1930s. Whereas British greenbelts can be seen to have declined by becoming less relevant to changing social and economic times, the mood at the Toronto conference was anything but despondent. Attendees were exuberant about the potential that a global greenbelts movement can play in addressing some of the most pressing planning concerns of the day. The conference showcased efforts to create and expand greenbelts worldwide and promoted the kind of multifunctionality that some British greenbelts lack. Examples were provided of greenbelts that provide climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation and green infrastructure, local food production, linear open space and recreation, and meaningful engagement with nature. Each of these functions was set in the cultural and policy contexts within which it was situated. For instance, the 'Iron Curtain Greenbelt', which was started in Germany to promote ecological health, historical awareness and recreation, is not placed in contrast to an urban area but to the surrounding industrial and intensively farmed countryside. Eschewing history, the conference promoted not simply a contemporary resurgence of the greenbelt, but rather its successful re-invention. Presentations, themes and conference content The conference combined presentations by policy-makers, academics and practitioners from many corners of the world, including Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the United States and Canada. They spoke to an audience composed of Toronto area academics, farmers, politicians, environmentally interested residents as well as international delegates. Any thought that the greenbelt is a moribund twentieth-century planning policy was banished as the local organisers, the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation (FGF), provided events for the audience centered very loosely around planning. These included: a music performance by local greenbelt activist Sarah Harmer; comedy sketches about greenbelts, planning and Canadians by the ensemble 'Second City'; a talk about the indigenous history of the Toronto greenbelt by noted archaeologist Dr Ron Williamson; and a keynote address by Margaret Atwood, who promised to tweet the 'Toronto Declaration for Global Greenbelts: Local Solutions for Global Challenges' to all of her 182,000 followers.1 Undoubtedly, had she been alive, Jane Jacobs would have been there too! During the plenary and panel sessions the content was designed to inspire, showing how the greenbelt is implemented in various parts of the world. The audience heard for example how the implementation of the Frankfurt greenbelt shaped the development of infrastructure and the airport on the urban fringe. Other addresses focused on using the greenbelt to stop sprawl around Warsaw, or using it to embed a biosphere reserve into the local physical planning of Sao Paulo. Only a few of the talks were rueful: the policy director of the US's Greenbelt Alliance spoke about non-governmental organisations' need to maintain constant vigilance to prevent environmentally insensitive development around the San Francisco Bay area in absence of government-led regional planning. The international flavour of the conference was further reinforced by the examples of boundary-crossing international greenbelts. …