Introduction

It is not difficult to feel engaged with the benefits of sustainability policies and planning initiatives in the central city of Toronto. As a city where the local government promotes walkable neighbourhoods as progressive spaces, creates infrastructure that supports bicycle commuting and currently owns and manages multiple hectares of park spaces and valley systems, residents can easily engage with environmental spaces and initiatives and often without question. The neighbourhoods of central Toronto represent multiple connections of sustainable urban planning – they can be largely navigated without reliance on an automobile, there are routes of mobility between neighbour-hood locations by public transit, the presence of government managed ‘tree protection zones’ to preserve tree canopy along roadways, and publicly owned and funded green spaces. While further public improvements to and additional funding for environmental initiatives have been a consistent need, Toronto – within a global context – is a city that has been at the frontline of local sustainability policy development as one of the first urban governments in the world to create an official local environmental policy agenda in the 1990s in collaboration with environmental non-governmental organizations (Desfor and Keil, 2004; Fowler and Hartmann, 2002; Gordon, 2016). Following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Summit) in 1992, the city was home to the head office of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEIs), an organization that formed with the direct purpose of implementing Local Agenda 21 policy. In the early 2000s, Toronto’s government used the United Nations’ notion of sustainability as the balancing of social development, economic development, and environmental protection to frame the city’s official 30-year-long planning and development vision (City of Toronto 2002, 2015). At the core of the plan is an emphasis on urban intensification as a merged strategy to attract global and domestic financial investment in residential and commercial development while mitigating climate change and additional environmental problems through the production of more green spaces and denser, walkable districts with the intention of lessening automobile dependency (Boudreau, Keil, and Young, 2009; Bunce, 2004; Kern, 2007).