Laura E . Taylor | York University (original) (raw)
Books by Laura E . Taylor
The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning, 2019
A greenbelt is a simple idea that sells the promise of permanent rural landscape protection. At t... more A greenbelt is a simple idea that sells the promise of permanent rural landscape protection. At the same time, it hides from most people the complexities of its designation. A single-goal greenbelt does not live up to the potential of the greenbelt concept. For example, a greenbelt that is just an urban boundary (where the greenbelt is a wide green line) is a central city containment strategy but is not a positive plan for the lands within it or beyond it. A greenbelt that is just a protected area designed for agricultural land protection is too narrowly defined as the value hinges on farming potentially at the expense of other rural landscape uses. A greenbelt that is meant for just natural environment protection—just as green infrastructure or just as a linear greenway—also runs the risk of being too narrowly defined; while environmental science supports boundaries and provides a rationale for protection seemingly away from political criticism, the lands must be managed as ecological or as recreational and may be at odds with other desirable rural uses. When designed to be more than a single-goal protected area designation, greenbelts can provide flexibility in the public interest over the long term. The rural-urban fringe is hybrid, multi-functional, contains multiple geographies and every fringe of every city is as unique as the landscapes and cultures and processes that have shaped the city’s region. Greenbelts are a powerful planning tool as they transcend localised land-use conflicts and remain aligned with the persistent spatial imagination of an interconnected city and countryside.
This book is about politics and planning outside of cities, where urban political economy and pla... more This book is about politics and planning outside of cities, where urban political economy and planning theories do not account for the resilience of places that are no longer rural and where local communities work hard to keep from ever becoming urban. By examining exurbia as a type of place that is no longer simply rural or only tied to the economies of global resources (e.g., mining, forestry, and agriculture), we explore how changing landscapes are planned and designed not to be urban, that is, to look, function, and feel different from cities and suburbs in spite of new home development and real estate speculation. The book’s authors contend that exurbia is defined by the persistence of rural economies, the conservation of rural character, and protection of natural ecological systems, all of which are critical components of the contentious local politics that seek to limit growth.
Comparative political ecology is used as an organizing concept throughout the book to describe the nature of exurban areas in the U.S. and Australia, although exurbs are common to many countries. The essays each describe distinctive case studies, with each chapter using the key concepts of competing rural capitalisms and uneven environmental management to describe the politics of exurban change. This systematic analysis makes the processes of exurban change easier to see and understand. Based on these case studies, seven characteristics of exurban places are identified: rural character, access, local economic change, ideologies of nature, changes in land management, coalition-building, and land-use planning.
This book will be of interest to those who study planning, conservation, and land development issues, especially in areas of high natural amenity or environmental value. There is no political ecology book quite like this—neither one solely focused on cases from the developed world (in this case the United States and Australia), nor one that specifically harnesses different case studies from multiple areas to develop a central organizing perspective of landscape change.
The sprawl debate will never be the same again! This collection explores the significance of the ... more The sprawl debate will never be the same again! This collection explores the significance of the ideology of nature in producing the culture and form of cities and suburbs—particularly the exurbs, where the urban extends into rural areas. Understanding society’s desire for a connection to nature may help build capacity for addressing the contemporary crisis of sprawl.
This book is about the contradiction between the idea that nature should be protected from settlement for its own sake and the way that privileging nature motivates people to seek natural residential settings. This search for natural settings is an important part of the production of sprawl, as the essays in this collection discuss. Within human geography and political ecology, a vibrant discussion has been sustained in recent years about the dualism of culture and nature in modern life. We argue that the role of the desire for nature in the experience and production of landscape needs to be part of our thinking about sprawl.
This collection demonstrates how ideology permeates green sprawl—from its roots in reaction to modernity to the shaping of contemporary urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes through individual choice-making, normative planning theory, and public decision-making. New insight into urban dispersion is possible through the authors’ wide range of perspectives from social sciences, humanities, planning and design disciplines concerned with addressing social and environmental problems of sprawl.
The decision to expand the urban boundary of a growing city into the adjacent countryside is alwa... more The decision to expand the urban boundary of a growing city into the adjacent countryside is always hotly debated, and the Toronto area is no different. At the edge of Canada’s largest city are some of the fastest-growing suburbs in North America. This paper discusses the current expansion of the Town of Oakville, a suburban lakefront community on the western edge of the built up area of Toronto. It focuses on the vociferous reaction of residents against urban growth at the edge of their town and how competing ideas about the past, existing and future landscape are negotiated within the planning process.
Papers by Laura E . Taylor
A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia, 2016
Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. Vol. 8: The Americas and Oceania: Assessing Sustainability., 2012
Journal of Rural Studies, Oct 2013
We analyze the role of landscape ideology in the recent Ontario Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) Gr... more We analyze the role of landscape ideology in the recent Ontario Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) Greenbelt Plan. Focusing on the “Protected Countryside,” the major land-use designation in the Plan that structures the Greenbelt framework, we explore tensions between abstract ideals of countryside used by policy makers to elicit support for the Plan and people's lived experience of material landscapes of the peri-urban fringe. Approaching “countryside” from the combined perspectives of landscape studies and political ecology, we show how the abstract ideals used to build support for the protection of countryside in the high-level political arena are in tension with existing material landscapes as people experience them. When implementing the Greenbelt Plan, the abstract ideals have to be applied at the landscape level through negotiation with municipalities, property owners, and other interests. In addition to drawing upon more conventionally legitimate explanations for landscape protection based on environmental science and land-use planning principles, the designation of Protected Countryside and the strategies used to implement the Protected Countryside designation at the local level suggest a tentative commitment to recognizing landscape values and collaborative environmental management processes in policy-making. As with any such normative land-use plan, the success of the Greenbelt Plan hinges on the long-term agreement between planning agencies and diverse publics. We demonstrate the usefulness of approaching environmental management challenges at the urban–rural interface by bringing the perspectives of landscape studies and political ecology into implementation processes for land-use management strategies like the Greenbelt. We argue that public participants deserve legitimate collaborative roles in negotiating just and desirable land uses based on their experiences, and provide observations on ways to bring contested goals and tools for achieving them into reflexive negotiations about how landscapes are and should be produced.
Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia: Green Sprawl, 2013
"The study of ordinary landscapes is a focus of cultural geography and at its best can reveal soc... more "The study of ordinary landscapes is a focus of cultural geography and at its best can reveal societal attitudes and political choices in ways otherwise hidden from view. Where historical accounts of interesting places tend to focus on social histories and downplay the role of space within which change takes place, landscape study situates that space as a central character. In this chapter, the landscape of Churchville [Brampton], an Ontario riverside
village, is the central character in a narrative of exurban change.
Laura Taylor, a planner and geographer, draws out the felt experience of sprawl, which is often difficult to discuss as something beyond mere nostalgia for the landscape sprawl has replaced. Recounting the history of settlement as the intertwinement of nature and culture, Taylor explains
the exurban impulse to escape urban areas as a reaction to contemporary urbanization, which creates landscapes devoid of everyday relationships with nature.
Green belts have been a part of the planning landscape for much of the 20th century, yet they hav... more Green belts have been a part of the planning landscape for much of the 20th century, yet they have come under attack in recent years. The objective of this article is to inform the future of the green belt concept internationally and in the UK. We first examine recent policy changes in the UK, showing how green belts are being conceived more broadly to include the concept of green infrastructure. We then focus on Canadian green belts, and in particular that of Toronto, which exemplifies some of the challenges with integrating green belts and green infrastructure.
The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many i... more The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many in North American society. But the environmental and social impacts of the realization of this dream by an increasing number of people has created crises and conflict for many communities. The concept of exurbia has traditionally been used to describe settlement patterns simultaneously dispersed from the city yet also connected to urban networks. This paper reviews scholarship across disciplines including geography, ecology, sociology, and political ecology. Exurbia is here proposed to be strengthened as a powerful conceptual approach to capture and discuss the complex processes producing this phenomenon. Previous scholarship has produced excellent
but largely disconnected work on the periurban zone around cities, exurban settlement processes, tensions between exurbanites and other rural residents, environmental impacts and habitat fragmentation. Future work on exurbia holds a great deal of promise to think about cultural values supporting the processes that produce these landscapes, working across scales from local to global using interdisciplinary and multi-method study.
The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physi... more The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics of landscape meaning in a contemporary planning process where local area planning comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination.
In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900 hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the city’s edge, it is difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned for change.
Talks by Laura E . Taylor
Cultural landscape qualities should be considered as part of the Modernist high-rise heritage. Co... more Cultural landscape qualities should be considered as part of the Modernist high-rise heritage. Consideration of the landscape of the towers will be important if high-rise properties are redeveloped as the City of Toronto’s tower neighbourhood renewal proceeds. Tower neighbourhoods were designed as superblocks in the 1960s drawing directly from Le Corbusier’s vision of the tower-in-the-park. Reacting to the cities of his time, he believed that high-rise living would free up the ground plane for recreation and enjoyment by all residents, and that each person would have fresh air and sunlight and a spectacular view from their unit. Today, urban designers and planners have rejected the tower-in-the-park and see Le Corbusier’s ideas a fundamentally flawed, but we are still left with the built legacy of his ideas. I argue that we do have towers in parks and that we should explicitly consider identified heritage Modernist buildings within the context of their overall landscape, identifying and analyzing the attributes and challenges of this natural heritage, which is part of the larger natural heritage of the city and provides a sense of place for residents.
The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning, 2019
A greenbelt is a simple idea that sells the promise of permanent rural landscape protection. At t... more A greenbelt is a simple idea that sells the promise of permanent rural landscape protection. At the same time, it hides from most people the complexities of its designation. A single-goal greenbelt does not live up to the potential of the greenbelt concept. For example, a greenbelt that is just an urban boundary (where the greenbelt is a wide green line) is a central city containment strategy but is not a positive plan for the lands within it or beyond it. A greenbelt that is just a protected area designed for agricultural land protection is too narrowly defined as the value hinges on farming potentially at the expense of other rural landscape uses. A greenbelt that is meant for just natural environment protection—just as green infrastructure or just as a linear greenway—also runs the risk of being too narrowly defined; while environmental science supports boundaries and provides a rationale for protection seemingly away from political criticism, the lands must be managed as ecological or as recreational and may be at odds with other desirable rural uses. When designed to be more than a single-goal protected area designation, greenbelts can provide flexibility in the public interest over the long term. The rural-urban fringe is hybrid, multi-functional, contains multiple geographies and every fringe of every city is as unique as the landscapes and cultures and processes that have shaped the city’s region. Greenbelts are a powerful planning tool as they transcend localised land-use conflicts and remain aligned with the persistent spatial imagination of an interconnected city and countryside.
This book is about politics and planning outside of cities, where urban political economy and pla... more This book is about politics and planning outside of cities, where urban political economy and planning theories do not account for the resilience of places that are no longer rural and where local communities work hard to keep from ever becoming urban. By examining exurbia as a type of place that is no longer simply rural or only tied to the economies of global resources (e.g., mining, forestry, and agriculture), we explore how changing landscapes are planned and designed not to be urban, that is, to look, function, and feel different from cities and suburbs in spite of new home development and real estate speculation. The book’s authors contend that exurbia is defined by the persistence of rural economies, the conservation of rural character, and protection of natural ecological systems, all of which are critical components of the contentious local politics that seek to limit growth.
Comparative political ecology is used as an organizing concept throughout the book to describe the nature of exurban areas in the U.S. and Australia, although exurbs are common to many countries. The essays each describe distinctive case studies, with each chapter using the key concepts of competing rural capitalisms and uneven environmental management to describe the politics of exurban change. This systematic analysis makes the processes of exurban change easier to see and understand. Based on these case studies, seven characteristics of exurban places are identified: rural character, access, local economic change, ideologies of nature, changes in land management, coalition-building, and land-use planning.
This book will be of interest to those who study planning, conservation, and land development issues, especially in areas of high natural amenity or environmental value. There is no political ecology book quite like this—neither one solely focused on cases from the developed world (in this case the United States and Australia), nor one that specifically harnesses different case studies from multiple areas to develop a central organizing perspective of landscape change.
The sprawl debate will never be the same again! This collection explores the significance of the ... more The sprawl debate will never be the same again! This collection explores the significance of the ideology of nature in producing the culture and form of cities and suburbs—particularly the exurbs, where the urban extends into rural areas. Understanding society’s desire for a connection to nature may help build capacity for addressing the contemporary crisis of sprawl.
This book is about the contradiction between the idea that nature should be protected from settlement for its own sake and the way that privileging nature motivates people to seek natural residential settings. This search for natural settings is an important part of the production of sprawl, as the essays in this collection discuss. Within human geography and political ecology, a vibrant discussion has been sustained in recent years about the dualism of culture and nature in modern life. We argue that the role of the desire for nature in the experience and production of landscape needs to be part of our thinking about sprawl.
This collection demonstrates how ideology permeates green sprawl—from its roots in reaction to modernity to the shaping of contemporary urban, suburban, and exurban landscapes through individual choice-making, normative planning theory, and public decision-making. New insight into urban dispersion is possible through the authors’ wide range of perspectives from social sciences, humanities, planning and design disciplines concerned with addressing social and environmental problems of sprawl.
The decision to expand the urban boundary of a growing city into the adjacent countryside is alwa... more The decision to expand the urban boundary of a growing city into the adjacent countryside is always hotly debated, and the Toronto area is no different. At the edge of Canada’s largest city are some of the fastest-growing suburbs in North America. This paper discusses the current expansion of the Town of Oakville, a suburban lakefront community on the western edge of the built up area of Toronto. It focuses on the vociferous reaction of residents against urban growth at the edge of their town and how competing ideas about the past, existing and future landscape are negotiated within the planning process.
A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia, 2016
Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. Vol. 8: The Americas and Oceania: Assessing Sustainability., 2012
Journal of Rural Studies, Oct 2013
We analyze the role of landscape ideology in the recent Ontario Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) Gr... more We analyze the role of landscape ideology in the recent Ontario Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) Greenbelt Plan. Focusing on the “Protected Countryside,” the major land-use designation in the Plan that structures the Greenbelt framework, we explore tensions between abstract ideals of countryside used by policy makers to elicit support for the Plan and people's lived experience of material landscapes of the peri-urban fringe. Approaching “countryside” from the combined perspectives of landscape studies and political ecology, we show how the abstract ideals used to build support for the protection of countryside in the high-level political arena are in tension with existing material landscapes as people experience them. When implementing the Greenbelt Plan, the abstract ideals have to be applied at the landscape level through negotiation with municipalities, property owners, and other interests. In addition to drawing upon more conventionally legitimate explanations for landscape protection based on environmental science and land-use planning principles, the designation of Protected Countryside and the strategies used to implement the Protected Countryside designation at the local level suggest a tentative commitment to recognizing landscape values and collaborative environmental management processes in policy-making. As with any such normative land-use plan, the success of the Greenbelt Plan hinges on the long-term agreement between planning agencies and diverse publics. We demonstrate the usefulness of approaching environmental management challenges at the urban–rural interface by bringing the perspectives of landscape studies and political ecology into implementation processes for land-use management strategies like the Greenbelt. We argue that public participants deserve legitimate collaborative roles in negotiating just and desirable land uses based on their experiences, and provide observations on ways to bring contested goals and tools for achieving them into reflexive negotiations about how landscapes are and should be produced.
Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia: Green Sprawl, 2013
"The study of ordinary landscapes is a focus of cultural geography and at its best can reveal soc... more "The study of ordinary landscapes is a focus of cultural geography and at its best can reveal societal attitudes and political choices in ways otherwise hidden from view. Where historical accounts of interesting places tend to focus on social histories and downplay the role of space within which change takes place, landscape study situates that space as a central character. In this chapter, the landscape of Churchville [Brampton], an Ontario riverside
village, is the central character in a narrative of exurban change.
Laura Taylor, a planner and geographer, draws out the felt experience of sprawl, which is often difficult to discuss as something beyond mere nostalgia for the landscape sprawl has replaced. Recounting the history of settlement as the intertwinement of nature and culture, Taylor explains
the exurban impulse to escape urban areas as a reaction to contemporary urbanization, which creates landscapes devoid of everyday relationships with nature.
Green belts have been a part of the planning landscape for much of the 20th century, yet they hav... more Green belts have been a part of the planning landscape for much of the 20th century, yet they have come under attack in recent years. The objective of this article is to inform the future of the green belt concept internationally and in the UK. We first examine recent policy changes in the UK, showing how green belts are being conceived more broadly to include the concept of green infrastructure. We then focus on Canadian green belts, and in particular that of Toronto, which exemplifies some of the challenges with integrating green belts and green infrastructure.
The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many i... more The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many in North American society. But the environmental and social impacts of the realization of this dream by an increasing number of people has created crises and conflict for many communities. The concept of exurbia has traditionally been used to describe settlement patterns simultaneously dispersed from the city yet also connected to urban networks. This paper reviews scholarship across disciplines including geography, ecology, sociology, and political ecology. Exurbia is here proposed to be strengthened as a powerful conceptual approach to capture and discuss the complex processes producing this phenomenon. Previous scholarship has produced excellent
but largely disconnected work on the periurban zone around cities, exurban settlement processes, tensions between exurbanites and other rural residents, environmental impacts and habitat fragmentation. Future work on exurbia holds a great deal of promise to think about cultural values supporting the processes that produce these landscapes, working across scales from local to global using interdisciplinary and multi-method study.
The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physi... more The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics of landscape meaning in a contemporary planning process where local area planning comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination.
In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900 hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the city’s edge, it is difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned for change.
Cultural landscape qualities should be considered as part of the Modernist high-rise heritage. Co... more Cultural landscape qualities should be considered as part of the Modernist high-rise heritage. Consideration of the landscape of the towers will be important if high-rise properties are redeveloped as the City of Toronto’s tower neighbourhood renewal proceeds. Tower neighbourhoods were designed as superblocks in the 1960s drawing directly from Le Corbusier’s vision of the tower-in-the-park. Reacting to the cities of his time, he believed that high-rise living would free up the ground plane for recreation and enjoyment by all residents, and that each person would have fresh air and sunlight and a spectacular view from their unit. Today, urban designers and planners have rejected the tower-in-the-park and see Le Corbusier’s ideas a fundamentally flawed, but we are still left with the built legacy of his ideas. I argue that we do have towers in parks and that we should explicitly consider identified heritage Modernist buildings within the context of their overall landscape, identifying and analyzing the attributes and challenges of this natural heritage, which is part of the larger natural heritage of the city and provides a sense of place for residents.