Planning

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Planning.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Planning by Author "Doucet, Brian"

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    Go on play with the words, the effect is the same: how gentrification and liveability feature in public discourses of neighbourhood change
    (University of Waterloo, 2019-09-25) Tolfo, Paolo; Doucet, Brian
    Despite its association with displacement, gentrification remains a persuasive model for encouraging economic development and growth. For gentrification strategies to remain politically palatable, policy discourses mask the exclusionary consequences of neighbourhood (re)investment. These discourses suggest that neighbourhood improvements are equally distributed, anesthetizing critical understandings of gentrification. This thesis contributes to contemporary scholarship investigating the relationship between discourse and gentrification. It analyzes the extent to which public discourses of neighbourhood change comprehensively consider inequality, affordability, gentrification, and displacement; specifically, the extent to which displacement is recognized within public discourse as a consequence of neighbourhood change. Each chapter uses discourse and framing analysis to investigate an area of public discourse: in the first, media discourses; in the second, neighbourhood planning and policy language. Whereas gentrification researchers studying policy often target the policy discourse itself as the tool that silences critical reflection, this thesis demonstrates that media discourses – used as a proxy for mainstream discourses more broadly – have evicted critical class considerations. Public policy discourses, liveability in particular, then perpetuate this eviction to encourage the types of neighbourhood change that benefit affluent groups and accumulation. In order to reverse this process, planning and policy practitioners should acknowledge inequality, different experiences of neighbourhood change, and make minimizing displacement a primary policy objective.
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    Spillover gentrification? Mid-sized cities within commuter sheds of global cities
    (University of Waterloo, 2021-10-06) van der Merwe, Justin; Doucet, Brian
    Commuter sheds have long comprised several mid-sized cities surrounding a large metropolis. The smaller cities typically feed into the economic and commuter orbit of the larger city. These ‘bedroom communities’ of the bigger city have housing markets that need to accommodate long-term in-migration, which is something for which they are sometimes ill-prepared. As a result, sustained and sudden increases in migration to these smaller communities can cause distortions in their housing markets, not least for affordable housing. This dynamic displaces those who are struggling, forcing them further down the urban hierarchy. Analyzing the wider region around Toronto, and the role of two prominent mid-sized cities within this system (Hamilton and the Region of Waterloo), this study investigates how gentrification spreads between large and mid-sized cities within a regional commuter shed, and whether the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a type of tiered and cascading gentrification throughout city regions. The first case examines how gentrification spills over from Toronto into Hamilton’s Lower City neighbourhoods, resulting in the (re)production of neighbourhoods based on a Torontonian middle class identity. The second case examines the established pattern of migration from the Greater Toronto Area into Waterloo Region, and the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this flow while amplifying affordable housing challenges. Considered together, the empirical chapters suggest that planners need to pay particular attention to the systemic pressures accruing between various ‘nodes’ within the urban hierarchy of commuter sheds, as spillover gentrification exerts a discernable pressure down the urban system of these commuter sheds. This thesis therefore makes a call for a wider systemic understanding of the scales of gentrifying capital. Planners in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, as well as in commuter sheds more generally, should focus on the systemic downward pressure caused by the ebb-and-flow of capital throughout their regions, as it valorizes and devalorizes neighbourhoods and suburbs around global cities. To properly ‘unscramble’ spillover gentrification around global cities, we need a refocusing of planning debates, and directing of future research to the neighbourhood and suburb scale instead of a metropolitan one.
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    Transit-Induced Gentrification in Weston and Mount Dennis: A Mixed-Methods Analysis
    (University of Waterloo, 2022-08-31) Di Loreto, Mark; Doucet, Brian
    As Toronto commits to increase investments in rapid transit across the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA), there is an increasing need to ensure existing residents are able to benefit from these new connections. Weston and Mount Dennis are two examples of neighbourhoods that have received major public transit investment and are susceptible to significant neighbourhood change. Most transit-induced gentrification studies depend on quantitative analysis, with little to no consideration for nuanced qualitative examination and often underestimate the number of displaced residents. For this reason, we conducted a mixed-methods study to understand what extent public transit investment has contributed to processes of gentrification in Weston and Mount Dennis. Analysis of census data determined were that there were no conclusive signs that gentrification has occurred in these neighbourhoods as of 2016. Interviews with key neighbourhood stakeholders revealed detailed accounts of neighbourhood change occurring in these areas before, during and after construction of new transit. While the quantitative and qualitative analysis rendered different findings, this outcome provides us with additional data to assess the strengths and weaknesses between different research methods to better understand the most efficient ways to measure gentrification moving forward. Our findings indicate that census analysis does not conclusively indicate gentrification has occurred while interviews with key stakeholders provide perspectives that indicate early signifiers of gentrification in these neighbourhoods.
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    Visual Change in the Urban Landscape: Taste, Gentrification & Displacement
    (University of Waterloo, 2025-01-23) Babin, Caleb; Doucet, Brian
    Measuring the pace, characteristics and spatial distribution of gentrification is important to developing policies to mitigate its negative consequences, most crucially displacement. Typically, this is done through an analysis of census data on demographic, socioeconomic or housing change. However, this approach has numerous shortcomings, including the homogenizing effect on differences within neighbourhoods and the infrequency of census data collection. Visual analysis, particularly when examining multiple temporal views of the same location, has the potential to render visible fine-grained detail about spatial, economic and cultural changes within the urban landscape. Google Street View (GSV) is emerging as a source of repeat photography data. In this thesis, GSV is employed for analysis within a number of neighbourhoods and retail streets in Hamilton, Ontario. Coding and analyzing GSV images between 2009 and 2021 reveals an array of specific home upgrades, retail turnover as well as aesthetic changes that reflect middle-class tastes, values and lifestyles that suggest more upgrading than found within conventional statistics or dominant narratives about the city. Mapping these changes paints a complex, and fine-grained, block-by-block picture of gentrification that reveals why some areas are more conducive to gentrification than others and how retail gentrification can lead to both direct and indirect displacement. This analysis is important for critical visual methodologies, gentrification and neighbourhood change theories in addition to planning and policymaking.