Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a Silurian dolomite cap over shale, which accounts for the famous falls; the Oak
Ridges moraine, whose sands and gravels filtered much of the rainfall in the area
before it enters the rivers and reservoirs that form the region's water supply, as well
as being a popular recreation area; and the Niagara fruit belt, with its vineyards,
peach and apple orchards, which together with the agricultural crops from rich soils
in other parts of the belt, provide a major source of unique agricultural products in
this climatically favoured part of Canada. Support has also come from the fact that
the government created a Green Belt Foundation with $ 25 million seed money, a
non-profit organization that has since attracted many other funds and is designed to
promote the benefits of the Green Belt (OGB
2012
). This source has calculated that
the belt's non-market ecological services alone are worth $ 2.6 billion annually, de-
rived from the third of the area that is composed of lakes, wetlands, river valleys and
forests. In addition, produce from the area is heavily promoted and sold in a variety
of local markets; farmers are helped to develop and market new crops; the benefits
of tourism and recreational usage are emphasized; while the foundation helped or-
ganize the first world conference on green belts in March 2011, with delegates and
speakers from around the world. This pro-active approach to publicizing the Green
Belt's benefits has led to overwhelming public support to the area, one that contrasts
with the way that the first green belts were just designated by top-down fiat and es-
sentially left as agricultural areas, with few attempts to make them effective, or to
create public support for the policy.
However, it must be admitted that this Canadian example provides a rare new ex-
ample of comprehensive regional planning around a big western city in the last few
decades, for national and state governments, especially under conservative regimes,
have been reluctant to use their powers to impose such solutions. This has been es-
pecially true in the U.S.A. where national and state governments, particularly under
conservative regimes, have rarely intervened to control the development around
cities. Throughout the country there is greater opposition to federal intrusion, sup-
port for states' rights, and a high degree of localism with municipalities having most
rights over planning. These administrative issues and increased car ownership have
helped create greater amounts of sprawl in the U.S.A. than in most countries of the
world, often in new local government units that operate independently from the
central cities. The result was to hollow-out cities, as residents and business fled to
cheaper, more accessible sites outside the central cities, with inner cities becoming
increasingly obsolescent or even abandoned as residents fled and no new investment
was available to counteract the decay, which was made worse by the increasing con-
centration of low income and often ethnic minorities in the areas. Detroit is perhaps
the exemplar of these trends, a city with 90,000 abandoned homes, that has dropped
in population from 2 million in 1960 to 700,000 in 2013, and which declared itself
bankrupt in the summer of 2013 (Binelli
2012
, LeDuff
2013
). Elsewhere, the value
of urban growth boundaries to define the limits of a spread of a municipality, and
a preference for infill development, rather than continued urban sprawl, in order to
help revitalize the central city, was pioneered in Oregon through the 1973 Oregon
Land Use Act. This reduced local government powers by creating state-wide poli-
cies for land use and transportation by insisting that all urban areas establish urban
