Growing Conversations - Project Update

Editor's Notes

1. Growing Conversations is an exciting initiative from the City of Toronto to help make Toronto the most engaged city in North America. Growing Conversations is central to the effort to improve participation in the planning process. This city-wide initiative will offer a variety of opportunities for residents to engage with planning staff to craft a better consultation process. Let’s talk!
2. Ethnic Media Strategy – Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Tamil and Tagalog
3. Growing Conversations is an exciting initiative from the City of Toronto to help make Toronto the most engaged city in North America. Growing Conversations is central to the effort to improve participation in the planning process. This city-wide initiative will offer a variety of opportunities for residents to engage with planning staff to craft a better consultation process. Let’s talk!
4. Growing Conversations is an exciting initiative from the City of Toronto to help make Toronto the most engaged city in North America. Growing Conversations is central to the effort to improve participation in the planning process. This city-wide initiative will offer a variety of opportunities for residents to engage with planning staff to craft a better consultation process. Let’s talk!
5. 1. An accessible planning process ensures that people feel welcome and are able to participate freely. Improvements to the engagement process should focus on accessibility and access to information related to the planning process. This includes overcoming linguistic barriers, making more regular use of plain language, offering a variety of mediums for engagement and scheduling meetings at times that suit differing schedules. 2. When people don't understand how their feedback has been used to inform planning, transparency and accountability suffers. Making a stronger connection between inputs from the community and project outcomes by being clearer about where feedback is going, and how it has been used can only increase the accessibility and transparency of the planning process. 3. The planning process in Ontario is complex and difficult to navigate, and this can be intimidating to many people, creating a barrier to participation. It also leads to frustration when people don't understand how the planning process itself influences planning outcomes. Building Torontonians' understanding of basic planning concepts, principles and processes will go a long way towards making engagement more relevant. 4. Many Torontonians find it difficult to find and access information related to development applications or planning processes happening in their communities. This includes access information regarding the time and locations of meetings and updates on development applications. Improving access to this information should promote greater participation. Open Data can play a key role in broadening access to information. 5. People are looking for new ways to participate in planning processes beyond the traditional community meeting. Canada has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world, with well over 85% of Canadians enjoying access to an internet connection, and close to 60% have a smartphone. While City Planning has already begun to make better use of these technologies, there is an opportunity to leverage them even further in order to make participation easier and more convenient. 6. Toronto is a very different place than it was in the 70s, when neighbourhood planning offices exited across the city. Residents today feel disconnected from the Community Planners who are responsible for planning their neighbourhoods. Giving Community Planners a more prominent community role will help to build stronger relationships with the community, and promote transparency and accountability.