Monitoring in landscaping

By Jérémie Vachon, Intern in urban planning at L’Atelier Urbain

Driven by a sincere desire to create exceptional living environments for their residents, Quebec municipalities are vying with each other in their ingenuity to improve, perfect and reinvent themselves. And their citizens want to be part of this change.

How can urban planning and development contribute to this change? Firstly, through the need to produce an urban plan that will contribute to the achievement of general objectives and propose actions to achieve them. We are also seeing a growing number of municipalities resorting to the Programme particulier d’urbanisme (PPU), a tool that describes in greater detail the development of a specific sector.

Turning words into action

It’s not enough to produce plans and programs; they also have to be implemented. And then, how do we know whether the means of implementation chosen are actually achieving the objectives set at the outset? The answer probably lies in monitoring tools. What are monitoring tools?

In medicine, Larousse defines monitoring as ” continuous or closely spaced medical surveillance, carried out by measuring parameters or recording various phenomena. ”

By analogy, in spatial planning, monitoring consists in monitoring, at set intervals, the progress made towards achieving planning objectives, through the evaluation of indicators.

A legal obligation in Quebec?

In Quebec, there is little doubt that monitoring will soon be a legally required practice. For example, the Vaudreuil-Soulanges MRC is working on adopting a bylaw that will oblige its municipalities that are part of Greater Montreal to  ” […] produce annually, starting on January 1^er of each year, a rreport on indicators for monitoring the densification process of spaces dedicated to optimal urbanization ” (draft bylaw 167-15).

Died on the order paper in 2012 when the election was called, the draft Sustainable Land Use and Planning Act (LADTU) was the subject of a broad consensus and will probably return to the agenda for adoption shortly. This project, which was to replace the current Loi sur l’aménagement et l’urbanisme, contained legal provisions concerning monitoring :

Excerpt from Article 102 of the draft LADTU law

” Every local municipality must equip itself with indicators designed to ensure the monitoring and implementation of its urban plan and to evaluate the progress made towards achieving the objectives expressed therein and the realization of the actions proposed therein; its council must adopt a biennial report on these subjects.”

In Switzerland, this is a well-known practice, for example in the canton of Geneva[1]. However, insofar as monitoring is new and there are no common references here, the question is : ” How to do it? ” There are a few things to bear in mind, not least the need to choose the right indicators.

Choice of indicators

Municipalities must be careful not to choose the wrong indicators! Keep in mind that the monitoring carried out with these indicators must serve to fuel reflection and help decision-making. Indicators that are too general will fail to capture the complexity of environmental evolution and will not be useful. Indicators that are too precise will be costly to develop and measure, and will provide superfluous information of limited scope. It is preferable to opt for indicators based on data that already exists, is readily available or easy to produce. Data production can be expensive and time-consuming!

It is therefore essential for a municipality to make a rigorous selection of indicators for :

1. meet its future legal obligations;
2. meet the expectations of citizens and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs;
3. ensure optimal resource allocation.

What are the advantages of monitoring?

In addition to the legal obligations that municipalities will have to meet, there is a real advantage in monitoring the progress made in relation to an urban plan or program.

Why is this? Because this monitoring enables the municipal administration to evaluate :

1. Whether or not the actions put forward by the municipality and its partners have achieved the desired progress;
2. Whether the timeframes set out in the action plans are sufficient to achieve the final objective, based on the progress already made, or whether the timetable needs to be revised;
3. Whether the chosen means of implementation are relevant to achieving the goals and objectives of the plans and programs, or whether other measures would be more effective or efficient;
4. Whether the financial, human and material resources allocated to implementing an action plan are sufficient, or whether they need to be increased.

This information is invaluable, of course, since municipalities are accountable to their citizens, who contribute financially to the efforts made.

Call in the specialists?

For the sake of credibility, it is often desirable in an evaluation exercise to have the results and analysis validated by a third party. This is one of the reasons why many public organizations have an Auditor General. By doing so, renderings benefit from greater credibility in the eyes of observers, since the applicant has shielded himself from potential conflicts of interest and has refrained from interfering too much in the process. In this way, a municipality benefits from enlisting the expertise of planning specialists who are familiar with monitoring.

In conclusion…

Everything points to the fact that development monitoring is just around the corner. It poses a number of challenges for the municipal world, and to avoid making it an undesirable feature, municipal players will do well to start thinking about it now. Bear in mind that there are many concomitant benefits.

And above all, monitoring confronts reality : have we planned to plan or have we planned in order to act?

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[1] http://ge.ch/amenagement/monitoring