This research evaluates the development of strategy and planning undertaken by the three federal protected areas management organisations in Canada. These organisations and the protected areas they manage are: the Canadian Wildlife Service (National Wildlife Areas and Migratory Bird Sanctuaries), the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Oceans Act Marine Protected Areas), and the Parks Canada Agency (National Parks, National Marine Conservation Areas, and National Historic Sites). As non-renewable resources become more valuable, urban centres expand, and the climate changes, protected areas will face an increasing number of threats, the mitigation of which will require significant new financial resources. In order to acquire these new resources, protected areas management organisations will have to compete with other aspects of the government’s agenda. In this research, strategy is identified as an important component of successful competition. A review of literature from various disciplines explains some of the main theories of strategy development: strategic planning, strategic management, and collaborative planning. Management planning for protected areas helps to understand the congruence between strategy and site management. Using a qualitative approach, the research triangulates the results of interviews, reviews of documents, and participant-observation to evaluate the way that each of the organisations develops strategy and understands management planning activities. The research also includes a model strategic plan for the Canadian Wildlife Service protected areas network. The model plan stems from data collected during this research. This research supports the results from a previous study (Foresta, 1985) that found Parks Canada (now the Parks Canada Agency, or PCA) has been actively pursuing a coherent strategy through systematic management planning since the late 1960s. The PCA can attribute a significant degree of its ongoing success in creating and managing National Parks to its consistent strategy and systematic planning efforts. Another important part of the PCA success has been its external orientation, which demonstrates its awareness of the importance of maintaining public satisfaction and its high public profile. No prior research on the development of strategy or of systematic planning at the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was uncovered. This research concludes that the CWS, which has many strategic plans on paper, has not actively pursued strategic or management planning. The lack of strategic thinking and planning contribute significantly to the relatively low budgets of the CWS, and to its low public profile. The DFO has decided to take a “learning approach” to its protected areas, by creating a set of pilot marine protected areas and then identifying the policies and procedures needed to manage the sites. The public profile of the DFO protected areas is even lower than that of the CWS. The CWS and the DFO are internally-oriented, do not have significant public outreach programs, long-range or strategic planning, and do not seem to have champions. The most important contributors to the PCA’s success are the finite nature and the simplicity of their goals, which Parks staff can easily communicate to decision-makers and to the public. The external orientation of the PCA, demonstrated by extensive public outreach programming, such as natural history interpretation and the provision of camping opportunities, is also an important part of its success. Another important contributor, identified in this research, is the support of a small number of key political champions. This research identifies means by which organisations could improve their competitiveness, including by improving public profile. The research highlights the importance of externally-focused strategic plans that include certain elements that are well-defined in the literature, and the importance of strategic thinking. The results suggest that there is a need for a new approach to developing strategy, and proposes the exploration of collaborative planning as a potential model. This research contributes to the academic literature and to planning practice by identifying key elements that created conditions of success for the PCA. The PCA experience highlights the importance of strategic thinking, in the context of developing a strategic plan.

Ethnic tourism has emerged as a means that is employed by many countries to facilitate economic and cultural development and to assist in the preservation of ethnic heritage. However, while ethnic tourism has the potential to bring economic and social benefits it can also significantly impact traditional cultures, ways of life and the sense of identity of ethnic groups. There is growing concern in many places about how to balance the use of ethnicity as a tourist attraction with the protection of minority cultures and the promotion of ethnic pride. Despite the fact that a substantial literature is devoted to the impacts of ethnic tourism, little research has been done on how to plan ethnic tourism attractions or to manage community impacts of tourism. This research addresses the need for more research on planning for ethnic tourism by exploring the status and enhancement of planning strategies for ethnic tourism development. Drawing upon existing literature, a conceptual framework was developed and adopted to study ethnic tourism in a well-known ethnic tourist destination in China – Xishuangbanna, Yunnan. The research analyzes how ethnic tourism has been planned and developed at the study site and examines associated socio-cultural and planning issues. The framework is employed to compare and evaluate the perspectives of four key stakeholder groups (the government, tourism entrepreneurs, ethnic minorities and tourists) on ethnic tourism through on-site observation, interviews with government officials, planners and tourism entrepreneurs, surveys of tourists and ethnic minority people, and evaluation of government policies, plans and statistics. Economic advantages have been a driving force in ethnic tourism development. The government and tourism entrepreneurs are the main powers in developing ethnic tourism, but most of them are not ethnic members. Their administrative and commercial involvement in tourism strongly shapes the ways of staging, packaging and representing ethnic culture in tourism sites. Authenticity of attractions is not determined by the resource providers, the ethnic minorities, but is shaped by decisions of government and entrepreneurs. The commodification of ethnic culture and the production of cultural events and other tourist products are manipulated to fit the interests of business and political mandates. Minority people are usually marginalized or disadvantaged economically and politically because they have limited control over tourism resources and activities. Most minority people employed in tourism hold only low-paying jobs. The findings show that the production and commodification of ethnic culture is often accompanied by tensions among economic, political and cultural goals. Economic motives often outweigh other goals in tourism development. Thus, the balance between the use of tourism as a form of economic development and the preservation of ethnic culture should be addressed in tourism planning. More effective planning is required to mitigate negative impacts and to reinforce the positive aspects of ethnic tourism.

Travel patterns in Canadian urban areas changed during the twentieth century. No longer is urban travel downtown oriented. In all but the smallest Canadian urban areas, travel has evolved into a polycentric pattern. Despite this Canadian public transit networks remain oriented to the older travel patterns because of shortages in planning capacity. The transit literature on performance monitoring focuses on “system” variables rather than “network” variables like how well transit networks match travel patterns. This research develops a method by which transit planners can monitor the performance of transit networks in their communities. Applying this methodology provides recommendations to planners on how to improve transit network structures to better facilitate polycentric urban travel. Future research should compare the network performance of Canadian transit systems.

This research evaluates the development of strategy and planning undertaken by the three federal protected areas management organisations in Canada. These organisations and the protected areas they manage are: the Canadian Wildlife Service (National Wildlife Areas and Migratory Bird Sanctuaries), the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Oceans Act Marine Protected Areas), and the Parks Canada Agency (National Parks, National Marine Conservation Areas, and National Historic Sites). As non-renewable resources become more valuable, urban centres expand, and the climate changes, protected areas will face an increasing number of threats, the mitigation of which will require significant new financial resources. In order to acquire these new resources, protected areas management organisations will have to compete with other aspects of the government’s agenda. In this research, strategy is identified as an important component of successful competition. A review of literature from various disciplines explains some of the main theories of strategy development: strategic planning, strategic management, and collaborative planning. Management planning for protected areas helps to understand the congruence between strategy and site management. Using a qualitative approach, the research triangulates the results of interviews, reviews of documents, and participant-observation to evaluate the way that each of the organisations develops strategy and understands management planning activities. The research also includes a model strategic plan for the Canadian Wildlife Service protected areas network. The model plan stems from data collected during this research. This research supports the results from a previous study (Foresta, 1985) that found Parks Canada (now the Parks Canada Agency, or PCA) has been actively pursuing a coherent strategy through systematic management planning since the late 1960s. The PCA can attribute a significant degree of its ongoing success in creating and managing National Parks to its consistent strategy and systematic planning efforts. Another important part of the PCA success has been its external orientation, which demonstrates its awareness of the importance of maintaining public satisfaction and its high public profile. No prior research on the development of strategy or of systematic planning at the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was uncovered. This research concludes that the CWS, which has many strategic plans on paper, has not actively pursued strategic or management planning. The lack of strategic thinking and planning contribute significantly to the relatively low budgets of the CWS, and to its low public profile. The DFO has decided to take a “learning approach” to its protected areas, by creating a set of pilot marine protected areas and then identifying the policies and procedures needed to manage the sites. The public profile of the DFO protected areas is even lower than that of the CWS. The CWS and the DFO are internally-oriented, do not have significant public outreach programs, long-range or strategic planning, and do not seem to have champions. The most important contributors to the PCA’s success are the finite nature and the simplicity of their goals, which Parks staff can easily communicate to decision-makers and to the public. The external orientation of the PCA, demonstrated by extensive public outreach programming, such as natural history interpretation and the provision of camping opportunities, is also an important part of its success. Another important contributor, identified in this research, is the support of a small number of key political champions. This research identifies means by which organisations could improve their competitiveness, including by improving public profile. The research highlights the importance of externally-focused strategic plans that include certain elements that are well-defined in the literature, and the importance of strategic thinking. The results suggest that there is a need for a new approach to developing strategy, and proposes the exploration of collaborative planning as a potential model. This research contributes to the academic literature and to planning practice by identifying key elements that created conditions of success for the PCA. The PCA experience highlights the importance of strategic thinking, in the context of developing a strategic plan.

This thesis was a post-implementation evaluation of Albuquerque’s Downtown 2010 Sector Development Plan. The Downtown Plan, commissioned in 2000, has a preset deadline of 2010 for meeting conditions outlined within its text. Therefore, the timing of this study was optimal. A triangulated, mixed methods methodology yielded data that were evaluated through an amalgamation of conformance and performance-based evaluation approaches. Six of the twelve categories, under which the Plan’s text is organized, were chosen as the focus of this study’s evaluation efforts. The categories are as follows: 1) Transportation and Parking; 2) Land Use and Design; 3) Healthy Neighborhoods; 4) Urban Housing; 5) Urban Retailing; and 6) Parks and Open Space. The findings of this study were specified to each of the six categories with additional findings listed later on. Overall, the results for each category fell between ‘somewhat unsuccessful’ to ‘successful’ based on a success spectrum created for typifying the evaluation results. Ultimately, this study found that the Plan was responsible for some significant and positive changes that occurred in Downtown Albuquerque over the past decade. These include the development of a number of various housing options, the prevention of commercial encroachment from the Downtown onto adjacent neighborhoods, and the creation of parking, bicycle, transit, and pedestrian facilities. A lack of various retail services and the failure to remediate the Fourth Street Mall are couple of the 2010 Plan implementation failures discovered by the evaluation. Additional findings spoke to the interplay between categories such as Urban Housing and Urban Retailing, which identified the need to synchronize the functions of these two interdependent markets. Further discoveries were derived from the collected data and their subsequent analysis.

Thesis (M.U.D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis was a post-implementation evaluation of Albuquerque’s Downtown 2010 Sector Development Plan. The Downtown Plan, commissioned in 2000, has a preset deadline of 2010 for meeting conditions outlined within its text. Therefore, the timing of this study was optimal. A triangulated, mixed methods methodology yielded data that were evaluated through an amalgamation of conformance and performance-based evaluation approaches. Six of the twelve categories, under which the Plan’s text is organized, were chosen as the focus of this study’s evaluation efforts. The categories are as follows: 1) Transportation and Parking; 2) Land Use and Design; 3) Healthy Neighborhoods; 4) Urban Housing; 5) Urban Retailing; and 6) Parks and Open Space. The findings of this study were specified to each of the six categories with additional findings listed later on. Overall, the results for each category fell between ‘somewhat unsuccessful’ to ‘successful’ based on a success spectrum created for typifying the evaluation results. Ultimately, this study found that the Plan was responsible for some significant and positive changes that occurred in Downtown Albuquerque over the past decade. These include the development of a number of various housing options, the prevention of commercial encroachment from the Downtown onto adjacent neighborhoods, and the creation of parking, bicycle, transit, and pedestrian facilities. A lack of various retail services and the failure to remediate the Fourth Street Mall are couple of the 2010 Plan implementation failures discovered by the evaluation. Additional findings spoke to the interplay between categories such as Urban Housing and Urban Retailing, which identified the need to synchronize the functions of these two interdependent markets. Further discoveries were derived from the collected data and their subsequent analysis.