abstract: Tempe political and business leaders implemented a series of strategies, composed of interconnected economic, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the city's growth over time. Influenced by a new economic opportunities and challenges, changing ideas about redevelopment and the role of suburbs, and Tempe's own growth issues after 1960, Tempe leaders and citizens formed a distinct vision for downtown redevelopment. Modified over time, the redevelopment strategy depended on effective planning and financing, public-private collaboration, citizen participation, and a revised perception of growth. After 1980, the strategy gained momentum enabling leaders to expand their ambitions for downtown. Redevelopment manifested through riverfront redevelopment, art and culture, and historic preservation redirecting the city's growth, creating economic development, and revitalizing downtown as Tempe began flourishing as a mature supersuburb. The strategy showed considerable economic success by 2012 and the completion of the Rio Salado Project, the Tempe Center for the Arts, and the preservation of the Hayden Flour Mill made downtown an attractive and diverse urban destination. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2014

My research considers both the challenges to and opportunities for implementing Smart Growth strategies in the City of Guelph’s urban growth centre, with a particular focus on the St. Patrick’s Ward neighbourhood. I follow the development of the downtown secondary plan-making process, spanning the time period from March 2010 to June 2011, which includes public participation by residents in the St. Patrick’s Ward and the city at large. The plan-making process started prior to, and continues after, my chosen timeframe, but the information collected in my case study brings to light the complexity of drafting a secondary plan for implementing Smart Growth strategies; the plan should ideally establish a framework for local interpretation and implementation of Smart Growth – the widely supported intensification and redevelopment strategy. I take the view that while a plan can be written to code and be argued rationally by experts, its effectiveness and ethical validity is a function of public participation in planning decisions that include values-rational anchoring, i.e. critical and ethical reflection on the value of a goal. Although many guiding principles and recommendations in the draft Plan are based on Smart Growth strategies, the physical scale of urban intensification is today very much focused on density numbers under the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. The City of Guelph’s draft Downtown Secondary Plan primarily seeks to facilitate high-density, mid- to high-rise condominium and/or office developments. This may in turn lead to increased spatial segregation based on socioeconomic differences. Like in Toronto, Guelph’s Downtown Secondary Plan deregulates zoning by-laws and reduces bureaucratic ‘red tape’ for the high-density development industry through more flexible policies. Potential socioeconomic consequences like displacement of entire populations, services, and jobs from the newly re-valued places are, however, not addressed in the Plan; the policy language and conceptual thinking appears primarily geared toward redevelopment and infill. The overall lesson learned from studying the plan-making process leading up to the City of Guelph’s 1st Draft Downtown Secondary Plan concerns the role of planning in implementing Smart Growth; being a specific form of urban planning, Smart Growth implementation requires facilitation and education of stakeholders who are willing to compromise, but not beyond the point where “smart” is removed from “growth”. Given the overarching responsibility of the government to drive home this message, every stakeholder working for the public interest must collaboratively define, steer, and direct the process and private interests at each and every step along the road. The case of Guelph demonstrates the difficulty of prioritizing such a responsibility. Thus, potential future pressures to push and undermine Smart Growth’s synergistic and public participatory core value must be monitored and controlled with long-term objectives in mind.

My research considers both the challenges to and opportunities for implementing Smart Growth strategies in the City of Guelph’s urban growth centre, with a particular focus on the St. Patrick’s Ward neighbourhood. I follow the development of the downtown secondary plan-making process, spanning the time period from March 2010 to June 2011, which includes public participation by residents in the St. Patrick’s Ward and the city at large. The plan-making process started prior to, and continues after, my chosen timeframe, but the information collected in my case study brings to light the complexity of drafting a secondary plan for implementing Smart Growth strategies; the plan should ideally establish a framework for local interpretation and implementation of Smart Growth – the widely supported intensification and redevelopment strategy. I take the view that while a plan can be written to code and be argued rationally by experts, its effectiveness and ethical validity is a function of public participation in planning decisions that include values-rational anchoring, i.e. critical and ethical reflection on the value of a goal. Although many guiding principles and recommendations in the draft Plan are based on Smart Growth strategies, the physical scale of urban intensification is today very much focused on density numbers under the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. The City of Guelph’s draft Downtown Secondary Plan primarily seeks to facilitate high-density, mid- to high-rise condominium and/or office developments. This may in turn lead to increased spatial segregation based on socioeconomic differences. Like in Toronto, Guelph’s Downtown Secondary Plan deregulates zoning by-laws and reduces bureaucratic ‘red tape’ for the high-density development industry through more flexible policies. Potential socioeconomic consequences like displacement of entire populations, services, and jobs from the newly re-valued places are, however, not addressed in the Plan; the policy language and conceptual thinking appears primarily geared toward redevelopment and infill. The overall lesson learned from studying the plan-making process leading up to the City of Guelph’s 1st Draft Downtown Secondary Plan concerns the role of planning in implementing Smart Growth; being a specific form of urban planning, Smart Growth implementation requires facilitation and education of stakeholders who are willing to compromise, but not beyond the point where “smart” is removed from “growth”. Given the overarching responsibility of the government to drive home this message, every stakeholder working for the public interest must collaboratively define, steer, and direct the process and private interests at each and every step along the road. The case of Guelph demonstrates the difficulty of prioritizing such a responsibility. Thus, potential future pressures to push and undermine Smart Growth’s synergistic and public participatory core value must be monitored and controlled with long-term objectives in mind.

Cette recherche porte sur la mise en oeuvre de stratégies visant à stimuler le développement résidentiel au centre-ville de Montréal depuis la fin des années 1980 . En nous appuyant sur une double étude de cas portant sur le redéveloppement de deux friches périphériques à la vieille ville, le faubourg Québec et le faubourg des Récollets, nous montrons comment les pouvoirs publics locaux peuvent, par le biais de diverses mesures incitatives, faire converger les stratégies d’affaires des promoteurs immobiliers avec les objectifs urbanistiques de l’administration. D’une manière parfois improvisée, les pouvoirs publics montréalais ont ainsi mis en place un système d’opportunités et de contraintes dans le but d’inciter les promoteurs à investir dans les faubourgs. Notre recherche constate que bien que le système mis en place par les pouvoirs publics ait laissée indifférente une majorité de promoteurs, il a néanmoins permis à un petit nombre d’entre eux de se tailler une place sur le marché, ceux-ci pouvant maintenant jouer un rôle actif dans le renouvellement du centre-ville, et ce bien au-delà des limites des faubourgs. / This thesis looks at the design and the implementation of strategies aimed to stimulate the development of residential neighbourhoods in downtown Montreal since the end of the 1980s. Following from a double case study about the redevelopment of two derelict industrial districts next to Old Montreal, the faubourg Quebec and the faubourg des Récollets, we show how local authorities can, by means of a bundle of incentives, encourage the investment of property developers in order to make their business plans converge with the goals of the local planning authorities. In a rather improvised manner, the Montreal government set up a combination of « opportunities » and « constraints » to entice partnerships with the private sector in order to foster the development of the two districts. Our results show that although the system set up by authorities left indifferent a majority of developers, it nevertheless allowed a small number of them to establish themselves in a now very profitable share of the Montreal real estate market.

Historic preservation has been a successful economic development tool that has led to heritage tourism in some Tennessee towns but not in others. The problem studied was to determine if there was a set of tangible attributes a town must possess to be successful in using historic preservation as an economic development tool. Through an extensive literature review, 59 predictor variables were identified and arranged into 6 research questions looking at the tangible attributes related to town demographics, geography, organizational structure, historic preservation organizations, heritage tourism organizations, and town financial structure. Data were collected from a mailed survey of 32 town managers. The response rate was 68.8% (N = 22). Secondary sources, such as U.S. Census data, were used to collect data when those sources appeared consistent and mandatory. The study used logistic regression analysis to compare successful towns, defined as those towns in the upper third of study towns for tourism expenditures per capita, with less than successful towns. The 32 study towns met the criteria of having a 2003 population of fewer than 10,000 and a nationally-recognized historic district that coincided with the towns' central business districts. The results of the logistic regression analysis on the individual predictor variables indicated that 5 were statistically significant--median age, distance to a major city, restaurant beer sales, Grand Division, and merchants' association. Constraining the final predictive model (Garson, 2006) to no more than 1 variable per 10 cases 3 led to the inclusion of median age and merchants' association as the 2 predictor variables that provided the highest predictive value of correctly classified towns (95.8%). In summary, this study is inconclusive in determining whether historic preservation leads to heritage tourism and can be used as an economic development tool by small Tennessee towns. However, it has been established that 5 attributes or characteristics of small towns does contribute to the probability of success and that median age and the existence of a merchants' association proved to be the best predictive model.

Cette recherche porte sur la mise en oeuvre de stratégies visant à stimuler le développement résidentiel au centre-ville de Montréal depuis la fin des années 1980 . En nous appuyant sur une double étude de cas portant sur le redéveloppement de deux friches périphériques à la vieille ville, le faubourg Québec et le faubourg des Récollets, nous montrons comment les pouvoirs publics locaux peuvent, par le biais de diverses mesures incitatives, faire converger les stratégies d’affaires des promoteurs immobiliers avec les objectifs urbanistiques de l’administration. D’une manière parfois improvisée, les pouvoirs publics montréalais ont ainsi mis en place un système d’opportunités et de contraintes dans le but d’inciter les promoteurs à investir dans les faubourgs. Notre recherche constate que bien que le système mis en place par les pouvoirs publics ait laissée indifférente une majorité de promoteurs, il a néanmoins permis à un petit nombre d’entre eux de se tailler une place sur le marché, ceux-ci pouvant maintenant jouer un rôle actif dans le renouvellement du centre-ville, et ce bien au-delà des limites des faubourgs. / This thesis looks at the design and the implementation of strategies aimed to stimulate the development of residential neighbourhoods in downtown Montreal since the end of the 1980s. Following from a double case study about the redevelopment of two derelict industrial districts next to Old Montreal, the faubourg Quebec and the faubourg des Récollets, we show how local authorities can, by means of a bundle of incentives, encourage the investment of property developers in order to make their business plans converge with the goals of the local planning authorities. In a rather improvised manner, the Montreal government set up a combination of « opportunities » and « constraints » to entice partnerships with the private sector in order to foster the development of the two districts. Our results show that although the system set up by authorities left indifferent a majority of developers, it nevertheless allowed a small number of them to establish themselves in a now very profitable share of the Montreal real estate market.