Sustainable Living Applying a Swedish Case Study in Steering Parc Downsview Park in Toronto in the Development towards a Sustainable User Phase

Sammanfattning: The 21st century is accompanied by a myriad of urban challenges with respect to energy use, waste management, transportation & mobility, water consumption and ecological space. An increasingly growing influx of people from rural to urban areas coupled with the already significant urban growth is presenting businesses, municipalities and the public with a multitude of challenges in managing and conservation of the aforementioned environmental matters. Constructing as well as transforming communities into sustainable cities is a very desirable vision in many developed urban areas around the world. This paper therefore examines how these goals are achieved in a Swedish case example (the Bo01 district), and how they can be applied to a current project in Toronto led by PDP which is still in the early stages of planning. It is widely accepted that both development and user phases of city districts are characterized by numerous environmental impacts. It is therefore imperative to integrate environmental consideration not only to the planning and development phases, but also, ensuring that such continue into the user phase of the community. This gives rise to the importance of evaluating sustainable city districts in the user phase and to encourage residents to take environmental impact into account in daily tasks. The first main component of the thesis provides an account of the Bo01 district case study with respect to how the project was managed, design, education and evaluation. The lessons learned are then imported to the next main component - a chapter providing suggestions for PDP. Both the case tudy and the recommendation chapters focus on design parameters that are conducive to an efficient performance in the operational phase; education to increase resident awareness in light of the goals; user phase evaluation and a project management approach to improve and reinforce the user phase. The last step drives the necessity to carry out an ongoing approach to evaluation and follow up to ensure that the environmental performance of PDP's user phase is moving closer to the targets.