Pamela Blais is an author, city planner and principal of Toronto-based Metropole Consultants. Formed in 1996, Metropole Consultants is an urban planning consulting firm, focusing on strategic approaches to urban planning issues -- integrating planning, economics and the environment, and working in urban research, innovative policy development, long range and regional planning. Pamela Blais' professional focus is in creating better cities by integrating planning, and economic and environmental thinking in the analysis of urban issues, urban design, and the development of innovative policy. Her approach to urban development issues aims to be both strategic and integrated. She is particularly interested in understanding key forces that drive urban development patterns, shaping cities to meet the future. In her twenty year career as an urban planning consultant, her work has included the development of strategies in reurbanisation and urban regeneration, long term regional growth and municipal economic development; she has developed innovative land use policies for industrial areas, for sustainable urban form, and for community design and infrastructure; she has researched the impact of technology on urban form. Blais has a Master of Science degree in Planning from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in urban economic geography from the London School of Economics. She is a Registered Professional Planner, and a member of the Canadian Institute of Planners. In her recent book, Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy and Urban Sprawl, Pamela Blais shows that, as a result of crude public policies, mis-pricing creates hidden, "perverse" subsidies and incentives that promote sprawl while discouraging more efficient and sustainable urban forms — clearly not what most planners and environmentalists have in mind. Perverse Cities makes the case that accurate pricing and better policy are fundamental to curbing sprawl and shows how this can be achieved in practice through a range of market-oriented tools that promote efficient, sustainable cities. Perverse Cities was published by University of British Columbia Press in November, 2010.

• published: 26 Nov 2013
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