Double down on the city we chose
Saint John is 316 km². A decade ago, PlanSJ pointed us to one Primary Development Area - the PDA. The next plan should send even more quality of life value into it: services, homes, everyday life.
New Brunswick has exactly one city that feels like a city. Ours.
But look at the map. Saint John sprawls across 316 km² - bigger than Moncton and Peterborough combined, with room to spare. And here’s the twist that should give all of us pause: both of those cities now hold more people than we do, on a fraction of the land. Moncton: 79,470 people on 141 km². Peterborough: 83,651 on just 65 km². Saint John: 69,895, spread across 316.
That’s not a brag about being big. It’s a huge bill. Every kilometre of road, pipe, and plow route we stretch across empty space is a kilometre we can’t fully fund. Spread thin, everything gets a little worse for everyone.
The good news is that we already chose the answer, and it has a name: PlanSJ’s Primary Development Area - the PDA. It’s roughly 82 km² (yes, bigger than all of Peterborough), and it’s where the city decided, over a decade ago, to concentrate growth. That decision was right.
So here’s the PeopleCity position, plainly: we should want MORE inside the PDA. More transit. More walkable streets. More housing. More parks, patios, and the everyday places that make a city feel alive. Focusing isn’t shrinking. It’s how a mid-size city gives more people big-city life — services close to home, streets you can walk, a downtown that’s alive. It’s how we deliver a better quality of life to the most people, and how we stay New Brunswick’s city.
Mark Leger made this exact case back in 2013, when PlanSJ was brand new. Thirteen years later, The City is about to write the next municipal plan, hopefully with as much or better public engagement than for PlanSJ. Let’s not relearn the lesson - let’s expand on it. Name the footprint. Fund it like we mean it. Build the city we say we want, in the place we already chose.
Read Mark’s 2013 piece: sologi.co/2013-footprint
A great city isn’t the one that covers the most ground. It’s the one that provides safety and a high quality of life, block after block, for the most people.