Toronto Star

John van Nostrand is enough of an architect to understand that architecture's only a small part of what makes a city work. The real issue, he will tell you, is what holds a community together, that messy glue of tolerance, economics, opportunity and planning. So when van Nostrand receives the Jane Jacobs Prize today, it won't be for his buildings, but his ideas. For more than 25 years, van Nostrand has been examining issues of housing and urbanity, how the two are related and how to strengthen the connections between them. His current projects include the master plan for Seaton, a proposed town of 45,000 to 60,000 people northeast of Toronto near Pickering. The project was first raised in the 1960s but so far nothing has happened. To van Nostrand, it represents a rare chance to get it right, to apply what he has learned about housing and build a live/work community that functions as a town rather than a suburb. "We need to `unplan' a bit," he says. "We need a Bad Boy of housing."