5 things to know about Edmonton's big zoning renewal — and how you can have your say

Edmonton is planning a major zoning revamp that will change the city for decades to come.

City council will soon mull over a bylaw that will completely redraw the map for urban development.

While the city has tweaked definitions over the years — including allowing subdivisions for garden suites in 2018 — this will be the first time since the 1960s that it's done a major overhaul of this scale.

Here are a few things you should know.

Every piece of land in the city is assigned a zone. Zones contain the rules for where buildings can go, what types of buildings they can be and what activities are allowed on a property.

Edmonton plans to shrink the number of zones by almost half — from 46 to 24.

If the new bylaw passes, it would mean rezoning more than 500 parcels of land across Edmonton to their new, most similar equivalent.

For instance, single-detached residential, semi-detached residential and small-scale infill would all fit underneath the new Small Scale Residential Zone.

That means a neighbourhood now dominated by single-detached homes could see other types of housing sprout up more easily.

There's a lot to unpack within the more than 700 pages of the proposed bylaw (and the city's rationale for it).

CBC News will be offering more in-depth coverage of the possible impacts in the coming weeks.

The city promises the redraw will streamline development processes and remove some of the esoteric language that has often befuddled residents.

That includes changing rules around which projects require permits and which don't.

It's also aimed at aligning zoning more neatly with the City Plan — Edmonton's big-picture strategy, approved by council in 2020. The plan imagines a more dense, environmentally-friendly urban space as the city grows toward a population of two million.