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It's an exercise in urban planning and it has the potential to incite change in Parkdale.

Led by the Parkdale Liberty Economic Development Corporation (PLEDC) and the Parkdale Residents Association (PRA), a group of Ryerson University students, in their fourth year of an Undergraduate degree in Urban Planning, toured Parkdale on Sept. 4.

"They are taking us on a tour today to see what kind of housing there is here and what kind of renewal is going on because a lot of people haven't seen the area," explained student Andrij Bablak.

But, it was more than just sightseeing for these students. Jessica Hum of PLEDC, who herself is a graduate of the bachelor in urban planning program at Ryerson University, explained the exercise is a study in community based planning in Parkdale.

"The students are really doing a job that we couldn't really do," Hum said. "They are doing a service for us, like a consulting service."

PRA is volunteer driven and PLEDC has a set of staff that have their tasks outlined for the year based on funding agreements and they can't really go above and beyond those projects.

Over the semester students will work on a work plan and come up with a series of reports and there will be a final report that goes before PLEDC and PRA at the end of November.

"It's community based planning, it's involving your community from the grass roots, not from the top down," Hum said. "Planning is never done by the federal government. It is done at the municipal level and here in Parkdale I think a lot of it is done through volunteer driven groups."

They have collaborated with Ryerson in the past, like with a study students did last year on managing gentrification in Parkdale. That study sparked so much interest, Hum said, that it lead to the creation of Parkdale Visioning, a series of community visioning sessions in Parkdale.

"We put the students in front of a group of about 250 community members and they presented to them and then we had a panel discussion and it turned out to be a great success," Hum said. "That is why we are doing it again."

Urban planning is a huge challenge for the future, according to Craig Peskett, past president of the PRA, who offered the group his prospective on the neighbourhood.

"Everywhere you go we are suffering from poor planning, whether it be the suburbs or downtown," Peskett said.

He explained the PRA grew out of a neighbourhood watch program he was involved with.

"We were dealing with a lot of safety issues in south Parkdale and it became apparent that a lot of those issues had to do with urban design and community planning," Peskett said. "So we then started to tackle issues like housing and have public meetings to address those issues."

He told the students the real challenges in Parkdale are often only addressed with lip service, and because of that he suffers from an enormous amount of frustration. The inability to get beyond the talk and the public meetings and actually get into some real initiatives with a little bit of money behind it to get things done, is what lead to his stepping back from leading the PRA.

"We have been enormously unsuccessful over and over again at really changing direction, in terms of the community planning significantly, on all three levels (of government)," Peskett said.

Parkdale suffers from a great deal of apathy, due in part to the tenant population, he explained. There is a division between a large number of people who are homeowners and have stake in the community and those who rent and don't have a sense of ownership.

"In terms of urban planning, designing new spaces and new policies to try and get people to integrate better is a great idea," he said.

When he got involved with the residents' association he said one of his main concerns was the division.

"I didn't want to see an enormously divided culture," he said. "I think the big irritation in terms of some kind of coherence in Parkdale... is this sense of ownership."

One of the initiatives the PRA tried to put forward to people in power was to bring in some kind of affordable ownership initiative in South Parkdale.

"If Parkdale could have a larger base of affordable housing that was ownership based, you might see a different sense of ownership there," he said.

Also, the main streets running through Parkdale are tremendously underdeveloped, he told the students.

"You walk down to King Street or Queen Street at 8 p.m. and it is desolate," Peskett said. "People don't occupy the streets and one of the main reasons, I think, is because it is only two stories with very little residential, as a result, the businesses aren't vibrant."

Imagine, he said, if Jameson Avenue, had stores all the way down it.

"It would completely alter the feel of Jameson Avenue and probably bring the kind of multicultural sense we are all searching for in Parkdale," Peskett said.

One student, Amy Peebles, who started her own consulting company with a focus on community consultation for urban planning related issues with a specialization in youth engagement, said she was struck by the different socioeconomic backgrounds and the fact that there is a mix of incomes and it is getting to be such a large gap between the higher level and the lower level.

"One thing I find really interesting is the juxtaposition of the two different types of housing," Peebles said. "How it is very high density south of Queen Street and north of Queen Street you have single family detached houses."

Also, as gentrification happens and the whole process starts to change what is happening on the other side of Dufferin and heading west, she said it will be interesting to see the changes.

"That is what I am taking away from it," Peebles said. "What changes have already happened and what change is to come."