Vaughan Complete Streets Guide recipient of CSLA's prestigious Award of Excellence

The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) has announced the recipients of the 2025 Awards of Excellence, and we are honoured that the Vaughan Complete Streets Guide is one of the projects recognized with an award this year.

The Vaughan Complete Streets Guide is the city’s primary resource for street design for practitioners, decision-makers, and the public. Like many post-war communities, Vaughan’s streets have been designed to prioritize the automobile over all other users. Emerging policy objectives recognize this imbalance. They call for a new paradigm that promotes safe, sustainable, future-ready streets that support varied and inclusive mobility choices for pedestrians, active transportation, and transit users. The Vaughan Complete Streets Guide will help Vaughan better integrate diverse modes and provide safe access for people of all ages and abilities.

Compared to other street design guides, this landscape architect-led exercise places greater emphasis on placemaking. The Guide stresses the importance of street performance beyond vehicle operations to prioritize inclusivity and sustainability and pays greater attention to embedding street trees, green infrastructure, stormwater management, and low-impact development in street design. Its non-prescriptive outlook encourages adaptive approaches, reduces reliance on ‘ready-made’ solutions, and offers lessons to other jurisdictions with similar street systems and contexts.

The 2025 Awards of Excellence will be celebrated during the Awards Gala at the 2025 CSLA-OALA Congress which will be held in Ottawa, Ontario at the Rogers Centre (formerly the Shaw Centre) on June 7, 2025.

These award-winning projects are preeminent examples of Canadian landscape architecture. They illustrate the range of what landscape architects do and how landscape architects are helping to reshape our communities by defining the places where we live, work, and play.