The Urban Containment Boundary is a stable, long-term, regionally defined area for urban development. Focusing growth in this boundary minimizes urban sprawl and its negative impacts, protects agricultural, industrial, and ecologically important lands, and supports the efficient provision of major regional transportation and infrastructure investments. This boundary helps protect regionally important lands such as Conservation and Recreation, Agricultural, and Rural lands, while helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions through trip reduction and avoidance.
Contextual performance measure
Metro 2050 establishes the performance measure as the total and cumulative change in hectares of land in the Urban Containment Boundary.
Progress
This contextual measure captures changes to the region’s urban development footprint over time. It tracks the addition and removal of land from the region’s Urban Containment Boundary. In 2024, the area within Urban Containment Boundary decreased by 390.71 hectares. The corresponding boundary changes stemmed from three regional growth strategy amendments affecting the City of Maple Ridge, Township of Langley, and Village of Lions Bay. View the list of current and completed
regional growth strategy amendments.