Environmental Design seeks to enhance the form and function of existing environments to balance social needs and ecological values through physical intervention and policy guidance. Environmental Design is a major focus for researchers in the School of Planning.
P. Filion and K. Hammond, 2006. The Failure of Shopping Malls as a
Tool of Downtown Revitalization in
Mid-Size Urban Areas, Plan Canada, winter edition, pp. 49-52 
This paper explores the practice of designing urban shopping malls in an effort to revitalize downtown areas. The paper uses data from many mid-sized Canadian cities to show that the construction of malls was largely unsuccessful in revitalizing the urban cores of the cities studied. The paper further concludes that one of the strengths of urban areas is their uniqueness - in design and sense of place. Creating malls works against rather than capitalizing on this advantage.
