Ten Year Master Campus Development Plan (MCDP)
In 2023-2024, Algonquin College’s Facilities Management Department embarked on an ambitious project to analyze and evaluate the current buildings and academic specialist scientific spaces to see if they met the growth needs of the College. The MCDP will ensure that the College has the right space at the right time to meet its needs over the next ten years and beyond.
Background
The Master Campus Development Plan (MCDP) is a buildable five-year plan to meet the academic and non-academic space and building needs of the Strategic Enrollment Management Plan (SEM). It will affect all campuses and satellite locations the College owns and occupies. It will provide for the College’s enrollment expansion of both domestic and international students from now until 2035.
This buildable plan is referred to as “buildable” because, to meet the needs of the SEM Plan, the College will need to have certain labs, classrooms, and other physical building requirements operational by a certain date to facilitate enrollment growth. In addition, the plan, which has enrollment data for 5-6 years, must be added to a ten-year building management plan for our current space (which is over 2.5M sqft), which will serve the College until 2035.
As building new or refurbishment, takes on average three years from start to finish, the College must plan for a 10-year building and infrastructure plan for 2025-2035. This plan provides the framework for all future development and opportunities on all three campuses and other satellite locations.
The second part of the MCDP is to plan around the condition of existing buildings, which is referred to as Deferred Maintenance. To keep our competitive edge and to continue to be attractive to our students, domestic and international, we must keep the standards and specifications of our existing buildings high. As the College progresses with the SEM Plan within the period of the MCDP (2025-2035), several buildings will have reached the end of their economic lives and will need to be demolished and rebuilt to meet the future needs of the College. The remainder of the buildings will need to be kept in excellent condition. This will require high levels of finance, without which all of the buildings and facilities on all three campuses will no longer be serviceable by 2023.
The third part of the MCDP is that it must also address the affordable housing issue for international students. Simply put, if there is no suitable housing available, the students will not be coming. The College will need to facilitate a number of internationally affordable accommodation units, and the MCDP Team is working on this.
The MCDP will also address the following key points:
- Creation of new specialist buildings and laboratories.
- Student spaces, campus services, and food locations.
- Ancillary supporting infrastructure.
- Sustainability and reaching Net Zero.
- Active transportation, shared road networks, and parking infrastructure.
- Wayfinding and pedestrian flow.
- Financial opportunities (retail units, sponsorships).
- Stakeholder and community engagement.
- Future trends: “We need to be ahead of the curve, not behind it.”
Timing and Planning Processes
The MCDP is to be completed by year-end 2024. This will then allow for the plan, the required infrastructure work, and new builds to be presented to the Board of Governors in February 2025 for approval. It is also important to note that some buildings will have to be started prior to the end of the MCDP process, to meet the demands of the SEM Plan or because of the existing building condition.