The City of Toronto has a new chief planner, and it’s a woman picked from “outside” the ranks of City Hall.  Jennifer Keesmaat is a partner at Dialog, and a founder of the Office for Urbanism, a planning and design firm that describes its work as specializing in “the integration of planning, design and consensus building processes”.  It was announced this morning, Keesmaat has been named to the top planning position at the city. Her appointment would end close to a year of speculation about who would fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Gary Wright earlier this year. There are indications that Jennifer Keesmaat may not always see eye to eye with the city’s car loving Mayor Ford. A talk she gave this spring in Regina focused on the importance of children walking to school, calling it “an indicator of what we believe and what it is we value.”