Kevin S. Hanna

Social capital and quality of place: reflections on growth and change in a small town

In recent years the concept of social capital has gained great currency in discussions of community development, but connections to notions of place have not been widely addressed. This article considers the quality of place and its centrality to social capital. The authors draw from the experience of a small rural community in British Columbia, Canada. The research has been drawn from interviews and focus groups. In describing social capital conditions, community residents referred to quality of place to frame the discussion and illustrate local conditions. This suggests that the qualities of spatial organisation have a relationship to and enhance social capital. If they are weakened, then it may be difficult for communities to adapt to change, develop new opportunities or maintain community well-being. Descriptions of place quality may emerge as a proxy for relating or representing the conditions of social capital, thus place can be seen as a materialisation of social capital. For planners and other practitioners seeking to enhance social capital and advance community development, there is a need to acknowledge and manage relationships between public policy makers and the private or public forces that determine the shape of places.

A Template for Integrated Community Sustainability Planning

This article describes a template for implementing an integrated community sustainability plan. The template emphasizes community engagement and outlines the components of a basic framework for integrating ecological, social and economic dynamics into a community plan. The framework is a series of steps that support a sustainable community development process. While it reflects the Canadian experience, the tools and techniques have applied value for a range of environmental planning contexts around the world. The research is case study based and draws from a diverse range of communities representing many types of infrastructure, demographics and ecological and geographical contexts. A critical path for moving local governments to sustainable community development is the creation and implementation of integrated planning approaches. To be effective and to be implemented, a requisite shift to sustainability requires active community engagement processes, political will, and a commitment to political and administrative accountability, and measurement.

Community Forestry: Mitigating or Creating Conflict in British Columbia?

In British Columbia, Canada, interest in community forests has steadily increased over the last decade. In part this may be a response to pervasive conflict over forest management. This article outlines three broad bases of conflict: communicative, personal dynamics, and process issues; these are used to create a framework for discussion of issues and perspectives seen in the community forestry literature. There can be a tendency to view community-based resource management as a panacea in conflict settings, but community forests have the potential to both mitigate and create conflict, and in some places their would-be success may be diminished by excessive expectations.

A potential role for EIA in Finnish forest planning: learning from experiences in Ontario, Canada

Reconciling diverse forest values within policy and decision-making processes is an ongoing challenge in forestry. The use of environmental impact assessment (EIA) provides potential for improving forest management and making it more responsive to diverse interests. This paper examines EIA in Canadian and Finnish forest planning. In Finland there has been a reluctance to see EIA as a tool for forest planning while in Canada some provinces have long applied EIA to forest management. Ontario, Canada, provides one example of applying EIA to forest planning at a range of scales in order to advance integrated planning and help conflict management. The paper provides a brief analysis of the Finnish forest planning system, an illustration of the Ontario EIA forest management experience, and then considers the application of EIA to Finnish forest management. The paper concludes that EIA may be workable for Finnish state forests and would likely enhance planning and management, but given the existing institutional frameworks EIA would be difficult to apply to private forests.

Incremental planning and land-use conflict in the Toronto region's Oak Ridges Moraine

The Greater Toronto Area is the largest urban concentration in Canada and one of the most significant built regions in North America. Torontos growth legacy has created a legacy of sprawl development. Growth has not occurred without controversy. On the Oak Ridges Moraine, an environmentally sensitive landform located along Torontos northern suburban edge, development has been the catalyst for activism and policy changes that led to a fundamental rethinking of Ontarios planning regime. Changes to Ontarios planning approach have resulted in land-use conservation legislation to manage development activity on the Moraine. This paper considers the role of incremental policies in creating a conflict setting which ultimately led to ecologically based planning legislation. We conclude that several factors helped advance conservation planning – media attention, a history of incremental planning, the emergence of a well-organised conservation movement and the serendipitous convergence of key leadership personalities.