Meg Holden

Is Integrated Planning Any More Than the Sum of Its Parts? Considerations for Planning Sustainable Cities

Policy integration is currently cresting a wave of interest, with new legal frameworks, programs, and processes emerging. Does integrated sustainability planning, to take one key motivator of this interest in integration, offer more than environmental planning, climate change planning, or other sectoral moves? This article reviews planning research and practice in integration in the context of diverse aspirations for sustainability. Normative claims, central to environmental policy integration, are seldom distinguished in theory or tested in practice. Applying a normative framework to sustainability policy integration in current practice, we find evidence of risks to applying each and contradictions within the set.

Vancouver's Promise of the World's First Sustainable Olympic Games

Vancouver has committed to host the worlds first sustainable Olympic Games in 2010. This promise is in keeping with local policy trends in the Vancouver region toward visions of sustainability and with growing attention by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to environmental sustainability concerns. We demonstrate that interests in sustainability at local and international scales may differ markedly, however, resulting in a range of possible legacies for Vancouver and the international Olympic movement from the 2010 Winter Olympics. To move beyond the fruitless search for a universally acceptable definition of sustainability, we investigate different meanings of sustainability using the tool of the ‘language game’, originally devised by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Examining sustainability as a language game in the planning phase of the 2010 Olympics allows us to consider the potential and likely scenarios for sustainability wins and losses, internationally and in the local context. Four possible scenarios are considered. In the most optimistic scenario, sustainability language converges across the international and local language systems, aiding the development of sustainability in Vancouver policy, charting a course for Olympic cities to follow, and creating institutional change within the IOC as well. In the contrasting scenario, the failure to find common ground in sustainability pursuits could doom the concept both for future Olympic cities and for policy practice in Vancouver. Two other mixed outcome scenarios are considered as well. This analysis leads to insight into the boundaries of the meaning of sustainability in the context of a megaevent, in which, more than any particular demonstration project, the communicated message of sustainability may be the most lasting legacy.

The Tough Minded and the Tender Minded: A Pragmatic Turn for Sustainable Development Planning and Policy

Among the many approaches being taken to sustainable development planning and policy, a basic dichotomy exists. The dichotomy is the classic one recognized over a century ago by pragmatist philosopher William James—between the tough minded and the tender minded, or in this case, those who trust in more and better information to address sustainability challenges and those who rest on the power of a plurality of voices. In this paper we demonstrate how this dichotomy confounds the construction of a holistic, actionable sustainability planning paradigm, frustrating in pragmatic terms the effort to develop sustainability planning that makes a difference. We argue for an approach to sustainable development grounded in the philosophy of pragmatism as a means to connect tough and tender minded perspectives on sustainability planning, policy and action. After detailing how tough and tender minded temperaments among sustainability advocates translate into different types of understandings and initiatives, a pragmatic framework for a holistic sustainability planning and policy suite is proposed. This framework is argued based on an understanding of pragmatic theories of truth and rationality, integration and a process basis for action, and human experience as a touchstone for public values and action priorities. This article contributes to the growing body of planning scholarship that draws upon pragmatic philosophy, connecting this with the growing body of work within environmental philosophy that highlights the utility of pragmatism in building a philosophy of sustainable development. If planners and members of the democratic public can work towards a common understanding that it is a process of continuous communication and interaction among citizens and experts that needs to be sustained in the push toward sustainable development, that knowledge is to be generated and tested in public contexts, and that stories have standing alongside scientific models and statistics, important moves toward sustainability can be made in the planning profession as a whole.

Urban policy engagement with social sustainability in metro Vancouver.

This article presents an analysis of social sustainability in comparative theoretical context and as a challenge to the post-political interpretation of sustainability in policy practice at the urban and regional scales. Metro Vancouver provides a case study for improving our understanding of the meaning of social sustainability as a framework for social policy in that it is among the handful of cities around the world currently working to define and enact social sustainability in governance terms. Results of this participant research provide evidence that some cities are politically engaging alternative development pathways using the concept of social sustainability. For sustainable development to retain its promise as an alternative policy framework for cities, social sustainability must be at the forefront.

GIS in Land Use Planning: Lessons from Critical Theory and the Gulf Islands

Geographic information systems (GIS) assume an increasingly large role in North American land use planning. Although GIS is often promoted as an answer to both democratic and sustainability issues in planning, this paper calls these premises into question and suggests a less ambitious role for GIS technology in the planning process in the new millennium. The contributions of critical theory to conceptions of decision making and action in planning, as well as a case comparison study of government GIS systems and those of community groups in British Columbias Gulf Islands are considered. Both strains of argument lead to the conclusion that more than new technology, fresh commitments to communicate and to share planning power and responsibility are needed for more democratic, interactive land use planning.

Justification, compromise and test: Developing a pragmatic sociology of critique to understand the outcomes of urban redevelopment

The outcomes of urban redevelopment projects are never predictable, nor do they conform perfectly to any single ideological expression of contemporary development approaches, whether that of rational master planning for the public interest, a market-driven neoliberal approach in the name of the competitive world class city or some other vision of utopia. We argue here that a critical pragmatic analytical lens can be applied usefully to improve our understanding of the justifications, qualifications and compromises that contribute to shaping such projects in their contexts. The critical pragmatic approach, deriving from the work of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and others, is offered here with illustrative applications to the case of a major redevelopment project in Vancouver, Canada. The approach is situated within planning theory related to governmentality, communicative action theory and American pragmatic philosophy. We establish the utility of studying disputes in the public sphere surrounding development projects, in terms of the objects and actors involved in particular contexts (as opposed to a pure discourse approach) and in terms of the nature and trajectory of compromises attempted and attained in the process (as opposed to consensus-seeking or governmentality approaches).

Facilitated and emergent social learning in sustainable urban redevelopment: exposing a mismatch and moving towards convergence

This article makes a case for the importance of social learning in urban planning and development practice, particularly in the context of attempts to achieve higher standards of sustainability. We proceed by comparing learning outcomes in Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek and Melbourne’s Docklands urban redevelopment projects. We find that the instrumental model of learning supports facilitated learning approaches pursued in a manner that is mostly disconnected from the learning being demanded for improved decision-making and improved results. The emergent learning which can be empirically demonstrated, which is more easily explained by a systems-theory model, lacks exposure to deliberative process.

Introduction—Special Issue on the Urban Legacies of the Winter Olympics

Living and teaching in Vancouver, it was impossible to ignore the Winter Olympic Games. The seven-year lead-up was filled with media prognostications of gloom and glory, torn-up streets and construction cranes. Normal routines, university teaching included, were suspended during the event. For those who stayed on—and not everyone did, the Games themselves were an uncharacteristically open-air (for our rainy city) celebration. Yet, what was being celebrated, by whom, was actively contested in the streets, and remains contested. Then overnight the temporary stages and fencing came down; it was all over, except that it wasn’t. The City Council that came to power amidst the controversy over the completion of the Olympic Village soon found itself dragged down in the polls by the ongoing financial problems of this flagship waterfront development. Conversely, Canada’s first airport rail link, long mired in controversy about how it was planned, funded, built, and for displacing other regional transit projects in fast-growing municipalities, is today embraced even by suburban commuters. The Vancouver Organizing Committee issued reports making dubious claims about its sustainability performance and balanced budget. These conflicted experiences, observations, and assertions about what the Games mean for our city provided one impetus for this special journal issue. Another impetus was our students, who found in the Olympics many rich and puzzling research questions. Some tackled the physical imprint of the Games on the city. Tracy Vaughan’s study of the Athletes’ Village—also known locally as Southeast False Creek (SEFC)—raised difficult questions about the gap between aspiration and reality. Through a close reading of the SEFC planning process, she traced how the focus on social sustainability and inclusivity in the city’s pre-bid SEFC plan, the product of a long-term and painstaking collaborative planning process, was scuttled by developer resistance and compliant elected officials, development costs, and the need to get the project done in time for the Games. In contrast, transportation impacts within the city limits, if not within the wider region, appear more positive. Jillian Glover and Carolyn Ruhland highlighted

Institutionalizing a policy by any other name: in the City of Vancouver's Greenest City Action Plan, does climate change policy or sustainability policy smell as sweet?

This article questions the implications of a shift in dominant urban planning framework from sustainable development to climate change. The case of the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan (GCAP) (2010–2020) is investigated as a window to perceive and understand this shift. We begin with the stance that the primary implications of a shift from sustainability to climate change policy are in social and institutional learning about action, and as such we adopt an urban knowledge order framework for our analysis. At the organizational scale, we investigate the implications of GCAP in terms of its impact on the city structure and organization, in terms of the way it works with the public and with external organizations in designing and implementing policy, and in terms of reporting and accountability. An understanding of the construction of an urban knowledge arena as a valuable process and outcome of sustainability and climate policy work offers a pragmatic way to integrate and promote sustainability thinking across the city administration, amongst citizen-participants, and in collaboration with external partners. We see in the City of Vancouver an ecologically modernizing city, which is also learning a new, partnership-based way of wielding power and coordinating and justifying sustainability and climate change policy and action.

The minority report: social hope in next generation indicators work. Commentary on Rob Kitchin et al.’s ‘Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking, and real-time dashboards’

Kitchin et al. offer clear warnings about the proliferation and use of increasingly automated, standardized and digitized urban data systems. These risks and warnings resonate for us, both social s...