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Urban waterfront research has concentrated primarily on the redevelopment of the core areas of major port cities; yet just as cargo handling activities have extended from their traditional core urban port locations into the metropolitan hinterland, urban waterfront redevelopments have spread into smaller and suburban communities. Both processes have occurred without much scholarly attention. In this paper, we trace the implications of waterfront redevelopment processes in smaller suburban communities beyond the urban core. We show how suburban waterfront developments tend to ignore local cultural histories and communities while threatening the values of diversity that might be embraced in all public spaces, regardless of location. To accomplish this, we provide a case study of waterfront redevelopment and public space formation in the town of Squamish, British Columbia, in comparison to other suburban waterfront redevelopments around the metropolis of Vancouver. Typically, these redevelopments are in communities that used to host significant industrial operations and are now trying to "reinvent" themselves. We identify the limited publics celebrated by, and the constrained forms of publicness created through, contemporary suburban waterfront planning practices. We also pay specific attention to the changing planning discourses that strongly influence the design and marketing of contemporary suburban waterfront communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2016, second-year students in the Baker Program in Real Estate embarked on a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia to meet with the people and companies that have played a role in shaping Vancouver into the celebrated international city it is today. Starting with a bold plan begun in the 1980s to connect the city to its waterfront, Vancouver has spent the following decades on a transformation spree that is the envy of urbanists the world over. Throughout a five-day itinerary, students visited the projects and neighborhoods that epitomize this transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates of sustainable urban development often privilege the region as a scale for coordinated action and investment. However, discourses of sustainability institutionalised through regional planning, and conflated with notions of liveability, lend themselves to recruitment by competing, and opposing, development interests. To be regionally sustainable, an individual land development should, both on-site and through its connections to other sites, contribute to overall sustainability of the region. Using examples of industrial waterfront redevelopment in metropolitan Vancouver, we show how particular urban spaces are misrepresented as lynchpins of regional sustainability. In a plan for residential redevelopment, it is claimed that sustainable redevelopment will reunite citizens with “their waterfront”, reframed as liveable, pure, clean, ecologically vital and non-industrial. At an adjacent site, it is claimed that waterfront industrial land should be protected to combat industrial sprawl. Yet, in both cases the developers have lobbied for the expansion of road transportation making the claims of regional sustainability doubtful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]