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This article is a longer reflection on Frank Cunningham's Ideas in Context in light of the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey.

In response to growing levels of social isolation and loneliness in cities, the promotion of social connectedness has come to the forefront of urban health, sustainability, and resiliency agendas. ...

The Hey Neighbour! pilot project set out to engage two residential buildings, their inhabitants and staff, to animate and increase the intra-building sense of community from within. The research presented here accompanied this pilot in order to devise and test a theory of change for this pilot project in terms of impacts on three key stakeholder groups who stood to benefit in terms of their health and well-being. Because the literature on the importance of sociability, social connections, and neighbourliness for health, well-being, and democratic engagement is diverse and interdisciplinary, crystallizing the expected and achieved impact of a project like Hey Neighbour is a challenge. The two rental buildings are situated in two distinct neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada. The City-led pilot project selected four individual residents in particular to take on the role of ‘Resident Animator’ (RA), to trial activities to increase sociability. Results indicate that, by bringing together housing providers, landlords, property managers, researchers, local and regional governments, housing associations and health authorities, the Hey Neighbour project demonstrates potential to achieve greater community well-being in urban vertical communities.

Moderated by Elaine Coburn, Harry Glasbeek, Meg Holden, Charles Mills and Frank Cunningham presented a symposium on Frank's book Ideas in Context May 29, 2021 for the Society of Socialist Studies. Now shared here in written form, the symposium includes what may have been the last contribution of Charles Mills, a friend of half of a century to Frank, known for his generosity of spirit and his trenchant theorizing of racial justice (Mills 1997).

International audience; "Comparative case study research in two prototype model sustainable neighbourhoods, Fréquel Fontarabie in Paris (France) and Dockside Green in Victoria (Canada), sheds new light on questions of ecogentrification in urban redevelopment cycles. The two cases are chosen for their superficial similarities, as mutual but independent frontrunners of the international movement to build sustainable neighbourhoods. They are also chosen for contrast value; the notable difference is that Fréquel is state-led and state-certified, dominated by social housing, compared to Dockside which is private sector-led and third party certified, dominated by market housing. The two cases offer certain shared features, including urban design, infrastructure, and amenities associated with green, bourgeois, and participatory democratic values. Beneath the surface, we examine how the redevelopment models pursued cycles of creative destruction of waste and value differently from how this cycle functions under hegemonic neoliberalism. In both cases, new wastes are identified and new values created, that reach beyond economic capital into social, political and ecological territory as well. Confronting the specific dynamics of waste and value formation in different urban contexts offers new means to advance understanding of neighbourhood redevelopment and transformation and how values of solidarity and nature can be advanced off-cycle from the persistent churn of new forms of capital." (source éditeur)

Much research has examined the socio-spatial distribution of, and access to, urban greenspace; the challenges of supplying greenspace, especially in periods of dynamic urban change, remain poorly understood. Multiple factors shape urban greenspace provision, however understanding the role of leadership as a factor remains somewhat elusive. Addressing this critical knowledge gap, we employed a case study approach, using qualitative methods, to hear first-hand from the key stakeholders involved with municipal urban greenspace provision, to investigate how different types of leadership affected greenspace provision in Surrey, Canada – a dynamically changing mid-size city. Semi-structured interviews with 32 purposively selected participants reveal that here, both leadership and organizational culture influenced resources and decision-making supporting greenspace provision. Aligned political leadership and organizational leadership witnessed a significant increase in Surrey's urban greenspaces – the converse occurred in a later administration. Findings provide insights into the governance of greenspace; especially how different types of leadership can play a pivotal role in effective greenspace provision.

This article examines the contradictory proposed connections between compact urban form and small housing and human well-being. Whereas planners have argued the merits of smart growth and more compact urban form, compared to the traditional North American sprawling suburb, since at least the 1990s, other researchers and the global urban development community have more recently added their own evidence and argument in order to understand how not just the land use dimensions but also the transportation infrastructure design, greenhouse gas emissions profile, and social and personality characteristics may be more favourable in a compact, infill urban context than in a suburban or sprawling context. At the same time, the connection between compact urban living and well-being is not clear to many, as suburban style development expands at a faster rate than compact urban development in much of the world. Moreover, compact urban form is increasingly criticized for exerting downward pressure on liveability and well-being by exacerbating unaffordability. Taking a case based focus on the Metro Vancouver region in British Columbia, well-known for its liveability advantage and compact urban form, we present the results of survey research on resident attitudes toward and perceptions of moderate density housing being added within existing neighbourhoods. We find evidence of a tipping point, at which attitudes about new compact housing may hinge on the possibility for existing residents to have a voice in new developments and on the rate of change as much as on design or structural characteristics of the development. Perceptions of the contribution of more compact urban form and housing options to well-being should be considered central to efforts to advance such housing forms and types in cities, if these efforts are to pass the test of public opinion.

The sustainable city represents an ideal of good and just living that has inspired urban development work for at least 25 years. While criticized by many for its scientific, social and political vagueness, the concept of the sustainable city has nonetheless continued to frame material and political efforts in urban redevelopment. From a perspective grounded in the pragmatic sociology of critique, this article takes this phenomenon as evidence of an international movement to generate not just political pronouncements or technical fixes, but a new order of worth, from the concept of the sustainable city. After presenting the pragmatic sociology of critique and the application of this body of social research as it pertains to better understanding sustainable urban development, we reflect on the factors that challenge the acceptance of the sustainable city as an order of worth, or as a mode and manner of justifying significant decisions in the public domain, recognizable and understandable to a majority. For efforts to create the sustainable city to justify themselves, socioculturally, in this way, the work demands a clear test of worthiness. This article illustrates the search for an adequate test through a review of two distinct efforts to generate new systems of assessment for sustainable building projects, and points out the contrasting nature of these two tests: one which aims to be accessible to thoroughgoing public debate fit to transform a context toward a political discourse of urban sustainability as well-being, the other that interprets the need for a test as affirmation of expertise related to the unfolding climate emergency.

This article identifies an opportunity to reinvigorate our theoretical understanding of community well-being at the neighbourhood scale as increasing numbers of cities around the world turn their attention to neighbourhood scale redevelopment of model sustainable communities. We identify three primary theoretical axes for this reinvention of the notion of the neighbourhood scale community, all oriented toward a philosophical approach derived from American pragmatism. First is the reorientation of older ideas of the political project of building the Great Society toward an alternative project of building the Great Community, via the work of “commoning,” which respects the value of diversity, democratic participation and communication. Second is the work of not merely placemaking but also politically constituting the public sphere within public spaces at the neighbourhood scale. Third and finally is the reinvention of our theories of social and political engagement in the public sphere as not only serving representative democratic process, nor distinguishing simply between classes of active versus inactive participants in public life, but as identifying the actual regimes of engagement directing and mediating participation in the neighbourhood community sphere.

Urban greenspaces provide diverse ecosystem functions, services and benefits to residents. Much commentary has been offered to date about citizens' demands for more urban greenspace. Less attention, however, has been given to the ‘supply side’ pressures experienced by local government in delivering urban greenspace, particularly in mid-sized cities. Greater attention to factors shaping supply is warranted, especially in the context of rapid population growth. By understanding how existing greenspace provision approaches can stymie the efforts of local government to meet citizens' needs, new approaches can be identified. This paper assesses several factors shaping urban greenspace provision in Surrey - a city within the Greater Vancouver area. Insights are derived from in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, public documents, and census and municipal data about parks and their context as a specific type of greenspace. Our findings suggest that governance tools, economy and property markets, and financial and natural resources manifest as core factors influencing urban greenspace provision in Surrey. A reliance on governance tools premised upon standards has created park provision paradoxes. Treating greenspace provision as a largely technocratic exercise may be limiting Surrey's ability to respond to changing politics, economics and population trends. We point to alternative approaches., Highlights • Providing urban greenspace is more than supplying land and revenue for facility development. • The clamour for more greenspace could be setting local governments up for some serious future policy deficiencies. • The tensions around land shortages, fiscal constraints and community expectations are driving the need for leadership.

In modern times, efforts to construct sustainable alternative neighbourhood scale developments date to isolated voluntary initiatives in 1970s Europe and the United States. Since about 2006, they have increased rapidly in popularity. They now go by many names: ecodistricts, écoquartiers, eco-cities, zero/low-carbon/carbon-positive cities, ecopolises, ecobarrios, One Planet Communities, and solar cities. They have become frames—sometimes the dominant frame—used to orient the construction of new pieces of a city in a growing number of countries. Despite numerous standardization efforts, the field of ecourban neighbourhood planning and practice lacks a consistent cross-cultural understanding of what constitutes meaningful ecourbanism in specific economic, political, ecological, social, and design-based terms. Ecourban neighbourhood projects also respond to strictly local challenges and opportunities and express themselves in fragmented ways in different contexts. This article presents an original typology of ecourbanism as the integration of seven extreme type principles. We developed this typology through an abductive approach, or the back and forth testing of observed practices with arguments advanced in theories of sustainable development, planning and urban studies. While ecourban neighbourhood developments by definition express integrative goals, this typology permits assessment of the extent to which outcomes are being achieved in terms of each specific principle. We define and present a limiting case for each of these extreme type principles. Rather than attempting to render different standards equivalent across national contexts, this typology-based approach to understand the outcomes of ecourban neighbourhood developments promises a means to facilitate orienting these developments toward higher levels of integration within a common set of principled boundaries, as they are developed around the world.

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...

Large-scale waterfront redevelopment projects, an urban development phenomenon that originated in the 1970s, are attractive to a growing suite of cities worldwide. But why? These mega-projects are full of pitfalls, broken promises, cost overruns, disappointments and are often accused of promoting inequality. In this article, we consider the specific case of Melbourne's Docklands, which local popular opinion has roundly judged a failure despite the countervailing judgment of success in the revival of 'liveability' of the adjacent Melbourne central business district. We use the Docklands case to illustrate the utility of a 'critical pragmatic' framework of analysis to get behind dominant explanations of the demands of the urban growth machine and postmodern neoliberal capitalism. Without denying the existence of these dynamics, nor their hegemony, we nevertheless explicate how a critical pragmatic analysis can reveal the social dynamics driving the judgments and justifications offered by actors in urban redevelopment. A pragmatic analysis of these dynamics of argument and action at critical moments in the long process of an urban redevelopment can reveal new kinds of compromises and tests by which these projects are judged. In other words, what counts as failure and as success in the work of city building will shift, depending on what actors do and how they talk about it, and on how well these actions and justifications hold up to public challenges about the true character of a successful city. By gauging how these challenges are constituted and settled, we can better understand the evolution of the urban value proposition, and the new notion of justice grounded in urbanity that is emerging at the urban redevelopment frontier.

When I first met Bob Beauregard in 1998, he had a page torn from the New York Times taped to his office door. The headline was huge. It read, “OCEANS RISE. CITIES FALL.” I was heartened that my pro...

Getting to Groundbreaking (G2G) is a housing indicators project formed in 2013 that brought together home builders, industry associations, municipalities, the regional government, and academic urban researchers around a common interest: to understand what works in housing development regulation and planning across the Metro Vancouver region of British Columbia, Canada. The project aims were to inject new, credible information into the discussion of regulation of land and housing development. The project investigated trends in the provision of housing, surveyed opinions and practices amongst municipalities, homebuilders and the public, and collected information on new innovations in regulating the provision of housing. The G2G 2014 report detailed the cost, timing and regulatory best practices involved in the development approvals process for new town houses, and the G2G 2016 report examined these factors related to woodframe apartment buildings. The Metro Vancouver region is marked by high regulatory costs and long time frames for housing development, with considerable variability at the municipal level. However, G2G data does not indicate any relationship between lower regulatory costs and less time in the regulatory process and a lower cost of housing. In the context of the politically charged debate about the cost and regulation of housing, we detail the collaborative industry-researcher-government multistakeholder partnership approach taken by G2G and discuss the divergent interests in data transparency, and the politics of participation and control that pervaded the G2G project. In 2016, the G2G partnership broke down as a result of these unresolved questions, leaving unclear how much collaboration can be expected to offer the practice of urban indicators work in a heated political terrain.

This introductory chapter to the volume provides an overview of the history of community indicators, beginning with a grant provided by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1910 to the Charity Organization Society (of New York) to survey industrial conditions in Pittsburgh, and moving to present day. As a social movement, we present community indicators efforts as being grounded in challenges and innovations within the distinct but overlapping domains of public administration, social work and philanthropy, community development, sustainable communities and environmental justice, happiness and wellbeing studies, and data analytics. Each frames and pursues the task of crafting and disseminating indicators of community conditions in a different way, resulting in a richly diverse field of practice and theory, that the Community Indicators Consortium seeks to serve and promote. In so doing, the Community Indicators Consortium recognizes that uniting these diverse approaches in community indicators provides a forum in which to pursue common themes of work, including the need to amplify the voice of disadvantaged communities, to seriously explore the increasing use of information technology, to produce positive community change and to sustain these efforts over time. Each chapter in this volume is also summarized here.

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).

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.

Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Bullitt Foundation and partnership with Small Housing BC that gave rise to the research reported here. Hamidreza Bakhtiarizadeh and Alex Thumm supported survey research analysis.

This research provides analysis of the case of the Jackson Farm development application, embedded within the particular dynamics of the municipal, regional, and provincial sustainability land use policy culture of the Metro Vancouver region, in Canada. Within a culture of appreciation of the increasing need for sustainability in land use policy, including the protection of agricultural lands at the provincial level through the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), to urban intensification and protection of the green zone at the regional scale, lies a political conflict that comes into focus in individual land use decisions, within municipalities struggling for autonomy. This case is neither driven strictly by “the politics of the highest bidder” nor by policy failure, the case of the Jackson Farm is instead a case of the challenges of implementing inter-governmental coordination and collaborative governance in a context of both significant sustainability policy and urban growth. The process can be seen to follow an ecological modernization agenda, seeking “win–win” alternatives rather than recognizing that typical compromises, over time, may tip the direction of development away from sustainability policy goals. Understanding the twists, turns, and eventual compromise reached in the case of the Jackson Farm brings to light the implications of the shift in the regional planning culture which may necessitate a less flexible, more structured prioritization of competing goals within plans and policies in order to meet sustainability goals. We highlight this, and present an alternative implementation process within the existing policy regime with potential to aid the specific goal of agricultural land protection.

A framework for assessing cities as contributors to sustainable development (SD) is proposed. Differentiating between SD and ecological modernization (EM), we contend that even the weakest EM reforms prompt ecological restructuring (ER). Once unleashed, ER creates four problematics—ecological, economic, political and cultural—which governments at different scales must address by maintaining or challenging the status quo in relation to global structural imperatives; notably, requirements to promote economic growth and maintain legitimacy. That is, ER fosters uneven, non-linear processes of societal learning, which apply at different scales. Hence, where national governments lag behind, cities that develop ‘action plans’ may prompt SD. The framework is road tested by evaluating Vancouver's Greenest City Action Plan. We find that Vancouver does indeed push ER towards SD, especially in the political and cultural domains, even as Canada and British Columbia appear less committed. However, due to the pr...

While sustainability indicator systems (SIs) have proven to be valuable rational tools for improving the availability of information related to the relationship of cities and communities to natural limits, the indicators movement has achieved limited instrumental uptake in policy. This paper begins from a recognition that instrumental use of sustainability indicator systems is rare. Greater potential impact exists for SIs designed to be much more attentive to their conceptual and political values within their particular social and political context. In other words, greater attention to what has been called the governance of indicator systems, or the ways in which SIs fit as policy tools within a multilevel and multiactor governance context, is key to increasing their utility. This is particularly true given the need for decisive policy change, or even the introduction of a new development path, which is asserted within the sustainability agenda. Understanding the real and potential utility of indicator systems within multiactor governance processes, in which their roles are primarily rhetorical, conceptual and political, is facilitated by thinking about indicator systems as boundary objects, tools which open up dialogue, information sharing, learning and consensus-building across different policy boundaries: between experts and nonexperts, formal government and different nongovernment actors, higher-order governments and lower-order governments. This paper offers a comparative analysis of three sustainability indicator systems in the North American context – Vancouver's Vital Signs (Vancouver Foundation), Seattle's Happiness Initiative, and LEED-ND (US Green Building Council) – all of which have shown some success in operationalizing a new policy boundary as a means of making conceptual and political contributions to governance practices. The specific boundaries operationalized, the different approach taken by each project, and the usability demonstrated by each project at that boundary in terms of salience, legitimacy and credibility, are assessed comparatively. In general, the trajectory in design and use of ecological and sustainability indicators demonstrates an increase in appetite, aptitude and numbers of channels for use in processes of governance; however, these factors vary with the local social–political opportunity structure. This analysis presents the advances made as well as the tradeoffs evident in these cases across the gamut of different forms of usability of nongovernmental indicator systems designed for use as boundary objects, and suggests a path forward for indicator work which aims to change policy, from a governance perspective.

Lessons from two leaders in the liveable cities race, Vancouver and Melbourne, demonstrate that these cities have followed a quite similar development, policy and planning path and now ride the crest of the wave while facing comparable challenges in preparing for the future. Success in urban liveability speaks to the conditions of life for the luckily satisfied few. An urban liveability that is also sustainable is possible but demands thinking about two other groups for whom the city is responsible: those who cannot meet their needs today, and those who will live in the future city. Melbourne offers an exciting notion of what living in the city is for and a sociability in public life that benefits from an intact equity argument at the national scale. Vancouver, by contrast, offers a compelling vision of urban life, for good, throughout the life cycle, one that brings with it an increasingly interactive, partnership-oriented and aspiring relationship between urban residents and their local government. The City of Melbourne is the showpiece, the workplace, and the venue for the young and restless to play. Vancouver has a regional government able to do the heavy lifting of narrowing the urban/suburban divide in metropolitan vision and priorities. In Melbourne, no such metropolitan entity exists, and regional governance is the domain of the state government, protecting established relationships and sharing common interests with big developers.

Urban resilience frameworks and strategies currently taken up in cities around the globe fall short of adequately preparing urban communities for the scale of change that many will face in coming decades. For cities aiming to address the impacts of climate change in a proactive sense as well as post-disaster, urban resilience presents itself as a useful frame, grounded in both ecological systems theory and psychological theory. This chapter tackles the question of where the notion of resilience helps, and where it holds cities back, in terms of urban planning and policy. Resilience in the urban planning and policy context may hold cities back because it lacks normative value in social and political spheres. That is, while concepts such as social justice and sustainable development suggest a normative direction for planning toward the improvement of our communities, resilience thinking does not imply any value-based criteria by which communities might determine how best to “bounce back” or “bounce forward.” Additional tools for urban resilience planning are needed, and we suggest and elaborate here upon two: the development path and regenerative sustainability. The notion of the development path originated within the IPCC process and draws upon futures studies, scenario planning and backcasting, in order to understand the social and political change and decision making implications of responding to climate change. The second concept we offer, regenerative sustainability, can be considered as the work of increasing the capacity of the current generation to give back more than we receive. The contribution of these two concepts to the value of urban resilience thinking in political contexts is explained through a discussion of five possible scenarios of urban transformation, which vary in terms of the social and political intentions at work in the strategies needed to build resilience.

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.