Meg Holden

• PhD Public and Urban Policy
• Professor at Simon Fraser University

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. Addressi...

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 i...

***available free until August 23 here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275119310960?dgcid=coauthor*** 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 t...

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 gr...

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...

Du Parc Marianne (Montpellier, France) à Vinhomes Riverside (Hanoï, Vietnam), en passant par l'Olympic Village (Vancouver, Canada) ou encore l'Éco-parc du Bardo (Constantine, Algérie), cet ouvrage présente quatorze projets urbains durables dans le monde et en analyse les succès mais aussi les difficultés et les échecs. Son objectif : développer un...

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924563) and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through an Insight Grant.

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.

What impact does an immersive, international field school experience have on learning about urban resilience; and conversely, what impact does a framing concept of urban resilience have on international field schools in environmental and planning studies? This article reports on qualitative analysis of learning outcomes related to a novel pair of i...

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...

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 no...

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...

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 Brit...

What can justice and sustainability mean, pragmatically speaking, in today’s cities? Can justice be the basis on which the practices of city building rely? Can this recognition constitute sustainability in city building, from a pragmatic perspective? Today, we are faced with a mountain of reasons to lose hope in any prospect of moving closer to jus...

This perspective documents current thinking around climate actions in Canada by synthesizing scholarly proposals made by Sustainable Canada Dialogues (SCD), an informal network of scholars from all 10 provinces, and by reviewing responses from civil society representatives to the scholars’ proposals. Motivated by Canada’s recent history of repeated...

This paper explores current debates, data products and key implications of what has been called the urban data revolution, which has emerged to international prominence in recent years. We engage with critical appraisals of the new urban data revolution, and discuss what they can learn from both the successes and the failures of the earlier wave of...

This book is the seventh volume in a series covering best practices in community quality of life indicators. The case studies and analysis in this volume demonstrate how community indicators projects today operate within a need to amplify the voice of disadvantaged communities, seriously explore the increasing use of information technology, produce...

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 luck...

A growing chorus of planners and designers heralds the neighborhood as the best scale at which to pursue a shift toward low-carbon, “green” living alternatives to the status quo Western lifestyle. Within this, attention to ecourban developments, as a set of planning, design, social and technological arrangements for living better within resource li...

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 u...

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, ecopolise...

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...

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 specifi...

New sustainable neighborhood developments are multiplying worldwide. Embedded in these model neighborhoods are not only particular ideas about better urban form, but also particular ideas about better organization of urban governance and development responsibilities, and how these guide social development and, ultimately, urban life. Numerous frame...

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 scientists who study, and sometimes design, these systems in practice in the cities of North America, Australia and Europe. What Kitchin et al. overlook i...

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 d...

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 u...

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 ins...

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, in...

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 sustai...

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and methodological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the...

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 luck...

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...

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...

In the context of calls for more effective processes to facilitate deliberative democracy in cities, and the connection often asserted between participatory means and sustainability ends in urban governance, this article examines a case of public participation for sustainability indicator selection in Vancouver, Canada. Sustainability indicator sys...

This editors’ introduction provides some introductory comments for this special issue of Applied Research on Quality of Life dedicated to best research from the 2009 Community Indicators Consortium conference in Bellevue, Washington. In addition, it includes an edited version of the keynote address presented to this conference by Stephen Bezruchka...

In 1991, development economist and American public intellectual Albert O. Hirschman wrote the Rhetoric of Reaction [1]. In this book, which was prescient of more contemporary popular books such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine [2] and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State [3], Hirschman proposed a way to understand the kinds of arguments made by...

From October 2005 to April 2006, the Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory (RVu) conducted the most comprehensive public engagement process that the Vancouver region has had to date for the purpose of deriving key indicators of sustainable development. The RVu study group process was an original design to draw out new and unique ideas about best mea...

Testing the validity of indicator systems is a task almost always left to the scientific community, in standard practice and in keeping with the quest for objectivity prevalent in politics and in society as a whole. This paper calls for a reinvigorated agenda within indicators research to question this practice and develop alternative methodologies...

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 sustainabili...

Vancouver has committed to host the world’s 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 sustainab...

Nearly any introduction to the ideas and actions of sustainable development includes a mention of the role played in launching the global movement by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. International forums have been a major vehicle for the pursuit of sustainability subsequent to 1992, as well, but little attention has been paid to the...

This article analyzes the experience of a particular sustainability learning classroom model, examining the classroom composition, structure, positioning, and atmosphere components in an experimental course on the topic of sustainable buildings. The course, called Angles on Green Building, offered as the second in a suite by the Learning City susta...

This paper investigates the power and potential of studying planning and policy innovations from a social learning standpoint. Social learning is an important but under-investigated feature of planning and policy processes, and a particularly critical goal in the adaptation of innovations. While often cited as part of the desired outcomes of planni...

As an organization, Sustainable Seattle (S2) can be considered to have gone through seven main phases to date (see Table 1). The organization’s inception occurred with a forum organized in late 1990 by a nongovernmental organization visiting Seattle from Washington, DC.1 The keenest participants in that forum continued to meet and, in an early phas...

The Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory (RVu) was established in 2004 to provide a new model for measuring and monitoring regional progress toward sustainability. RVu is the first indicator project in Canada to join the UN-Habitat Global Urban Observatory network. RVu takes up the challenge within sustainability assessment theory to analyze and in...

Sustainable Seattle’s Indicators of Sustainable Community project was the first of its kind and remains one of the best known attempts by a community group to measure a wide range of what it values most about local quality of life and sustainability. The great irony in the organization’s notoriety, however, is that S2’s reputation grows with distan...

Both advocacy and performance measurement ends of the city planning spectrum have advanced the approach of measuring and monitoring urban indicators as a practical means to lofty planning goals. Urban and regional indicator projects aim to generate synergistic utility out of measures of urban quality and progress, trying to transform assessment mea...

"Better information for better cities!" is the call that leads this special issue. Urban indicators and performance measurement are the answers, aiming to improve local performance on key trends and contribute to solving global problems. Better information, according to the rational model that predominates in urban policy, is the surest path to imp...

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 mille...

This paper describes the conceptualization and implementation of a higher education classroom focused on enacting and enabling urban sustainability in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Learning City project aims to bring together community members, researchers, students and instructors from four higher education institutions to create sustainability...

"Graduate Program in Geography." Includes abstract. Thesis (M.S.)--Rutgers University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-174).

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--New School for Social Research, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 444-474).