New book highlights innovations in urban sustainability

WHITEHORSE – A new book co-edited and authored by Yukon College vice president Academic, Dr. Bill Dushenko, highlights fresh thinking in the on-going debate over sustainable urban planning and development.

Urban Sustainability: Reconnecting Space and Place brings together 12 researchers and practitioners from across North America to explore the governance challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for city planners.

Smaller carbon footprints, walkable cities, eco-friendly buildings, and urban agriculture are topics of discussion at city halls across Canada, and no stranger to Whitehorse council meetings. These are some of the concrete ways of achieving urban sustainability put forward in the book.

Dushenko believes that to create more sustainable cities municipal politicians and planners will increasingly need to take a community’s social capital and their engagement into account when making decisions.

His chapter in the book - Urban/Rural Tensions, Place and Community Sustainability - focuses on the repercussions that occurred when the municipality of Sooke, on Vancouver Island, began annexing portions of neighbouring unincorporated communities.

"A person’s sense of ‘place’ is an expression of their emotional and cultural connection to a particular ‘space’," said Dushenko. "In this BC case, people in neighbouring communities felt that their identity was being compromised through this annexing and rose up to challenge it."

Royal Roads University social scientist, Ann Dale, and Ryerson University professor and planner, Pamela Robinson co-edited the book with Dushenko. The book was conceived six years ago, just before Dushenko became dean of the School of Sustainable Building and Environmental Management at the North Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT).

Despite the book’s more southern focus, Dushenko believes northern communities like Whitehorse can take a lot from the case studies they gathered.

"Some may say we have a very sprawling community up here, but slowly progress is starting to be made through zoning and other changes to support greater sustainability. There are others who still like things just the way they are. Citizens are becoming more engaged in this dialogue, so we’re seeing calls for urban chickens, and for more walkable and bike-able communities."

"Our approach to sustainability is growing and evolving and there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. We need to have the kind of debates we’ve been having here, with give and take between competing groups, to create a community we like and enjoy, rather than one we just happen to live in."

Urban Sustainability: Reconnecting Space and Place is published by the University of Toronto Press and available from www.amazon.ca/.

-30-

For more information, contact:

Michael Vernon
Communications Coordinator
College Relations
Yukon College
867.668.8786
867.332.4722
mvernon@yukoncollege.yk.ca

Jacqueline Bedard
Director
College Relations
Yukon College
867.456.8619
jbedard@yukoncollege.yk.ca