Sustainability Matters

Prospects for a Just Transition in Calgary, Canada's Petro-City

Noel Keough, Geoff Ghitter

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781773852515
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

Calgary, Alberta is a culturally diverse urban metropolis. Sprawling and car-dependent, fast-growing and affluent, it is dominated by the fossil fuel industry. For 30 years, Calgary has struggled to turn sustainability rhetoric into reality.

Sustainability Matters is the story of Calgary's setbacks and successes on the path toward sustainability. Chronicling two decades of public conversations, political debate, urban policy and planning, and scholarly discovery, it is both a fascinating case study and an accessible introduction to the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A clear-eyed view of the struggles of turning knowledge into action, this book illuminates the places where theory and reality converge and presents an approach to municipal development, planning, and governance that takes seriously the urgent need to address climate change and injustice.

Addressing a wide variety of topics and themes, including energy, diversity, economic development, and ecological health, Sustainability Matters is both a critique of current practice and a vision for the future that uses the city of Calgary as a microcosm to address issues faced by cities around the world. This is essential reading not only for every Calgarian working for a vibrant and sustainable future, but for all those interested in in the future of cities in a post-carbon world.

Introduction

Journalists recognize that at heart they are storytellers. Academics tend not to see ourselves as mere storytellers—but we are. In 2010 we took up an invitation to write a regular column on sustainability matters for Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly. We listened to the public conversations Calgarians were having—the collective stories they were telling and retelling. We came to appreciate the power of the stories we tell ourselves, and we realized that even as people begin to lose faith in their stories, without new stories they are reluctant to abandon the comfort of the old.

Facts and figures on their own rarely have the power to move people. In Sustainability Matters, we articulate, interpret, and critique stories that we in the West have been telling ourselves for some time now—like the story that all good things come from economic growth, or that technology will solve all our problems. But many of us now believe that we are at an epochal moment in the history of our city and of our species and that, more than ever, we need to craft a new story. This book is a small contribution to that effort.

The original motivation for the collection of essays that form the core of this book (chapters 4 to 13) was to engage Calgarians in discussion, debate, and exploration of current events as they unfolded week to week. We were putting into practice what we believe is an obligation of all academics—to be engaged intellectuals. As such, our goal was to write in an inclusive manner that speaks to all Calgarians, including academics and post-secondary and post-graduate students.

Our goal for the current collection remains the same—to engage and educate readers. These essays offer more than debate and opinion; they also present evidence via government and not-for-profit reports and websites, as well as peer-reviewed academic books and journals, for readers to investigate issues in more depth.

A core attribute of sustainability analysis is systems thinking. In these essays, we attempt to connect the dots. To illuminate causes, we probe behind the political flashpoints of the day, which can tend to focus on the symptoms. We make the argument that local phenomena like sprawl, auto dependence, affordability, lack of economic diversification, and broken governance are all connected; they are not isolated issues to be dealt with in their respective bureaucratic silos. We argue further that none of these local issues can be divorced from global challenges such as climate change, income inequality, and economic crisis. Instead, they are systemic manifestations of fundamentally unsustainable patterns of human settlement.

The public debates of the time dictated our topics. But as the Fast Forward column evolved, we began to see a pattern. The early essays took on some of the most immediate sustainability issues in the city of Calgary, including land use planning and transportation, and the politics and economics of these processes. As the column matured, we found ourselves exploring the technical, ecological, and political dimensions of issues like energy and economic diversification—issues that were still core to our petro-city but were generally perceived as rooted in provincial- and national-scale politics and economics. Our stories got bigger.

In the later essays, we widened our lens once again. Rather than continue to hammer away at the day to day of city politics, we were compelled to connect these debates to issues of global significance. Cities, after all, are not isolated islands. We invited Calgarians to reflect on local issues in a global context and to consider the Sustainable Calgary principle that our bid to achieve sustainability cannot be at the expense of our neighbours—whether they be the family next door or on the other side of the planet. We connected our stories to the stories being told in the global village.

This book is a place-based exploration of the concept of sustainability from the vantage point of Calgary—a fast-growing, wealthy, car-dependent, sprawling, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan urban centre. The book is also the story of a unique period in our city’s history. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, our political conversation has reflected an understanding of sustainability, but we have struggled mightily to turn that knowledge into action.

The themes articulated in this book transcend Calgary. We offer these matters of sustainability in the city of Calgary as a microcosm of the issues faced by cities around the world, particularly those of the more affluent nations. Furthermore, to the extent that cities are imagined as the engines of growth and creativity in the global human enterprise (more than half of humanity is now urbanized), the issues faced by Calgarians transcend urbanism. In this sense, Calgary—its governance, energy regime, diversity, economic development, and ecological health—is a microcosm not only of cities but of the global village.

The structure of the book emerged rather organically as a praxis—a dialogue of theory and practice. Pedagogically, the book is informed by the tradition of radical education whose practitioners, most notably Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, counsel educators to start where the people are.1 So while critical theory inspires the book, most citizens are not critical theorists and do not necessarily adhere to radical critiques of the status quo. To paraphrase Freire, educators should aspire to stretch the thread that joins an educator to his or her audience, but not to break the thread.

Our essay series started with instrumental, liberal, practical proposals for change that would find the light of day within a neoliberal capitalist economic reality. For example, confining debate and discussion to proposals for good urban design may frustrate the critical theorist, but it is the ground on which much of the debate in Calgary begins. Our challenge, moving from essay to essay, was to leverage those starting points and nudge debate onto more critical theoretical terrain. We attempted to do this both within the individual essays and through the arc of the essay series. The reader can judge whether we have been successful.

If critical urban theorists are to bridge the theory-practice divide and contribute to change, then we have to make our theoretical discourse accessible. The arc of these essays reflects a growing confidence in building that bridge. We walked the line between the average citizen discounting our words as academic impracticality and academic colleagues doing the same with the charge of simplistic analysis. Engaging citizens through a journalistic medium, we experimented with the art of storytelling in a way that we hope achieved, in some degree, what Leonie Sandercock, an urban planner and academic, advocates as the power of storytelling in planning practice and pedagogy.2 The book also straddles two fields of inquiry that rarely communicate with one another: the literature on cities, processes of urbanization, and critical urban theory, on the one hand, and the sustainable development discourse that originates in the international development enterprise, on the other.

Chapter 1 outlines, in broad strokes, the challenge of urban sustainability. We review critical commentary on the modern city and processes of urbanization as well as the diverse prescriptions for change that have been proposed since the publication of the World Commission on Environment and Development’s Our Common Future, popularly known...