Category Archives: Environment

An expert panel discusses how our municipal government could help build a more economically vital and ecologically resilient community

*

*

There have long been gaps between the vision most of us have for a socially responsible, environmentally “green” Victoria, and the high-priced, unbridled growth towards which the dominant economic forces in this region steer us. This gap was identified in city staff’s own analysis of Victoria’s Official Community Plan (OCP), and grows wider daily through disagreements over everything from new condominium high-rises to mega-yacht marinas.

In sustainable governing parlance, such gaps can ideally be bridged by making all development decisions with equal consideration for economic, social and environmental impacts, or “triple bottom line” accounting. Unfortunately, in its current OCP consultation process covering issues like urban design, energy and emissions, local food sustainability, and economic development, the City inscrutably failed to request that its economic discussion paper provide any triple bottom line analyses (see “Visioning Our Future or Our Pipe Dream?” in May’s Focus). Yet, obviously, economic decisions frequently drive bulldozers right through the most beautiful of our food sustainability and urban design dreams.

So Focus and Transition Victoria recently brought together an expert panel to brainstorm how the municipal government could help transform Victoria’s economy and economic decisions to be more in line with the social and environmental values which our citizens have overwhelmingly given voice to over the years. Continue reading →

There’s a problematic gap between what many people want to see in Victoria’s Official Community Plan, and what traditional urban economics dictates.

*

As the public participation component of Victoria’s Official Community Plan process officially launched, the air felt heavy with irony. It was only March, but fans were already fighting mugginess in the glass-roofed Crystal Garden, serving as a constant reminder of the preceding century of haphazard government “planning” that built a downtown saltwater swimming pool which became ­a tropical botanical zoo and then an ill-fated geographic museum and finally a less-than-ideal conference centre dependent on the public purse.

Nevertheless, as I participated in the municipality’s “Shape Your Future Victoria” event, the energies of an increasingly concerned and engaged population were stirring inspiration. Continue reading →