Assembling place-based transitions: capitalist logics of green building in Vancouver, Canada

ABSTRACT

Green building is increasingly central in urban sustainability strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to demonstrate leadership, innovation, and technological advances. Vancouver offers a strategic example of a city that has adopted green building policies for sustainability and boosterism purposes. We combine assemblage thinking with sustainability transitions research to expose the relationality and interconnectedness of green building practices in specific places like Vancouver. This allows us to explore the entangled nature of niche-regime relations, and the stickiness between places and practices, which influence emergent innovations: how place specificity affects the unfolding of transitions. Through our empirical examples, we identify two logics driving green building in Vancouver (risk and innovation, and urban entrepreneurialism), which although differentiated nevertheless work to reinforce neoliberal sustainability activities. We argue that despite implementation of varied green building approaches, policy and discourse tend to mainstream a weaker, incremental form of green building.

KEYWORDS:

• Assemblage
• transitions
• green building
• urban sustainability
• Vancouver

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Helen Coulson, Richard Cowell and David Gibbs for comments on earlier drafts. The comments of three anonymous reviewers have significantly helped us improve our arguments. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We employ assemblage theory here rather than policy mobility as the former enables us to emphasise spatial connections and relationalities, and to think about place-specificity in governing how transitions unfold, rather than a more specific focus on the mobility of certain policies. As Savage (2020) and others have outlined, assemblage and policy mobilities theories share some epistemological traits.

2 UBC and the University Endowment Lands are together with other unincorporated areas part of Greater Vancouver Electoral Area A.

3 http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/PlanningPublications/140509_RPA_Density_and_Urban_Growth.pdf

4 https://www.pembina.org/pub/bc-green-buildings-2017

5 https://sustain.ubc.ca/campus/green-buildings (accessed 14 June 2020).

6 https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/vancouver-affordable-rent-housing-home-prices-zoning-density/588916/

7 https://planning.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/2019-12/PLANS_UBC_VCampusPlanPart22014.pdf (accessed 18 June 2020).

8 http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/ubc-tall-wood-building-worlds-tallest (accessed 13 June 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number DFG-BR1678/12-1]; Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg [grant number FNR 5791578].