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Abstract
Advocates of sustainable urban development often privilege the region as a scale for coordinated action and investment. However, discourses of sustainability institutionalised through regional planning, and conflated with notions of liveability, lend themselves to recruitment by competing, and opposing, development interests. To be regionally sustainable, an individual land development should, both on-site and through its connections to other sites, contribute to overall sustainability of the region. Using examples of industrial waterfront redevelopment in metropolitan Vancouver, we show how particular urban spaces are misrepresented as lynchpins of regional sustainability. In a plan for residential redevelopment, it is claimed that sustainable redevelopment will reunite citizens with “their waterfront”, reframed as liveable, pure, clean, ecologically vital and non-industrial. At an adjacent site, it is claimed that waterfront industrial land should be protected to combat industrial sprawl. Yet, in both cases the developers have lobbied for the expansion of road transportation making the claims of regional sustainability doubtful.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an SSHRC Standard Research Grant (Global Gateway, Local Benefit?) and a Partnership Development Grant (Reclaiming the New Westminster waterfront). An early version of this paper was presented at the 2012 meetings of the Association of American Geographers in New York organised by Constance Carr, Markus Hesse, Rob Krueger and Christian Schulz. Thanks also to Azadeh Hadizadeh Esfahani and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.