Individual Presentation or Panel Title
Sustainability, eh? An Analysis of Vancouver, British Columbia’s 2020 Greenest City Action Plan
Abstract
The concept of urban sustainability is at once apparent and ambiguous in its objectives and implementation. In this paper, I analyze Vancouver, British Columbia’s 2020 Greenest City Action Plan (GCAP), a 10-part plan designed with the objective of making Vancouver the “world’s greenest city by 2020.” I argue that the integration of sustainability discourses into urban planning through documents such as the 2020 GCAP emphasizes false understandings of urban and natural space as divisible and autonomous. In failing to produce a clear definition of sustainability, planning regimes like the City of Vancouver have coopted the concept as master-signifier in urban planning discourse, creating an ethos of environmentalism within urban space built upon artificial consensus concerning what it means to be “green.” Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I read the 2020 GCAP for a definition of sustainability and conclude that in lacking a definition of this concept, the GCAP itself becomes a definition of sustainability. Thus, sustainability becomes a mechanism of governmentality, limiting the type of environmental action that can be taken within cities, and emphasizing power struggles inscribed within and beyond urban spaces.
Location
Janney Lounge
Start Date
30-4-2016 3:30 PM
End Date
30-4-2016 4:20 PM
Keywords
urban planning, sustainability, governmentality, socionatural production
Sustainability, eh? An Analysis of Vancouver, British Columbia’s 2020 Greenest City Action Plan
Janney Lounge
The concept of urban sustainability is at once apparent and ambiguous in its objectives and implementation. In this paper, I analyze Vancouver, British Columbia’s 2020 Greenest City Action Plan (GCAP), a 10-part plan designed with the objective of making Vancouver the “world’s greenest city by 2020.” I argue that the integration of sustainability discourses into urban planning through documents such as the 2020 GCAP emphasizes false understandings of urban and natural space as divisible and autonomous. In failing to produce a clear definition of sustainability, planning regimes like the City of Vancouver have coopted the concept as master-signifier in urban planning discourse, creating an ethos of environmentalism within urban space built upon artificial consensus concerning what it means to be “green.” Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I read the 2020 GCAP for a definition of sustainability and conclude that in lacking a definition of this concept, the GCAP itself becomes a definition of sustainability. Thus, sustainability becomes a mechanism of governmentality, limiting the type of environmental action that can be taken within cities, and emphasizing power struggles inscribed within and beyond urban spaces.