Including culture in sustainability: an assessment of Canada's Integrated Community Sustainability Plans

Abstract

In Canada, a federally legislated requirement to develop Integrated Community Sustainability Plans (ICSPs) based on a four-pillar model of sustainability provides a good example of a procedural and substantive policy effort to encourage local governments to integrate all pillars of sustainability into their long-term planning. It also provides an opportunity to explore the conceptual and governance challenges that cities and communities face in implementing this four-pillar framework for long-term community planning. Focusing on the linguistic framing of the cultural dimension of this sustainability framework, this article explores the conceptual relationships between culture, nature, and development, as well the governance issues they pose. Then, it assesses the pragmatic integration of culture in ICSP guides and in actual ICSPs developed by cities and communities across Canada. It concludes with an overall analysis of the current status of these efforts and the key conceptual and governance challenges that are evident.

A conceptual framework to assess urban agriculture’s potential contributions to urban sustainability: an application to San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico

“…UA is able to provide expression to many urban elements, processes and their relationships, and thus help concretize this otherwise abstract construct. We based our framework on a widely accepted four-pillar model of sustainability (Nurse 2006;UCLG 2011;Duxbury and Jeanotte 2012): the traditional environmental, economic and social dimensions, along with the more recently accepted cultural dimension, which was particularly relevant to the historical characteristics and the current ethnic diversity in SCLC.…”

Culture-Sustainability Relation: Towards a Conceptual Framework

“…Conceptual frameworks aim to clarify and relate concepts in order to make them useful tools in research through description or categorization [10]. Attempts to frame culture in sustainability have appeared in policy documents [11,12] and in scholarly works [1,7,[13][14][15]. However, most of these texts, as well as some other work related to this theme, have a specific thematic scope, such as cultural planning [15], arts [4], heritage [16], changes in values [17], or cultural industries [18].…”

“…Attempts to frame culture in sustainability have appeared in policy documents [11,12] and in scholarly works [1,7,[13][14][15]. However, most of these texts, as well as some other work related to this theme, have a specific thematic scope, such as cultural planning [15], arts [4], heritage [16], changes in values [17], or cultural industries [18]. Culture is also often explicated via the anthropological method of intensive case studies, which has yielded valuable insights of cultural aspects of sustainability but has not provided explicit information on how the results can be interpreted within the frame of sustainability.…”

Cities, Culture and Sustainable Development

“…The cultural pillar can be the catalyst that brings about new ways of thinking about the troublesome relationship that has existed thus far between sustainability and development." (Duxbury and Jeannotte 2012) Three layers of discourse…”