Congratulations to Kate Thompson on her second dissertation paper hitting print today in Planning Practice & Research. The paper, The ecosystem services concept in urban planning: the criteria for practical fit, draws upon 31 interviews and two focus groups Kate did with planners in 3 Canadian cities to understand how planners feel about ecosystem services concepts and related tools (normative fit) and the suitability of both for planning work (practical fit). The gap between the two allowed her to probe about the characteristics that support practical fit, and the important role of policy entrepreneurs in encouraging that fit.
Category: Urban (Page 1 of 3)
I always try to do some training during sabbatical, and this winter I took a digital photography course at NSCAD. This was designed to get me more familiar with handling and editing photographs in advance of some repeat photography work in Australia this summer. The class was a wonderful group of folks from a range of backgrounds, and we each tackled a final project that was displayed in the photography department for the week (see above).
My project was repeat photography of images I found in the Halifax Municipal Archives, allowing me to learn to combine old and new photographs from familiar sites around the city (see below for an example). The whole set can be found here. Thanks to Elena Cremonese at the Archives, and Rob Allen at NSCAD, for their support of this work. Also thanks to those of you on LinkedIn who answered the call when I couldn’t identify one of the photo sites.
I am working on a digital photography project right now associated with a sabbatical course at NSCAD, and spent a chunk of the weekend looking through the HRM Archives for images around my neighbourhood to use in repeat photography. In a fond of images called C.N.R. Bridges–taken to track infrastructure issues around the city for what seem like long-standing disputes around responsibility–came the above intriguing and quite shocking image from 1968. Can anyone help me figure out where this was taken? Do you know anything about the monkey?

Fig. 1. Building the case: the intersecting ways that ES was used to elevate the status of environmental considerations in urban planning and policy.
The first of Kate Thompson’s empirical IDPhD papers is out this week in Ecosystem Services, Building the case for protecting urban nature: How urban planners use the ideas, rhetoric, and tools of ecosystem services science. Based on interviews with urban planners in Greater Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax Regional Municipality, Kate and her committee describe how conceptual, strategic and instrumental use differ in the tasks to which they are put as well as who is using them (see above).
I’ve broken my flight strike to head to Vancouver for the Adaptation Canada meeting, and if you’re going to expend the carbon, at least have a window seat and a clear day. Candy to a geographer. The transect across from Edmonton on the last leg was fascinating, from fields and shelterbelts and intermittent riparian buffers, to oil and gas pump sites cut out of forests, to forestry cutblocks and then into the Rockies proper. On descent towards Vancouver an amazing panorama opened up of the Fraser Valley and its mix of agriculture and industry and development. Vancouver’s new train in from the airport was a real boon, as was not having to put on my parka, hat or mitts, brought just in case. You could easily identify the visitors on the streets: smiling and coatless among the bundled locals.