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.
Tag: urban planning
Congratulations to Kate Thompson, for the first of her PhD comprehensive papers which has just come out in Ecosystem Services. Kate reviewed dozens of municipal plans in Canada, coding deductively for ecosystem services concepts using the new CICES framework, and synthesized what she found into a useful new model for urban planners. The paper, The use of ecosystem services concepts in Canadian municipal plans, translates ecosystem services to ‘planning imperatives’: protect ES supply, mimic and rebuild ES, and capitalize on ES. I am sure this paper will be useful to scholars and practitioners alike.
Farewell to Jingwen (June) Qin, who headed back to China early this morning to begin her final undergraduate year of urban planning at Wuhan University. She has been working with me on a research project this summer, funded by the Mitacs Globalink, using Sina Weibo social media to understand Chinese student perspectives on Halifax. It was great to have her overlap with Ruoqian (Joy) Wang, last year’s Globalink intern, who has just arrived to begin her MES at SRES with Karen Harper and I. I hope June takes a similar path back to us next year. Thank you, and bon voyage, June.
I enjoyed getting out of the office last week to Moncton and Amherst. In Moncton I attended a Climate Change Adaptation and Infrastructure meeting sponsored by the Climate Change departments of the Atlantic Province governments with NRCan funding. This year’s meeting was on infrastructure, and included participants including engineers, planners, NGOs, decision-makers and researchers on discussions of infrastructure renewal in the face of climate challenges. While being disappointingly light on social science – clearly infrastrcture change can have significant social implications, viz wind farms, hydro dams and dykelands – it was a great networking opportunity. Lots of SRES alumni and other people I had been hoping to connect with on other matters.
I spent that evening in Sackville, connecting with colleagues from Mount Allison University. The next morning I spent at Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Amherst office, talking to the Atlantic region Outreach through Events committee about conservation messaging, supporter engagement and program evaluation. We hope to do some Mitacs-funded research with them this summer around youth engagement. A particularly funny point was some remedial education via YouTube of one of the committee members who was unfamiliar with the term ‘hoser‘.