The Sustainability Files

This past week in the city of Lethbridge, I had the distinct pleasure to be a guest at a regional sustainability conference attended by more than 40 municipal councils from across southern Alberta.

Yes, sustainability is becoming a buzzword, even in the council chambers of our windy southern neighbours.

On hand for a keynote presentation was former British Columbia premier Mike Harcourt, best known as the premier who advocated for sustainability and for his contributions to Vancouver’s ambition to become the “Greenest City on Earth.”

Harcourt addressed a crowd of 120 municipal mayors and councillors, and talked about sustainability for communities, realizing a balance between social, economic and environmental values on the landscapes, and how to convert industrial brownfields into green communities.

The conference speakers challenged the communities throughout Southern Alberta to demonstrate leadership and seize the opportunities of Alberta’s growth and prosperity to invest in sustainability for the future of our communities.

Discovering highest value and best use development opportunities within our municipal boundaries is an important aspect of sustainable community development.

The beginning of this discovery process is the engagement of the public in a visioning session to assign values to municipal assets.

By assessing the social, economic, and environmental values of our neighbourhoods, we start to see opportunities for contiguous areas of green spaces and patterns of complimentary land uses, such as high-density residential with walkable commercial nodes, which by default start to raise the value of each independent component.

Within the regional planning process, we are also assigning values at a larger scale and discovering that the sustainability goals are much easier to assess once we determine both complimentary and competing land values.

The Cochrane Municipal Sustainability Plan has incorporated many of these types of value assessments and we are now looking at opportunities to implement and move forward with our sustainability goals.

In Cochrane, our inner-city development has been stalled because of the massive industrial brownfield site in the middle of our town, which has been in conflict with both light commercial and residential values.

By having already moved through the process of identifying the key social, economic and environmental values, our community is poised to move forward and assess potential complimentary values that can occur on the site.

We can start looking at the opportunities that complimentary land-use values can contribute to our community, such as high-density, low-impact housing supported by renewable energy, commercial nodes for technological or medical industries, and an arts and culture centre.

Leadership and innovative community design and development can occur when we start to discover the complimentary values on the landscape, but civic leadership is also critical to creating real solutions that align with our vision for sustainability.

Cochrane’s brownfield site has sat idle for almost a generation in Cochrane, and our citizens haven’t had the opportunity to realize the potential social, environmental or economic values to the community.

In 2009 the Town of Cochrane received a $6-million  grant from the Build Canada fund, a provincial-federal partnership initiative to help communities with growth infrastructure.

With a partnership with Springwood Developments in place, remediation plans being looked at by the province, and a Sustainability Plan endorsed by the community, all the right pieces are now in play to see some real progress on bringing the lands back into our community with vision and innovative sustainable solutions.

With a little bit of leadership, and some out-of-the-box thinking, perhaps Cochrane can make a bid for the “Greenest City on Earth!”

Lisa Fox is the founder and executive director of a local not-for-profit environmental management consulting firm. She also volunteers with the Cochrane Environmental Action Committee, the Bow River Basin Council, the Alberta Water Council and the Calgary Region Airshed Zone.
lisafox@telus.net

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