Building capacity for regenerative communities: what does it mean?

Burrard Inlet from atop Burnaby Mountain

What does building capacity for regenerative communities mean to me? This is my perspective in brief. Regenerative systems development focuses not solely on reducing resource extraction and its impact (on Earth and each other), but -above all- on (re)connecting and…

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The Urban Agenda for the EU

Reposted from https://www.urbanagenda.urban-initiative.eu/urban-agenda-eu My commentary Although the European Urban Agenda (EUA), co-funded by the European Commission, could be better embedding holistic/systems thinking, it is currently one of the most advanced frameworks for the transformation of cities for the 21st century….

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Explained: holistic and regenerative sustainability

In this post, I briefly explore the concept, principles, and practices of holistic urban productivity or regenerative sustainability as an emerging theory in Sustainable Community Development (SCD) and I introduce a conceptual framework for regenerative urban sustainability.  The full paper…

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To what extent is sustainability addressed at urban scale and how aligned is it with Earth’s productive capacity?

New research article I co-authored, just published online by Elsevier’s Sustainable Cities and Society. Vigier, M., Ouellet-Plamondon, C. M., Spiliotopoulou, M., Moore, J., & Rees, W. E. (2023). To what extent is sustainability addressed at urban scale and how aligned…

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Urban systems theory, operationalized (part 2) 

Continuing our presentation of urban agendas that operationalize urban systems theory… Apart from the prevalent sustainable city agenda, at least five other popular urban agendas have been identified in the literature: ecocity, low-carbon city, resilient city, knowledge city, and smart…

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What is the sustainability continuum?

The position of an initiative on the weak/strong sustainability continuum is a debate that is rooted in economics but is now central to sustainability discourse, pertaining to both research and practice. The weaker-to-stronger sustainability debate is a spectrum between those…

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