Penny Gurstein – författare

Vancouver is heralded around the world as a model for sustainable development. In Planning on the Edge, nationally and internationally renowned planning scholars, activists, and Indigenous leaders assess whether the city's reputation is warranted.While recognizing the many successes of the "Vancouverism" model, the contributors acknowledge that the forces of globalization and speculative property development have increased social inequality and housing insecurity since the 1980s in the city and the region. To determine the city's prospects for overcoming these problems, they look at city planning from all angles, including planning for the Indigenous population, environmental and disaster planning, housing and migration, and transportation and water management.By looking at policies at the local, provincial, and federal levels and taking reconciliation with Indigenous peoples into account, Planning on the Edge highlights the kinds of policies and practices needed to reorient Vancouver's development trajectory along a more environmentally sound and equitable path.

Planning on the Edge explores the reality behind the rhetoric of Vancouver's reputation as a sustainable city and paves the way for developing Vancouver and its region into a place that is both economically sustainable and socially just.

As public issues stretch out to affect an ever expanding population, democratizing planning and governance becomes increasingly important. How localized communities embrace the progressive qualities of civil society is a critical topic in an era where diverse and divergent forces often counteract civil society formation and community initiatives. This collection explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic planning and governance in relation to civil society formation and social learning.The contributors to this volume use multiple lenses to uncover the challenges of democratizing planning and governance, helping to create a better understanding of how civil societies learn from their experiences, and how these lessons might be applied in other contexts. Learning Civil Societies provides insights for developing a critical methodology for studying civil societies and their formations and suggests that new organizational mechanisms within and outside civil societies must be created if more democratic forms of planning and governance are to emerge, be revitalized, and become institutionalized in the coming decades.