http://hdl.handle.net/10315/34 Sat, 25 May 2013 18:00:31 GMT 2013-05-25T18:00:31Z http://hdl.handle.net/10315/6362 Delivering sustainable buildings and communities: eclipsing social concerns through private sector-led urban regeneration and development Bunce, Susannah; Moore, Susan Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10315/6362 2009-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10315/6361 Developing sustainability: sustainability policy and gentrification on Toronto's waterfront Bunce, Susannah A “three pillar” concept of sustainability guides the current publicly funded planning and redevelopment process on Toronto’s waterfront. While this concept serves as a guiding framework, sustainability is largely defined in planning and redevelopment policy and practice by multi-level public sector urban intensification policy and a reliance on the private sector-led implementation of new sustainable communities. This study connects perspectives on “policy-led gentrification” and “third-wave gentrification” with an exploration of public plans and development strategies for the new West Don Lands waterfront neighbourhood. It traces how sustainability objectives are integrated into a gentrification process driven by public sector planning and development policies and private sector development interests. Components of the integration of sustainability into gentrification practices are the sale of publicly owned waterfront lands to private developers and public sector financial and educational incentives for private real estate development that meets Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design sustainability targets. Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10315/6361 2009-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10315/2529 Urban Expansion and Industrial Nature: A Political Ecology of Toronto's Port Industrial District Desfor, Gene; Vesalon, Lucian This article analyses political and economic practices involved with the production of an industrial form of socio-nature - the Port Industrial District - during the early decades of the twentieth century in Toronto, Canada. Informed by historical documents from that period, as well as using contemporary concepts from urban theory, we analyse the creation of a major land mass and southern extension of Toronto within a political ecology framework. We explicitly link the concept of socio-nature with the dynamics suggested by theories of capital and spatial expansion, thereby bringing 'nature' into a more central position in understanding urban development processes. The Toronto Harbour Commissioners, the central organization in this land-creation process, reflected, we argue, more the ideological preferences and economic interests of local elites than an efficient institutional design for solving a multi-dimensional 'waterfront problem '. The harbour commission and its supporters envisioned and promoted the new industrial district, the pivotal section of its 1912 waterfront development plan, as a general strategy for intensifying industrialization and growth of the city. The massive infrastructure project is best understood as a spatio-temporal fix to productively absorb capital through spatial expansion and temporal deferment. A new institutional arrangement consolidated political and economic relations through practices that made possible the production of a new form of socio-nature and reshaped the eastern section of Toronto's central waterfront as an industrial landscape. Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10315/2529 2008-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10315/1265 Changing Urban Waterfronts' Seminar Series Report - Revised Bunce, Susannah This Seminar Series Report summarizes research presentations made by members of York University's Changing Urban Waterfronts' (CUW) research project in the spring of 2008. The Series focused on the central theme of the project - the interrelationship of society and nature in the historical transformation of Toronto’s waterfront. This focus spans a chronological period of approximately one hundred years, culminating in the current redevelopment plans for the waterfront. The project’s emphasis on the intertwined processes of social and natural transformations in the changing landscape of Toronto’s waterfront suggests that political decisions, governance arrangements, engineering practices, and management techniques have a direct role in the shaping of natural places and forms. The natural landscape of Toronto’s waterfront has been produced by multiple human interventions. This focus necessitates an interdisciplinary research approach where researchers address both social and natural processes in their specific substantive areas and geographical sites of waterfront research. The CUW research project is a SSHRC funded project that began in 2005, with faculty and graduate student researchers from the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, the York University Archives, the Department of Geography, University of Toronto, and the Department of Environmental Studies, University of Vermont. Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10315/1265 2008-06-09T00:00:00Z