Sustainable or Healthy
“How to Make a City Healthy”
Someone sent me an interesting link to this article and I found some of the discussion very interesting.
I know in Saanich and the CRD we spend a lot of time defining (and refining) our goals on what is a “sustainable community or region”?
The article quotes Mark Holland, a former director of Vancouver’s sustainability office and a founder of the Healing Cities Institute:
“Ten years ago when we talked about creating sustainable cities, that was entirely a focus on environment. What has happened since, is that we began to see this tsunami of information coming forward in the connections between design and health. We realized we really needed to dig deeper into the human experiences in cities. Most of that has been left to a strange amalgam of other practitioners — architects, environmental physiologists — but it really hasn’t found its way clearly into a framework of urban planning”.
Through the Healing Cities Institute they have created 8 Dimensions of a Healing City.
Here is the list but I suggest you go to the website to get the “detail”:
Whole communities; Conscious mobility; Restorative architecture; Thriving landscapes; Integrated infrastucture; Nourishing food systems; Support society; and, Healthy prosperity
When Holland was interviewd for the “Urbanite” he was asked if there were specific examples of successful healing cities, he responded:
“I have difficulty pointing to cities. I think neighborhoods would probably be a better focus. They are the unit of space we live our lives in. Neighborhoods that have a lot of people walking, a lot of people moving around, access to green space, a strong social network — those are the kind of places that build your physical, social, mental and emotional health and your sense of spiritual well-being”.
For me, I think Mark Holland is on to something that is so important to our way of life, are we nurturing our neighborhoods to be people places where we all feel a “spiritual” well-being, that’s the challenge.
What Have I done towards sustainability, you ask?
Someone once asked me why I ran for Saanich Council the first time. For me, as it said in the Saanich News after I was elected, it was about an urban river known as the Colquitz.
My home backs onto the Colquitz River and I had been noticing the pollution and other impacts in it. When I was President of the Strawberryvale Community Association I asked the Engineering Department whether there was any technology that could clean the run off before it hit the river system. The answer was no and that led to my running.
Why does society always have to impact the environment first instead of improving the environment before permanently damaging it?
Why do so many trees have to fall for subdivisions, why couldn’t subdivisions be planned around the environment on the site?
These and other issues lead me to run for a seat on Saanich Council.
I was told you won’t get elected the first time, and when I saw we had 27 candidates running, thought that would be true BUT I was elected the first time and thereafter ever since!
Thank you Saanich voters for continuing to support me, I still have more ideas and energy to give!
Working with community members, non profits and businesses have taught me that there are many ways to improve outcomes but I always believed that local government should lead in some of those areas.
We all talk about climate change and how we need to change our ways. It was during my first term on council I attended my first Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) conference and started to learn and learn more about what we could do at the local level.
From my report to Saanich Council that we join the FCM’s 20% Club aimed at reducing GHG emissions by 20% in 1998; retrofitting our traffic lights with LED bulbs after attending a meeting with BC Hydro; and to an important project I pushed when I was Chair of the CRD, the first Energy Management and Water Conservation Project. This project was the First Regional Energy Reduction Plan in Canada.
You can read more about the project in “Leadership makes a difference” book, produced by the Centre of Civic Governance. To me the energy project was the big stepping stone, both at the CRD and ultimately led to Saanich’s energy retrofit program.
Through various initiatives we saved about 1629 tonnes of GHG emissions (the equivalent of getting 393 mid-sized cars off the roads) and 62 million units of bottled water a year while creating economic development equivalent to 102 person months of employment for local trades from the retrofits.
I continue to push for CRD and Saanich to move forward to address so many of these important issues so that future generations inherit a place that is in better balance with the environment and our impacts have been reduced.