Sustainable Community Planning in Canada: Status & Best Practices

Abstract

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Green Municipal Fund (GMF) commissioned Marbek Resource Consultants, in association with Dr. Ray Tomalty of Co-operative Research and Policy Services (CORPS), to undertake research on current and best practices in sustainable community planning (SCP) in Canadian municipalities. Every sector covered by the FCM’s GMF – brownfields, energy, transportation, waste and water – has a planning component. Community planning provides the overarching vision and language that allows plans and implementation policies from these various sectors to integrate in the most productive way. Ideally, planning addresses each of the component sectors and brings them together as an integrated whole. As further elaborated in Section 3 of the report, sustainable community planning (SCP) is a collaborative, integrated approach to community planning that steers a community toward the implementation of local and global sustainability goals, using a long-term perspective in an adaptive institutional framework.