Editorial Notes: Stimulating and Extending the Conversation about Land Use and Sustainability

Welcome to the November postings of the CIT Information Resource!

When we launched the CITinfoResource blog a year ago our intention was, as Tim Pringle said at the time, to "stimulate and support the conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities." How do we do this?

• By highlighting specific projects and events that we're involved in;
• By having CIT and Real Estate Foundation staff talk about the conversations they're involved in;
• By engaging you as "land use practitioners" – the professionals and lay-people who are actively shaping land use practices across BC's non-metropolitican communities.

We're always interested in what you think. Please leave comments or email us!

In this posting of CITinfoResource we start with Foundation Executive Director Karin Kirkpatrick's notes on a variety of topics, including her observations from a recent trip to China. Our CIT project overview gives a sample of what Prince George is doing to address a range of issues, from downtown revitalization to climate change, with the help of SmartGrowth BC and the Real Estate Institute of BC. This month our "cover" image is taken from the Smart Growth on the Ground process generated by these partners.

Our engagement of land use practitioners tends to focus on two areas: coverage of land use related events and conferences, and guest columns and interviews.

BC communities are blessed with a wealth of talent and imagination when it comes to looking at how we use and conserve our land-based resources. Our guest columnists reflect a little of this wealth. In this posting, Janine de la Salle and Mark Holland address a recurring topic at CITinfoResource: food and land, and ways in which our urban centres, metropolitan as well as rurally-located, can play an active role in supporting sustainable agricultural practices.

The richness of talent amongst BC's land use practitioners is also reflected in the quality of conferences and events focused on land and sustainability. Interviews with participants and organizers is one way CITinfoResource extends the value of these events. During the past year, we have covered Reversing the Tide (Prince George, October 2008), moving to the Northern Housing Conference (Smithers, January 2009), the BC Land Summit (Whistler, May 2009), and most recently, Resilient Cities (Vancouver, October 2009). We've interviewed participants about their impressions of these events, how they "come to ground" in BC communities, and the medium-to-long-term legacy of these gatherings. Wherever possible, we follow the conversation over several postings of CITinfoResouce. For example, we've featured several interviews about the BC Land Summit in our June and September postings. In this posting, we continue that coverage as we talk with Judith Walker, planner with the Village of Cumberland.

Our conversations around Resilient Cities began in September when we interviewed Gene Miller, the visionary behind the Gaining Ground series of summits. Now we interview some of those who attended and who will make it real in our communities. We start with Michelle Rule, a City Councillor in Kelowna, move to Tim Pringle of the Real Estate Foundation, and finish with Jack Minard of the Comox Valley Land Trust. Upcoming issues will feature more conversations from a similarly broad spectrum of perspectives on land use.

As a closing column, I write about some of the challenges I see in trying to bring home the kinds of inspiring, sometimes sobering ideas and approaches to community sustainability that Resilient Cities presented so effectively.

Please share these resources

We are hearing from you that the CITinfoResource posts are helpful to your work. Thanks for that. One of the hallmarks of the Real Estate Foundation's 22+ years is collaboration and sharing of resources. We actively encourage the reproduction of CIT Information Resource articles and materials for non-profit educational purposes. In return, we ask that you please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses.

You may also want to follow us on Facebook or on Twitter. (As an aside, the value of using Twitter to provide real-time coverage of a conference was evident for anyone following the Resilient Cities conference. A sample of this is viewable at the Gaining Ground blog here. Just another way that we're using social media to extend the reach and impact of a downtown conference to outside communities and individuals unable to attend.)

ps...
Please note that on occasion we'll post outside of our usual 6x a year schedule. For example, audio posts of our #GGRC09 interviews were posted in previous weeks. In future you'll start to see video posts appearing as well. Tell us what you think of these ways of stimulating and extending the conversation about land use and sustainability in BC!

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2009. We strongly encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses