ABSTRACT
Communities across Canada are developing vision statements and experimenting with sustainability indicators in an effort to steer new directions for regional planning. 'Smart growth' is gaining rapidly in popularity, with mayors' workshops, and planning conferences. The chapter reviews the Canadian experience with planning for sustainable development. It suggests that community planners do not have the tools and authority to generate solutions to many problems that make our economy and communities unsustainable. While communities have engaged in many progressive initiatives in recent decades, the fundamental underlying issues of unsustainable life-styles and land use practices remain unresolved. Remote towns in rural Canada, agricultural regions, and former centres of resource extraction are losing population and government services; the contemporary economy renders many communities peripheral. Smart growth implies a fusion of concepts from new urbanism and sustainable development. It argues that some land use strategies can prove sustainable over time.
