| In 1996 a group of Calgarians formed the Sustainable Calgary Society to pursue a community sustainability indicator initiative. Through the initiative over 2000 Calgarians have participated in the selection, research and documentation of thirty-six indicators of sustainability for the city of Calgary. In this dissertation I explore the outcomes of that process, propose a strategy for moving from indicator reporting to action on sustainability and propose a qualitative place-based model of community sustainability. The exploration begins with a discussion of the philosophical foundations of my inquiry. I focus my inquiry around the embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as complementary aspects of critical theory (particularly Jurgen Habermas's theory of Communicative Action), postmodernism and feminist theory. I also identify six key concepts that are the conceptual tools of my inquiry. From geography I take place and scale. From environmental science I take the concept of nature. From critical education I employ the concept of transformational learning. And from the biological sciences I take the concept of complexity. The dissertation presents two pieces of original research. The first is an exploration of the personal and community outcomes of the Sustainable Calgary community sustainability indicator initiative. The second is a comparison of sustainability indicator initiatives in eighteen other North American cities. The dissertation concludes with a strategic and a theoretical contribution to the work of Sustainable Calgary and to sustainability's theoretical literature. The Sustainable Calgary indicators to action strategy aligns Sustainable Calgary with the international Local Agenda 21 and Action 21 movement, and employs the concepts of adaptive learning organization, governance for sustainable development and deliberative policy-making to craft a five-point indicators to action strategy. In the final chapter I speculate on an alternative experiential, sense- and place-based theoretical framework for sustainability. I propose that the object and subject of sustainability should be "sustaining ecological community." I propose a relational model of the sustaining ecological community, define the evolutionary and transformational driver of sustaining ecological communities, and offer a set of five criteria by which we can determine whether there is, in fact, authentic experience in a sustaining ecological community. |
