| As a mechanism of social change and a human settlement organised to implement principles of sustainability, ecovillages are small, full-featured, co-operatively owned human settlements that include housing, agriculture, and self-reliant infrastructure (such as energy and water systems), and focus on the realisation of sincerely sustainable social and environmental goals. However, as an emerging developing concept, a lack of familiarity is apparent in planning discourse regarding the meaning and relevance of the ecovillage as a sustainable alternative to patterns of development in the industrialised world.;Therefore, and in order to clarify the term 'ecovillage', my thesis compares a literature-based understanding of ecovillage with the manifestations of these communities in British Columbia and Ontario. Beginning with a literature review, I contextualize ecovillage among four other related community types (green city, healthy community, intentional community, and sustainable community). Through this review, I establish the discursive independence of the ecovillage project and a working definition for ecovillage. Meanwhile, through key informant interviews and document analysis, a record of the physical and social structures, ideologies of, and effects of planning policy and legislation on the ecovillages in British Columbia and Ontario is developed, and the communities are compared. Subsequently, the similarities and differences among the theoretical and empirical understandings are considered, in order to determine the challenges facing the implementation of the ecovillage in British Columbia and Ontario.;Considerable congruence is found among the ecovillages surveyed, and among them and the ecovillage concept contained in the literature, with some exceptions. While planning policy and legislation has not had a major impact on the ecovillages surveyed, two of the four communities have interacted with planning procedures. Aside from planning processes, some of the other challenges facing ecovillages are time, limited financial resources, and the lack of supporting infrastructure. |
