City of North Vancouver Wins Second Community Excellence Award for Leadership & Innovation in Sustainability
The City of North Vancouver continues to garner recognition for its commitment and progress in the area of sustainability, most recently, winning a prestigious Community Excellence Award for its 100 Year Sustainability Vision.
At the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) convention, the City of North Vancouver was 
presented with the UBCM’s prestigious 2009 Community Excellence Award for Leadership & Innovation. In the category of ‘Large Municipality’, the City was recognized for demonstrating initiative and cooperation in leading the innovative planning process to prepare a 100 Year Sustainability Vision for the City.
Since 2007, the City has worked with the University of British Columbia Design Centre for Sustainability to prepare an innovative 100 Year Sustainability Vision. Operating under the themes of liveability, sustainability and resilience, the long-range plan examines likely scenarios, challenges and opportunities in the future, allowing the City to develop forward thinking policy planning that would address land use planning decisions and their greenhouse gas implications.
For the complete news release, click on City of North Vancouver Wins Second Community Excellence Award for Leadership & Innovation in Sustainability.
Contribution by UBC Design Centre for Sustainability
When the award was announced, Patrick Condon released the following statement:
“I am particularly proud that this award validates a core DCS strategy, that of working with real actors in situ to both advance the state of the art and, at the same time, address a critical problem. The DCS has long acted in the faith that the two must be done together, believing thinking and doing to be inherently linked facets of sustainability scholarship.”
“I also believe that this award provides firm evidence that the DCS and the SALA are seen as the vanguard in providing intellectual leadership for our region and beyond in this crucial area.”
“Particular thanks goes to Sara Muir-Owen for her organizational work on the project and for managing the writing of the report, to Jackie Teed for overall management of the project, to Daniel Rohr for his enthusiastic intellectual contributions to the green infrastructure elements of the strategy, Sara Fryer for applying what is now many years of creative contributions to this complex constellation of issues, Ron Kellett for providing a framework for thinking about the world as multiple scale elements nested into neighborhood patterns, Nicole and Duncan for working so hard to link credible modeling of GHG consequences to urban form, and to Elisa Campbell for structuring an organization that was capable of pulling all this off.”
About Patrick Condon:
Professor Patrick Condon is the visionary force behind the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability. He has over 25 years experience in sustainable urban design; first as a professional city planner and then as a teacher. He started his academic career in 1985 at the University of Minnesota, moving to the University of British Columbia in 1992, acting first as the Director of the Landscape Architecture 
program and later as the James Taylor Chair in Landcape and Livable Environments.
Patrick Condon is now a senior researcher with the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability, an urban design think tank that evolved from the original efforts of the Chair and now employs over a dozen researchers.
As James Tailor Chair, he pioneered multi-party sustainable community design workshops now generally known as charrettes, starting in 1995 with the seminal Sustainable Urban Landscapes Surrey Design Charrette.
Since that time Patrick Condon has worked to advance sustainable urban design in dozens of major charrettes, and scores of publications. He has lectured widely in both Canada and abroad, and is the author of several books, most recently Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities, Island Press.
He is currently focused on the Sustainability by Design project, a vision for a sustainable Metro Vancouver region with a population of 4 million.
Posted October 2009