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“Deep knowledge is being ignored or dismissed at an alarming rate. Our world seems to be getting more wobbly, more unstable, more uncertain, and for all sorts of reasons. Storytelling is needed more than ever. It matters how we share information to ensure concepts are conveyed to, and understood by, the people who need to know. Solutions to the issues of our time lie in WHAT stories we tell and HOW we tell those stories. There is tremendous value in networks to help solve problems together. Cooperation will help buttress this wobbly world,” stated Remi Dube.

“Metro Vancouver faces increasing resistance to provincially mandated Transit-Oriented Area (TOA) development amid concerns over the impacts of rapid densification. Without coordinated planning, this growth risks producing fragmented, unaffordable, and poorly serviced communities. Now that Metro region mayors have called on the Province to repeal ill-conceived housing legislation, this creates a unique opportunity for a course correction because the housing density issue hits everybody literally where they live. It is not esoteric,” stated Patrick Condon.

“Many plans fail to explicitly define green infrastructure. How it is defined guides the types of projects that local governments implement, with enduring impacts to people and the urban environment. Ecology is not really being embedded in any planning practice. This realization turned my attention towards this question…how do you embed ecosystem science and principles within landscape planning to conserve landscapes, ecological functions, and quality? My work is about a new paradigm that moves away from humans as separate from nature,” stated Zbigniew Grabowski.

“Not everyone gets to plan a brand-new community on top of a mountain as I did at Simon Fraser University. To everybody embarking on these gentle densification projects to construct 4 or 6 homes on single-family lots, you must get the drainage right. Get it wrong and it can be expensive to fix the problem,” stated Michael Geller. “One of the real advantages we had at UniverCity is that I was able to try out new ideas. Whenever people would say, we cannot do that, I could say: I will give you written assurance from the university that if this idea does not work, we will fix it.”

“Nature belongs in cities, but how do we put nature first without pushing people aside? Nature-First Cities reveals the false dichotomy of that question by recognizing that people and nature are indivisible. What are the costs associated with having cities that are not nature-based? What are the benefits if we invite nature back into our cities? What would it take to actually do this? If we are to challenge how urban development has taken place without a deep understanding of our connection to nature, what is a strategy for bringing nature back into cities,” stated Sean Markey.

“Land use intensification and redevelopment – where does that water go? I see the answer having two faces for RISK and LIABILITY. You are creating a drainage demand by preventing rainwater from reaching building foundations or removing groundwater at depth. But the other face is the lost opportunity because the water resource is not being managed in either a coordinated or holistic manner. Creating a drainage demand is the more immediate consequence of land use intensification. The loss of groundwater as an option for water supply is a future reckoning,” stated Robert Hicks.

“What is being done in the upland wilderness affects what goes on in the low land because the source of runoff and sediment that runs through urban areas is in the headwaters,” stated Younes Alila. “Forest hydrologists for over a century swept the dimension of frequency under the carpet in the name of the “public does not understand probability”. The rest is history and it has not turned out well. So, I made the conscious decision to make probability central to my outreach to the media, wider public, professionals, and scientists.”

“And then something happened. We just seemed to lose momentum in the 2010s. With the benefit of hindsight, others have made the same observation. We got bogged down in the implementation plan. We just talked about the burden on local governments from all the capital items that were arising from the completion of integrated stormwater management plans. Coincidentally, this was just as the region’s needs became dominated by transportation, transit, active transportation and cycling. And then we were hit by the pandemic in 2020 and this huge retirement wave,” stated Ray Fung.

“As a matter of policy, the Province was quite deliberate in the sense that we wanted to push the boundaries of how municipal infrastructure was developed. We knew that we were going to have to do this under pretty strict fiscal constraints. And so that is why innovation became so important. We used the slogan The New Business As Usual to convey the message that, for change to really occur, practices that until then had been viewed as the exception must become the norm moving forward. With the new grant programs, we had some funding to support innovation,” stated Dale Wall.

“And isn’t that how turning that supertanker of thinking happens? Just incrementally, then by gosh, we end up going in a whole different direction than we were when we started,” stated Joan Sawicki, Parliamentary Secretary for the Georgia Basin Initiative. Launched in 1994, the GBI was a call to action by the provincial government led by Premier Mike Harcourt. The living legacy of the GBI is embedded in and embodied by the Georgia Basin Inter-Regional Educational Initiative. The IREI is now in Year 13 and provides peer-based education among local governments.