Remaking Nature Through Public Participation in Resilient Calgary
Date
2022-01
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Abstract
Cities around the world are embracing agendas to build urban resilience, in part by harnessing “nature” and engaging citizens. Critical geographers have argued that top-down resilience agendas deploy frameworks that homogenize understandings of “urban natures”, legitimate technocratic approaches to urbanism, and disempower citizens. These scholars call for in-depth case studies that situate “urban natures” to bring out crucial politics of how knowledges of these phenomena are used in contexts of contested urbanization. This thesis is an intensive qualitative case study of public participation in urban resilience governance in The City of Calgary, following the 2013 Alberta floods. Through a scholar-activist approach, I employ participant observation and semi-structured interview methods to bring out politics in the redevelopment of a multi-functional infrastructure, the Sunnyside Flood Barrier. Drawing from theory on the “social production of nature” – where discourse and materiality are entangled and iteratively reproduced – I argue that processes of public participation in urban resilience governance operate as power-laden “technologies” in the social production of nature, and can depoliticize contested urban transformations. An analysis of two such technologies – community engagement and a triple bottom line analysis – illuminates how power operates through participatory knowledge production activities to remake actors’ conceptualizations of “nature” in ways that influence decision making and urbanization. The study also expands on participant “counter-conduct”, documenting how this subtle form of resistance can build citizen power in the process. I conclude that public participation offers powerful tools in the social production of nature however, additional research and practice are needed to explore how “nature” might be remade in radical alternative ways that shift our collective praxis towards more sustainable, and socially and environmentally just futures.
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Keywords
Nature, Public participation, Urban resilience, Urban political ecology, Knowledge politics, Scholar-activism, Calgary
Citation
Welker, P. (2022). Remaking nature through public participation in resilient Calgary (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.