Jerry Levy

Mark Roseland, Ph.D., MCIP, is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development, formerly the Community Economic Development Centre, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and is a professor in SFU's Department of Geography. A former Editor of RAIN magazine, he was the North American Editor of the international journal Local Environment, published in association with ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, from its inception in 1995 until 2002. He lectures internationally, advises communities and governments on sustainable development policy and planning, and participates actively in sustainable community development projects in Vancouver and elsewhere.

Aurora: Thanks for doing this Mark. I would like to discuss your book Toward Sustainable Communities, or more specifically what is new in the third edition of your book published in 2005. But first, can you tell me a bit about how you got into this area of environment and society?

Mark Roseland: Well, largely through a chance meeting, when I was a young man, with Murray Bookchin, the social ecologist, who just died last summer. At that time, I was in university in Connecticut in a new program called science and society. I was the first student in it. Nobody knew what it was about. I was interested in both ecology and society, that is, in nature and social justice. I wanted to link the two, but nobody seemed to be able to put them together.

In those days, we still had some closet Marxists in universities, and there was this guy in the English Department, who got tenure for editing the American Heritage Dictionary, really mainstream, straight stuff. As soon as he got tenure, he just started teaching these wild courses that didn’t have much to do with English per se.

Mark Roseland: One that I took was called Towards a Socialist America. It was a great critique of capitalism, with wonderful books, and a great political economy perspective. On the syllabus for that course, at the very end, was Murray Bookchin’s Post- Scarcity Anarchism, a collection of his writings from the 1960s, but we didn’t get to it. So I was standing in line at the bookstore to get my money back, and it happened to be a long line, and I started to read Toward a Liberatory Technology and Ecology and Revolutionary Thought and by the time I got to the cashier, I said “You can’t have this book!” I had just had one of those ‘AHA!’ moments.

And then I organized a conference called “ECOS: Strategies for Social Ecology” and I invited Murray Bookchin, sight unseen, as the keynote speaker. We got into a huge argument, which I won’t tell you all about, and he basically adopted me at that moment. He said that nobody had ever talked to him like that, except for his ex-wife. I started hanging out at his Institute for Social Ecology, which was at Goddard College in Vermont in those days. He invited me as his guest, and I basically ended up editing big sections of what would become The Ecology of Freedom… (See the Bookchin Bibliography)

So I got my orientation and my “AHA!” introduction to this area through my experience with Bookchin and social ecology, and while I was at his institute they would have people visit like John Todd from the New Alchemy Institute and David Morris from The Institute for Self-Reliance, and this whole range of interesting people in what we called then ‘the appropriate technology movement.’

Aurora: Okay, that’s when I was doing my hippie thing in India…Oh well, Mark we arrived here and are sitting at the same table together…

Mark Roseland: Anyway, from there I graduated with this bachelor’s degree in Science and Society, and managed to tack on a Masters in what I called Social Ecology and then came out to Portland, Oregon where I was hired to be an editor of RAIN magazine, a journal of appropriate technology.

Mark Roseland: It was sort of a sister publication to the Whole Earth Catalogue and CoEvolution Quarterly. It emphasized access to information, so we didn’t just do bibliographies, we did addresses and phone numbers in those days … and the mandate was to provide information that would help people to create a society that was “durable, just and ecologically sound.” So my roots go way, way back in this.

Aurora: As I think about this book too, the structure of the book mixes some of those roots and principles of theory and practical connections.

Mark Roseland: Particularly the part about access. When this book was first published in 1992 nobody had done a scholarly book that had addresses and phone numbers. There were lots of books that had this kind of information but with typical academic bibliographies and no one who wasn’t an academic could, especially in those pre-Internet days, access them very easily, especially if you were not able to get to an academic library with academic journals. So, one of the things that was innovative about this book, aside from the content, was that it had contact addresses and phone numbers and later, email addresses and web sites. Now that’s more common, but pre-Internet it was not a common thing at all.

Aurora: From your work at RAIN in the late 1970s to this book, what was happening in your thinking and writing?

Mark Roseland: After working for RAIN I went with friends and lived in the woods in southern Oregon for several years, to practice what I was preaching. So I lived on forty acres of forest land, first in a tent, later in a school bus, and we cut forty trees from the forty acres and turned them into 18,000 board feet of lumber and we built that into a house from scratch. I did that for years and years and years and got into natural selection forest management and organic gardening and the whole thing and after many years it was time to go back to school. I came to UBC to do a PhD in 1987, working with Bill Rees.

While I came to UBC with the intention of doing the sort of thing we are doing now, social economy and sustainable rural development, I actually had this notion that I would do a PhD that would be focused on taking the Basque Mondragon…

Mark Roseland: Of industrial cooperatives, and somehow applying that to the forest sector in the Pacific Northwest. But, I was starting my doctoral work in 1987, and the Brundtland Commission came out with Our Common Future. And the ozone hole was becoming a big deal in 1988, so in 1990 Bill was appointed to a task force for the City of Vancouver , a Task Force on the Environment (we later changed the name to Task Force on Atmospheric Change) and Bill suggested that I be hired as lead researcher on that task force; and from that, I got into the whole exploration of urban responses and community level responses to global climate change and did a document which was very significant for the City of Vancouver called Clouds of Change which was very successful. It was the first one after the Toronto report that led to their initial atmospheric initiatives. And Clouds of Change got lots of press, and I got it through the Task Force and through the Vancouver Council by buttressing all the recommendations with examples such as, “ Stockholm’s doing this, and Seattle’s doing that, and Toronto’s doing this…”

As you know, in municipal government there’s a real funny thing about leadership. Everybody wants to be out in front, only not really, because it’s too risky. So, they want to know that it’s been done, and there is this kind of fine line between “keeping up with the Jones” and also being on the cutting edge. So that’s what I did with Clouds of Change and it was so successful, outside of Vancouver as well as inside, that I used the same method with this book.

The first edition was published in 1992 by the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, but they were not really a publisher in the normal sense. The more successful the book was, the more money they lost, because they were not selling it so they we starting to hide it…in those days they didn’t charge for their books. And they were getting requests from all over the world. Every time I would speak somewhere I’d say “This is how you get the book” and they were getting requests from Australia and they were thinking, “Oh my god, this book is costing us money!” So I got the license back and published a new edition with New Society Publishers in 1998, and then this edition in 2005.

Aurora: Well it’s a great book. And I bought a few copies and gave it to some town councilors I know. The one’s I knew I wasn’t wasting my money on. Can I walk you through the book a bit? The title changed a bit and as I read the front parts you seem to have reworked it over the years. Let’s talk about how it’s evolved because our readers and students will be interested in that too, and you never know on the Internet who will end up reading this interview.

Mark Roseland: The original title, the main part of the title is the same “Toward Sustainable Communities” but the subtitle in the earlier editions say “A Resource for Municipal and Local Governments.” When I changed the subtitle to “Resources for Citizens and Their Governments,” I wanted to emphasize what sustainability is really about. We’re looking at issues that are dominant today, for example global climate change, and the responses to those that make sense ultimately are local responses. They may have to come from the federal and international levels, but the actual changes that we're talking about are local. It’s unlike other issues such as nuclear power or terrorism, where the state would be engaging them. This is really about how we live, it's about lifestyle, it's about communities, and it has to involve millions of people in a whole range of decisions.

And therefore, citizen engagement is really important, as is understanding that local communities are where these changes happen. Especially around the things that really effect the ecosystem – like driving, and how we have our patterns of housing development, and things that municipal councils have to make decisions about that are really, really critical.

Mark Roseland: Community capital, right. That's in the new edition, that's in the 2005 edition, it doesn't appear before.

Mark Roseland: That’s resonated very well. I developed that between 1998 and 2005, partly because of work we were doing with aboriginal people, and work we were doing in Mexico and the Ukraine. Everywhere that I go, people “get” this. It's a way of articulating what otherwise seems to be a disparate, disconnected set of values and concerns and putting them into a coherent framework. The community capital framework basically has six kinds of capital: natural capital, physical capital, economic capital, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital. And the argument is that you have to strengthen each of those forms of capital in order to have sustainable community development. In a way it's a more nuanced version of the three-legged stool of economic, social and environmental development. But it’s giving us more... the problem with the "three-legged stool" is, especially when you get to the social, nobody knows what that is. We know that "ecological" is about ecological integrity, we know that "economic" is about prosperity or something like that, but when it comes to the “social,” it's just... not very well articulated. So community capital just breaks this all down in away that’s much easier, I think, for people to understand.

And, very importantly, and this really in a way was influenced by my social ecology roots, what ties all that together is community mobilization – the need to mobilize citizens and their governments to strengthen these six forms of capital, creating community capital, in order to move toward sustainable community development.

Aurora: You know, this morning I re-read that part, and I was going to ask you a question about “social caring capacity” and “community civic-ness.”

Mark Roseland: Social caring capacity was a nice term that came out of a UBC task force on healthy and sustainable communities. They produced an interesting anthology called Fatal Consumption.

Aurora: Well, I want you to be a teacher for a second, and maybe you could help us with the concept of sustainability. Can we go back a bit to this older distinction, useful at the time, between "weak" and "strong" sustainability that students may be familiar with… How does this concept of “community capital” get us a little further?

Mark Roseland: It's funny. Now there's finally starting to be a whole lot of interest in discussion around sustainability, and what does it mean. ... There's a public relations firm based in Vancouver called "James Hoggan and Associates" and they just did a huge survey with two other big opinion research companies, I forget the exact names of the companies; but they surveyed people across the country, and they basically asked people, "What do you understand sustainability to mean?" and most people just didn't know the term at all. When you get past that particular word, "sustainability," and you ask people about the things that sustainability is about, I mean, are you in favor of ecological communities, and waste reduction, and recycling and all of this, everybody is totally on board. Again, it's a matter of articulation and doing it in a way that firstly is not fearful, because we’re still getting, even now we're still getting this notion that if we're going to be serious about Kyoto, for example, then its going to mean that we're all going to be freezing in the dark, which is nonsense. But then also saying, how do you actually do it, how do you operationalize it, how do you take these concepts and actually make them real so that people can do them? And I think part of it, I mean a big part of it, is demonstrating what is possible, which is why the emphasis of the book is not just ideas, but examples, a zillion examples.

Mark Roseland: Yes, the middle section is "building blocks." It looks at various sectors, if you will, of sustainable communities, such as transportation and land use and economic development and waste, and water and sewage. And each chapter attempts to link that topic to the broader concept of sustainable development and sustainable communities. But then we show a series of things that you can actually do, with examples of who's done it and how it’s worked, with access information to find out where we got that...

Aurora: It's very effective, it's always been effective. Funny enough, we were looking at conservation pricing strategies for water conservation in Athabasca, so I pulled this book out and I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm being too narrow." I've got to think about having a public meeting about it, first of all, which I'd forgotten about, in my zeal to get going. So I was reading the book again for the last couple of days, and I was thinking, "Ah yeah, you forgot all the important stuff." Like the last part of the book, it is all about building public participation and support for the ideas…engaging the public.

Mark Roseland: It's easy to forget. You get involved in a particular topic, like transportation, and there’s' so much detail there that you can forget about how to actually make it work.

Aurora: One of the things that I noticed in the book is that the tools are great, and the examples are great, but you are talking about “economic” tools a lot more. You mentioned it in the preface, and it comes up throughout that there are a lot of new “economic” tools that focus on sustainability. Some critics will say "You know, they will quote Audrey Lorde,” who I like by the way, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" and I'm thinking, "Well, Mark Roseland; are you trying to do that?"

Mark Roseland: The shift here, the way I would describe it is that if you look back, from 1992 to 2005, the only place where sustainability is done well, and maybe with success and progress I think, is at the local level. You can look around the globe, there have been great initiatives, but in terms of national and international stuff... really, Rio was a high point in 1992. And there was a sense then, for example, that Al Gore could become president and, you know, we just don't have people like that in the White House or in Ottawa now. So what this is reflecting, I think, is recognition that we have very conservative national governments that are not into government intervention or leadership, really. What they're into is releasing the market to go do its thing. So, without simply turning things over to market forces, the shift here is asking can we use market mechanisms to accomplish our goals, rather than rely on the state because the state's been weakened and clearly the state is not into solving these problems.

I think we're discovering a couple things. One is that there are a lot of things that we can do using the market that maybe we didn't even try to do before, because we've had this notion for so many decades that the state would take over and do the right thing if we just got the right people in power. And the other thing, if we're really going to make an argument about the role of the state, or that the state needs to be strengthened or re-invigorated in some way, then we will be able to make that argument more effectively if we show that we've actually tried using market mechanisms to the full extent, and yes they work in situations a-b-c, but when it comes to doing d-e-f, no, they really don't work and we need to go back to the state or some other...

Mark Roseland: And I don't think that progressive people have put enough emphasis on using market mechanisms, because we tended to shy away from them, and not think that that was our way of doing things. So, I think for people who have values about sustainability, not just in terms of the environment but in terms of affordable housing and concern about social equity and such, to try and really say "Okay, we are going to take the market mechanisms approach as far as possible...." I think we will learn some new things doing that, and find out there are some things that do work better that way. I think the bottom line is, if you can use the market, then use the market, but if the market doesn't work then you're in a better position to say, "Okay we need to find a non-market way to do this."

Aurora: And it's just not a "naked market" at work in your book. You're embedding it in some progressive policy making, some organized community-level organizations, and new ways of organizing ownership, things that we've been talking about in terms of social enterprise.... I found it very interesting to sort of re-think these ideas. Sometimes you pick up a book like an old friend. You read it again and you find different things because you're in a different place in the struggle.

Mark Roseland: I actually find that with this book as well. I pick it up, and think "Oh, right! I forgot about that!"

Mark Roseland: These are three graduate students who helped me revise it. It’s interesting. I mean, I wrote the first edition in 1992 completely on my own, partly because I was a PhD student then and had the time, but also because the field was small enough and I could see the entire thing myself, I was creating it. By the time I wrote the second edition in 1998 it had just mushroomed, it was all over the place and I really needed some help, so I worked with a couple of graduate students then, and certainly for this third edition in 2005. It was just much bigger. Again, the Internet didn't really exist in 1992, and just between 1992 and 1998 for the second edition suddenly everybody had a website in that period of six years, which is just amazing the change in the world.

Aurora: I haven't actually looked at the website, but I will when I go home.

Mark Roseland: The problem with doing a “resource book” is... That very concept makes less sense now in 2007, than it did in 1992. Resources are constantly changing; a resource book today is almost an oxymoron. You have to have some way to update it more frequently so we're connecting that to our centre's website (www.sfu.ca/cscd).

Aurora: I've been doing some collective work, with students and other colleagues who are working at U of A and the smaller universities in Edmonton. It's been quite productive for us, because the field is so huge and so alive. Exploring how environmental sociology or the critical social sciences are looking at sustainability issues. The group writing is a little challenging; pulling it all together, but we have a lot of intriguing talks together. It's really pushed my thinking.

Mark Roseland: Well, when you're looking at the local level, a lot of the stuff that's very esoteric and abstract at higher levels suddenly becomes much more tangible, and you get a grip on it. That's one of the main arguments in the book. It's those local initiatives that are giving us the models for what works, and what can be replicated elsewhere and scaled up.

Aurora: That’s true. Look at my copy. I do all the things you're not supposed to do, I mark pages with pencil and pen... saying "Okay, I'm going to try that." "I'll bring that example to council," and for me the book works great. Before we run out of time, I would like to ask you about scale and translating some of these practices from a larger urban scale to, let’s say, a smaller community, such as the Town of Athabasca where I live of about three thousand people. Sometimes sustainability initiatives don't work at that scale. But given your social ecology and on the land experiences that I didn't know about, you must be thinking more about this now.

Mark Roseland: I am. I mean, I deliberately called this book "Sustainable Communities" and didn’t use terms like "urban sustainability" or "sustainable cities," although more of the examples are urban than not. That's why in my current work with you in the social economy project; I've been interested in sustainable rural development. I've been wanting for a long time to do a sort of a companion volume that focused really on small towns and counties and municipal districts. The structure of the book might be very similar, but instead of focusing on urban transportation, for example, you might be focusing more on community resource management.

Aurora: Lets talk about where your other work is going now, where your thinking's going.

Mark Roseland: The research I'm doing right now… I've got a project called "Market Mechanisms for Sustainable Community Development." I'm doing a lot of stuff on that because I do think that's something we have an obligation to explore fully. Some related topics – a project funded by CMHC on “Site Control for Sustainable Community Development,” which again gets very tangible at the level of the municipality. We explore land assembly, land acquisition, and land control, and that was inspired for me by the town of Nelson in British Columbia, which was trying to fight off a Wal-Mart. They did all of the usual things... people protesting, writing letters and so on because they had an official plan that was talking about community amenities, parkland, and seniors housing, and not big box retail. Finally, eighteen people put a thousand dollars each into an envelope, and they put in a bid to BC Buildings Corporation, which owned the land, and they won.

Aurora: Really? Is that downtown at the lakefront in Nelson? Is that where it was?

Mark Roseland: Yes. And so here they are, which I think is an amazing story, but for me the issue is that they shouldn’t have had to do this completely by themselves. There was nobody they could call. In my view, there was an actor missing. They should have been able to call somebody and say, "Hey, there's this incredible thing happening, we need technical assistance, we need some capital, we need some design work, we need some community organizing.” Because now, they're suddenly developers themselves. They can't afford to hold the land, right? They’ve got to do something with it. They can create this alternative plan, if they can stay financially afloat long enough to do it, but it seems to me that every town has a couple of sites that are strategically significant like that, so identifying them in a systematic way and figuring out how to control them is really important.

Another project we're working on right now, which is funded by Infrastructure Canada, is called "Strategic Sustainability and Community Infrastructure." And again, it's focused on local implementation. Because, in the broad scheme of things, what I've discovered over the last several years, while there's a lot of great work going on in sustainable community planning, and we actually now have municipalities that have good plans, where we drop off is when it comes to implementation. A lot of the implementation can't be done by the public sector, it has to be done in some market way.

Mark Roseland: There's been a lot of partnership stuff going on, which I think is still quite murky. But I think we need very entrepreneurial community economic development, social enterprise type actors, who can say, "You know what, we’re going to go in there and we're going to do this aggressively just like a private firm would, but we're doing it from a public perspective, a common good perspective.”

I think we need some new actors, maybe new kinds of social enterprises. We have, for example, community land trusts, which I think are really good models for this. Or housing coops, but they have not been aggressive enough. They're basically preoccupied with just running what they have. We need some kind of an entity that can control lots of land, in the way the Nature Conservancy has been able to do that for non-urban land. We really need to get something that is going to influence the pattern of municipal and urban land. The Nelson example is a good case. If that had become a Wal-Mart or any kind of a big box, that would have basically tossed a decade’s worth of sustainable community planning out the window. We know that key parcels of land really do make a difference.

The example I used in the book is of the city of San José, California where a decision about whether to use a sprawl versus a compact development pattern would have resulted in an additional 200,000 miles of automobile commuting every day in that community, because of a land-use pattern that was in the control of local government. If you think that that's one community, and you think of the global CO₂ emissions that result from 200,000 miles of automobile commuting every day, if you think about all the other communities around the world that are doing that, well there's your "thinking globally, acting locally." It has real tangible meaning.

(Editor’s note: RAIN Magazine http://www.rainmagazine.com/. Try clicking on the link called RAIN Magazine website circa 1998 and review the back issues for the 1970s listings. The topics Mark Roseland: worked on in those years ring true today, more than ever.)

Publications by Mark Roseland

Eco-City Dimensions: Healthy Communities, Healthy Planet (1997), New Society Publishers

Publications by Mark Roseland

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