Managing Ontario's urban landscape

In Canada, increasing costs of maintenance, a shifting perception of what makes a city beautiful, a recognition of the needs and the importance of urban wildlife, and changing recreational demands are all contributing to a pressure for change in current practice. This study examines the extent to which the ecological approach has influenced the design and management of urban green space in Canada, focusing on the city of Toronto and its surrounding region as an example.     

Study of oil-water partitioning of a chemical dispersant using an acute bioassay with marine crustaceans

The toxicity of seawater dispersions of a chemical dispersant to two marine crustaceans was investigated in the presence and absence of various quantities of a non-toxic mineral oil. From the results and a physical-chemical partitioning analysis, a limiting value of the oil-water partition coefficient of the toxic compounds is deduced suggesting that essentially all of the toxic compounds in the dispersant will partition into solution in water following dispersant application to an oil spill. This conclusion simplifies interpretation and prediction of the toxic effects of a dispersed oil spill.The combined bioassay-partitioning procedure may have applications to the study of the toxicity of other complex mixtures such as industrial effluents.     

Food production in the city: (re)negotiating land,food and property

This paper addresses issues of access to land for food production in Toronto by offering fresh perspectives on urban agriculture in the neo-liberal city of the global north. It examines attempts to scale up urban agriculture that emphasise changing the relationships between land access, property and new collaborative relationships among different stakeholders. These initiatives involve renegotiating access to land for growing food between private property owners and landless growers, concomitant shifts in control over valued resources and commercialisation. These shifts are often based on relations of trust within a sharing economy rather than public battles over political decisions to develop urban agriculture lands. Growing food on private lands in the city is political in challenging taken-for-granted ideas and practices of property and urban agriculture. New approaches offer options for training and income, as well as expanding the land base for urban agriculture. Small-scale farming projects are affirmative political manoeuvres. They challenge urban residents to consider land for food production across the categories of public and private property. We document three approaches that challenge current property relations: temporary use of a development site through “soft” squatting; redesignating suburban backyards for farmer training and community-based and private food production; and garden sharing of private home backyards for urban food production and commercial growing. Such initiatives articulate alternative visions of sustainability and food security that rely on principles of collaboration and a sharing economy that challenge prevailing notions of property ownership and food security.     

Urban environmental justice through the camera: understanding the politics of space and the right to the city

Using the lens of Lefebvre's spatial trialectics, we assess the utility of photo-elicited interviewing for environmental justice, recognising that a view to social spatial analysis is essential to engaging with the historical processes of exclusion and discrimination that are crucial to explaining why unequal distributions of environmental injustice are systemic and not random. Drawing on insights from our own photo-elicited interviewing-based work in the neighbourhood called Parkdale in Toronto, we make two main recommendations for future environmental justice work using photo-elicited interviewing. First, researchers must be open to a broader epistemology, one that draws on a more spatially nuanced and temporally evolving knowledge of the full range of environmental influences on communities. Second, in order to arrive at a more robust critical analysis of social space, researchers should complement photo-elicited interviewing with historical research about the relevant communities and include participants from other comparative communities.     

Sustainable Development in Jordan

Sustainable development is a process which aims at establishing a harmonious relationship between man, on the one hand, and environmental and natural resources, on the other, capable of coping with ever-increasing changes and challenges over time. This paper investigates, in a conceptual and qualitative manner, the practices and procedures of sustainable development in Jordan and outlines constraints and difficulties facing Jordan in pursuing such development. The paper concludes with a presentation of some prerequisites for the process in the light of the national objectives and suggests recommendations for future action.     

Realising local food policies: a comparison between Toronto and the Brussels-Capital Region’s stories through the lenses of reflexivity and co-learning

ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the development of Toronto and Brussels’ local food policies by analysing reflexivity and co-learning as important dimensions within a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA); it approaches the interaction between four forms of governance (bottom-up, networked, state, market-led) and the tensions between them as hybrid dynamics. Within this approach, reflexivity refers to the positionality of agents, i.e. to the ways local food actors embody as well as reflect on and reconsider their principles and practices through time. Closely related to reflexivity, co-learning involves agential interactions to co-construct enabling food policy delivery systems. The HGA is mobilised to understand the ways in which reflexive capacities, as well as co-learning, take place in the two cases and how they lay the basis of particular modes of (de)institutionalisation. Learning from the two cases’ trajectories, this paper highlights: (a) the role of key governance tensions as triggers as well as breeding grounds for reflexivity and co-learning outcomes; (b) the challenges of food movement actors to surmount or valorise key tensions in order to build accountable modes of food policy delivery through time; (c) the struggles to build legitimacy and accountability in local food movements through the development of bottom-linked organisations and governance modes.     

Assessment of emissions data for the Toronto region using aircraft-based measurements and an air quality model

An aircraft-based measurement campaign was conducted during the summer of 1996 in the vicinity of Toronto, Canada. The objective of the campaign was to assess the errors in a particular emission inventory used by three-dimensional air quality models. Measurements of NO₂ and hydrocarbons were made both upwind and downwind of Toronto, on days with strong synoptic-scale flow from a west to northerly direction. The chemical composition of the background airmass on these days was typical of unpolluted continental air. Measurements have been compared with the output from an on-line air quality model (MC2-AQ) run at 5 km resolution and suggest that emissions of NO_x from Toronto are well described in the emission database, though evidence that NO_x emissions are underestimated for suburban regions surrounding Toronto was found. In general, no significant underestimation of hydrocarbon emissions was found, though emissions of the model propane species, which includes acetylene and benzene, was underestimated by at least a factor of two.