Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien最新文献

Despite promises of blending financial returns and social good to produce positive impact, what distinguishes “social” finance from the more traditional financial sector is ambiguous and often contested. Indeed, while financial returns are easily quantified and defined, the idea of a social return contains a plurality of understandings of how the social good is valued, who has power over its valuation, and its relative worth in comparison to financial returns. This article addresses this tension through examining how the concept of the social good has been understood and contested in the creation of Canada's Social Finance Fund. Using the creation of the fund in 2018 as a departure point, I outline the results of 37 interviews with social finance participants including representatives from social purpose organizations, intermediaries, and investors. Based on these interviews, I argue that struggles over how to value the social good hinge on the geographic imaginaries of those involved in the sector, power relations that privilege investors, and the models of organization which are embedded in existing investment systems. However, despite the relative power of investors, the need for social sector buy-in allows non-profits and service providers to influence how ideas of the social good manifest in valuation processes.

This paper showcases how climate disaster presents unique challenges to many northern Indigenous communities in Canada. Disasters further exacerbate historical traumas related to colonialism, including forced displacement, land loss, and cultural disconnection. Indigenous cultural barriers and the imposition of external interventions deter effective communication and disrespect Indigenous sovereignty and traditional Indigenous land-based adaptation. Limited resource allocation prolongs socio-economic disparities, increasing vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Western disaster management often overlooks Indigenous worldviews and traditional environmental practices, leading to culturally insensitive and ineffective disaster responses. This paper advances an Indigenous Land-based Theoretical Framework that centres Indigenous Knowledges, cosmologies, and environmental stewardship in disaster adaptation. This framework offers holistic, culturally relevant disaster education by advocating for communities to draw on their traditional land-based practices of adaptability and resilience. Through collaborative research with Indigenous and non-Indigenous land-based scholars, this paper highlights the importance of Indigenous-led, land-based disaster management strategies. These strategies not only address immediate disaster challenges, but also support long-term sustainability, environmental preservation, and cultural continuity, offering critical insights for effective and culturally sensitive disaster management practices in the context of climate change.

Research on mega-projects gives minimal consideration to municipal stakeholders and the municipal level as a sphere of action, or to decision making about and adaptation to these projects. It is also only recently that attention has been paid to the duration of projects and the roles of a variety of stakeholders in their progression. Using writings on development paths and agency, we show that a project can be reinitiated after its failure. In addition to being just a phase of development during the life of the project, failure can be transformed into a window of opportunity to rethink the project and its governance and allow other stakeholders to take part in its transformation. Based on the case study of Mirabel airport, its failure and subsequent redevelopment, we studied the relationship between the development strategies implemented by the airport managers and those of the municipal stakeholders. We show that while the initial airport project profoundly disrupted the municipal territory of Mirabel, its transformation into an aeronautical industrial site is mostly perceived and supported positively by municipal stakeholders, having enabled a new dual trajectory of territorial and industrial development.

Geographers generally use the notion of territorialization to evoke or reflect on the process by which human beings relate to the world and take their place in it on the basis of the territory they create or seek out. They use the related notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to evoke or reflect on the problems of territorial neglect or carelessness, and to criticize its causes and consequences. However, when we refer to one or other of these three processes, little or nothing is said about their articulation as a triptych indissociable from our territorial doing, and therefore about territorialization as a global process inherent to our territorial condition, and then about the territorialities that these three specific processes express, mobilize, and nourish. In order to remedy this situation to some extent, this article proposes a conceptualization of their particularities and correlations, and more specifically of their consequences. By thus seeking to embrace and systematize the processual field within which human beings think, say, and do territory, we are attempting to better understand and manage the relationships between human beings and territory.

Residential preferences for single-family homes are a key driver of urban sprawl. Using a stated-preference survey among university students in Montreal, we explored how participants’ residential preferences are related to their perceptions of urban sprawl and intergenerational justice. A surprisingly large proportion of participants knew very little about urban sprawl. Preference for single-family homes was not particularly pronounced. Preferences for suburban and urban housing options were similarly strong. Evidence was insufficient to conclude that perceptions of urban sprawl were associated with housing choices, but results indicated promising avenues for further research. Residential preferences were more strongly related to perceptions of future urban sprawl than current urban sprawl. Participants were equally concerned about their own futures and those of future generations, and both concerns were associated with residential preferences. Individuals are open to more sustainable housing options. It will be crucial to increase awareness among landowners, developers, urban planners, and renters about the intergenerational significance of housing choices.