Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien最新文献

While secondary suites were once informal and hidden, they are now seen as a key to addressing Canada's housing supply and affordability challenges. Cities such as Edmonton, where this study was conducted, have reformed their urban planning to allow and encourage secondary suites. In this context, it is important to know whether secondary suites meet adequacy standards. We conducted focus groups with 32 postsecondary students who lived in secondary suites and employed a housing adequacy framework derived from international standards to assess their experiences as tenants. Participants reported that secondary suites generally offered security of tenure, were among the most affordable rentals available on the market, and provided an opportunity to live in high-amenity neighbourhoods, including close to campus. Conversely, they reported shortcomings in the availability of services due to lack of control over heating and ventilation, in habitability due to inadequate soundproofing and natural light, and in accessibility due to barriers such as steep stairs. This study provides detailed insights into the quality of secondary suites from the perspective of those who live in them, and identifies issues that need to be addressed for tenants to enjoy the right to adequate housing.

Bioenergy is a promising renewable energy option for energy insecure communities across the boreal region. Whilst community energy planning tools are advancing, many are driven by external technical resource assessments and fail to capture local community values. Community energy solutions must be community-appropriate. This research combines spatial tools with participatory mapping to assess bioenergy resource potential for the northern Indigenous community of Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan. Results show that sufficient resources are available near the community to support local bioenergy production needs, whist respecting culturally significant and traditional use areas and ensuring that resources can be harvested within proximity of the community and road networks. The assessment approach demonstrates the utility of spatial and participatory tools to address the data challenges related to biomass resource assessment in remote northern contexts and to ensure community-appropriate energy solutions. The research responds to increasing calls in energy geography scholarship for energy transition planning that is spatially relevant, grounded in technical realities, and accountable to community values, expectations, and aspirations.

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.