Recent Publications

View a more complete list of publications, abstracts and some full texts.

Books

David Maggs and John Robinson, Sustainability in an Imaginary World – Art and the Question of Agency, Routledge, 2020

Journal Articles (2018-2024)

Makaremi N, Yildirim S, Morgan GT, Touchie MF, Jakubiec A, Robinson JB, (2024) “Impact of classroom environment on student wellbeing in higher education: Review and future directions”, Building and Environment, 265, 111958 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.111958

Given the emerging concern for student wellbeing in public health discourse, a question arises: What role do campus buildings play in shaping the overall wellbeing of students? Following the PRISMA guideline, this study reviews the current building science literature that explores the relationship between higher education learning environments, specifically classroom spaces, and the wellbeing of students. Our investigation reveals that the existing literature primarily frames student wellbeing in terms of individual comfort and health. While acknowledging the importance of these aspects, we emphasize the desirability of embracing wider social and collective dimensions from an interdisciplinary perspective. We also advocate for a departure from the traditional approach that focuses primarily on mitigating adverse environmental effects to one focused on net positive environmental and human benefits. Encompassing these two perspectives, this paper presents a holistic approach to better understand the wellbeing of both individuals and the communities within educational settings. This comprehensive perspective aims to highlight the diverse and collective dimensions influencing campus wellbeing, contributing to a regenerative pathway toward achieving net-positive design and sustainability in both human and environmental terms.

 

Rothman, D., Raskin, P., Kok, K., Robinson, J., Jäger, J., Hughes, B., Sutton, P. (2023) “Global Discontinuity: Time for a Paradigm Shift in Global Scenario Analysis”, Sustainability, 15, 12950. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151712950

The evolutionary paths of social-ecological systems comprise periods of structural continuity punctuated by moments of convulsive change. Various forms of systemic global shock could materialize in the coming decades, triggered by the climate crisis, social disruption, economic breakdown, financial collapse, nuclear conflict, or pandemics. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic stands as a real-time example of an interruption of historic continuity. More hopefully, deep institutional and cultural shifts could rapidly usher in more resilient forms of global civilization. These plausible possibilities challenge scenario studies to spotlight discontinuous futures, an imperative that has not been adequately met. Several factors—for example, gradualist theories of change, scientific reticence, the lure of quantitative tractability, embeddedness in policymaking processes—have rendered mainstream scenario analysis ill-suited to the task. The emphasis on continuity fails to alert decision makers and the public to the risks and opportunities latent in our singular historical moment. A shift to a paradigm that foregrounds discontinuity is long overdue, calling for efforts to broaden the base of persons involved; devote more attention to balancing narrative storytelling and a broader range of quantitative methods; and apply and develop methods to explicitly consider discontinuities in global scenario development.

 

Robinson, J., Alhakim, A., Ma, G., Alam, M., Braune, M., Brown, M., Côté, N., Crocce Romano Espinosa, D., Brando, F., Garza, A., Gorman, D., Hajer, M., Madden, J., Melnick, R., Metras, J., Newman, J., Patel, R., Raven, R., Sergienko, K., Smith, V., Tariq, H., van der Lem, L., Wong, C., Wiek, A. (2023) “Odd couples: Reconciling academic and operational cultures for whole-institution sustainability governance at universities”, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 24(8), 1950-1970 https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-07-2022-0244

Slater, K. and Robinson, J. (2023). Transformational Climate Action by Cities, Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 74–82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.285

With their predominantly coastal geographies, rapidly growing populations, and emissions-intensive activities, cities are highly vulnerable and major contributors to climate change. Their role as cultural centers, and commerce and innovation hubs, means they are also promising sources of solutions. Taken together, these factors demand a closer examination of the progress and solutions that cities are making to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. However, research on the extent and effectiveness of cities’ implementation efforts is underdeveloped. There is a need to better understand if and how cities are rolling out effective implementation measures, what effects (intended and unintended) such measures are having, and whether their implementation efforts are achieving the transformational changes needed to realize a low carbon, climate-resilient future. This editorial introduces the special issue by exploring these issues and reflecting perspectives from a variety of disciplines both within and outside academia, and in relation to diverse cities in the Global North and South. To better understand the practical dimensions of implementation, and the various obstacles and opportunities faced by public and private sector actors in progressing climate action targets and goals, the editors invited submissions reflective of co-produced research. Though not all took this form, some did and helped to foreground the experiences of those actors who arguably have the most power and responsibility to advance implementation measures, and seed the very institutional arrangements needed for deeper, multisectoral climate action. Collectively, the content of the special issue points to a need for significant investment, policy change, social innovation, and cooperation across societal scales.

 

Slater, K., Ventura, J., Robinson, J., Fernandez, C., Dutfield, S., & King, L. (2022). Assessing climate action progress of the City of Toronto. Buildings and Cities, 3(1), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.248

The Canadian City of Toronto’s progress is evaluated for the implementation of its climate action plan, TransformTO, and its effectiveness in reducing sectoral emissions. Following a brief history of climate action in Toronto, the key climate policies and programs are subjected to a content analysis and assessed using an aggregate evaluation framework composed of qualitative indicators commonly used to track municipal climate action. The results of this assessment reveal that the city has made steady progress in reducing emissions, surpassing its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of 30% reduction below 1990 levels. However, Toronto is not on track to meet its 2030 target of a 65% emissions reduction from 1990 levels. Without transformational action across all sectors, it is unlikely to meet the 2030 and 2040 targets. The results are intended to strengthen implementation and evaluation efforts in Toronto. The discussion will be of interest to decision-makers and practitioners who seek to accelerate implementation of municipal climate action plans.

 

Robinson, J., Ariga, A., Cameron, S., & Wang, R. (2022) Reaching the Rest: Embedding Sustainability in Undergraduate Student Learning, Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, 19:1, 171-187, https://doi.org/10.1080/1943815X.2022.2131829.

There exists a substantial literature on sustainability pedagogy. Much of it addresses individual courses, sustainability programs, or the learning competencies that are encouraged. The implicit focus is on students who have chosen to specialize on sustainability topics by obtaining a degree in programs such as , sustainability management, environmental science or studies. More recently, there has been emerging literature calling for embedding sustainability into entire university curricula as sustainability becomes a more prominent issue for higher education institutions. Four key themes have emerged in this literature that are relevant to the goal of developing sustainability pedagogy relevant to all students: (i) the organizational framework for the content of sustainability pedagogy, (ii) the conceptualisation and teaching of inter-transdisciplinarity, (iii) the relative merits of compulsory or voluntary sustainability programming, and (iv) the role of course inventories. In this paper, we examine the University of Toronto’s introduction of a new model of sustainability learning and evaluate it against the themes and recommendations found in the literature. This model aims to establish university-wide sustainability learning trajectories, called Sustainability Pathways whose novelty is in its offer to reach many more students than other approaches. The key themes emerging from the literature will serve as a basis for program evaluation. It is found that the Pathways program does embody some of these themes but that further development would be desirable. The program and the course inventories at its foundation will go through periodic evaluation to assess progress on program goals and objectives.

 

Morgan, G. T., Coleman, S., Robinson, J., Touchie, M. F., Poland, B., Jakubiec, A., Macdonald, S., Lach, N., & Cao, Y. (2022). Wellbeing as an emergent property of social practice. Buildings and Cities, 3(1), pp. 756–771. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.262.

Wellbeing in buildings is often approached by practitioners and researchers as the aggregate result of individual interactions between building occupants and building features. This sum-of-the-parts approach, however, ignores the ways in which broader social (i.e. sense of ownership and belonging) and symbolic (i.e. what it means to be ‘well’ in a specific culture at a particular place and time) components of wellbeing influence occupant experience of the built environment. A social practice perspective on wellbeing in buildings is proposed that accounts for these elements. Beginning with discussions of how wellbeing has been assessed and the foundations of social practice theory, it is suggested that occupant wellbeing is emergent not just from individual interactions with building features but also from broader social and symbolic elements.

 

Lach, N., McDonald, S., Coleman, S., Touchie, M., Robinson, J., Morgan, G., Poland B., & Jakubiec, A. (2022): Community wellbeing in the built environment: towards a relational building assessment, Cities & Health, DOI: 10.1080/23748834.2022.2097827 https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2022.2097827

Community Wellbeing (CW) in the built environment is acknowledged as being ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, a process that emerges when residents negotiate understandings of community within shared spaces. However, methods of evaluation have not caught up. In practice, evaluation methods and frameworks measure CW as an aggregate of individual wellbeing, and operate as a ‘pick and mix’ of dimensions and indicators. Such an approach fails to capture the resident experience as it emerges from (and is shaped by) the local community context. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, we advance participatory mixed methods to integrate CW theory with current building performance assessment methods in support of the development of a novel, evidence-based tool. The first section covers the shift from an aggregate to relational conceptual framework, employing a social practice theory lens to acknowledge how CW emerges from individual and collective interactions. We then situate CW within current building performance assessment methods by reviewing seven CW frameworks. Finally, we recommend improvements to CW assessment based on our own research, including participatory methods, local community engagement, and Photovoice.

 

Robinson, J. “Sustainability as transmutation: an alchemical interpretation of a transformation to sustainability”, Sustainability Science, (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00987-y

This paper explores what it might mean to think about ontological change in our quest for sustainability transformations. To do so, it attempts to paint a picture of the vanished world of esoteric thinking in Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The paper pays particular attention to the alchemical tradition of the times and describes key ontological concepts that would derive from an alchemical framework of understanding and experience. The paper goes on to discuss briefly the critical role that such approaches played in the development of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by contributing to a “re-orientation of the will” towards an active human role in modifying the world. It is suggested that this alchemically inflected world did indeed come to an end after the sixteenth century, in all its spiritual but also material richness, in precisely the spiritual terms feared by many at the time. The “Modernist” world that emerged in the seventeenth century in Europe, and has become increasingly influential globally, was fundamentally philosophically materialist in orientation, relegating spiritual understanding to subjective experience (along with all the other secondary qualities), and thereby perpetuating a fundamental split between subject and object, self and world, humanity and nature, fact and value, etc. The paper suggests that a re-imagination of an alchemical world might have some relevance to an anthropocenic planet ravaged, both socially and ecologically, by the single-minded materialism, empiricism and utilitarian rationality of the Modernist era. It offers evidence of the existence and attributes of a very different kind of world that perhaps speaks to some of the challenges we face today and shows that a fundamental metamorphosis of the world itself is possible.

 

Slater, K. and Robinson, J. (2020), “Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Co-Production: A Social Practice Approach”, Sustainability, 12, 7511; doi:10.3390/su12187511.

To address the challenge of achieving social learning in support of transformative change to sustainability, this paper develops an analytical framework that applies a social practice theory (SPT) lens to illuminate the constituent elements and dynamics of social learning in the context of transdisciplinary coproduction for sustainability transitions. Adopting an SPT approach affords a means of interpreting concrete practices at the local scale and exploring the potential for scaling them up. This framework is then applied to a real-world case at the urban neighbourhood scale in order to illustrate how social learning unfolded in a grassroots transdisciplinary coproduction process focused on climate action. We find that a social practice perspective illuminates the material and nonmaterial dimensions of the relationship between social learning and transdisciplinary coproduction. In decoupling these properties from individual human agency, the SPT perspective affords a means of tracing their emergence among social actors, generating a deeper understanding of how social learning arises and effects change, and sustainability can be reinforced.

 

Jost, F., Dale, A., Newell, R., Robinson, J. (2020) “Climate action assessment in three small municipalities in British Columbia: advancements vis-à-vis major neighboring cities”, Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, 2, 100010

This paper applied a recently developed Local Government Climate Action Assessment Framework to identify whether small municipalities in British Columbia are on track to meet their climate targets and to better understand the effectiveness of their climate-related actions. The aim of this paper was (1) to further test the assessment framework by evaluating its applicability for smaller municipalities, (2) to evaluate and categorize local progress in three small cities, namely Campbell River, Prince George and Revelstoke, and (3) to contrast these climate actions with actions taken by larger municipalities in BC, using the same assessment framework. This assessment revealed that key external sup- port made available to expand on their Integrated Community Sustainability Plans provided for striking similarities among the three case studies regarding their strategies and plan formulations for which actions were largely transformative or reformative. However, the three small cities were lacking periodic reporting and monitoring of actions and presented shorter timeframes of up to 20-50 years for their planning horizons, all of which negatively impact their prioritization strategies. The main difference between larger and smaller cities was found among actions related to the feedback and evaluation category of the framework, with smaller cities performing more poorly. Greater shift in priorities away from climate change-related actions were evident in smaller local governments, signalling their more vulnerable position regarding changes in leadership in local and provincial administrations. This study highlights the key role that strategic alliances, networks, and external champions as partners play in planning and implementing climate action and in increasing public interest in sustainability. Thus, these should be fostered and promoted to keep building local capacity and effectively accelerate greater change through e.g., strengthening their capacity to implement, monitor and evaluate climate actions.

 

Jost, F., Dale, A., Newell, R., Robinson, J. (2020), “Evaluating development path changes using a novel climate action assessment framework in three municipalities in British Columbia, Canada”, Environmental Science and Policy, 114, 410-421.

To transition to a more sustainable and low-carbon economy, a series of local governments in British Columbia, Canada, are implementing climate action and innovation. This is largely in response to a need for societal changes in current development paths. However, there has been a lack of studies assessing the effectiveness of these actions and whether these municipalities are on track to meet their targets. This paper tests a newly developed assessment framework to evaluate local government actions and to better understand city-wide community development paths in three major cities in British Columbia—Vancouver, Victoria and Surrey. This assessment reveals notable progress in their transitions to sustainable pathways in areas such as agenda setting and strategy, plan formulation and implementation, and these sometimes result in transformative actions. Nonetheless, a gap between these actions and their performance reveals that local governments from this study are failing to properly address the current climate emergency. In particular, the municipalities lack processes for evaluating their progress in changing their current paths. This reduces their capacity to identify best practices to improve the effectiveness of climate actions and also hinders their ability to act on feedback and make adjustments to meet their stated goals and targets.

 

Williams, S. and Robinson, J., (2020) “Measuring sustainability: An evaluation framework for sustainability transition experiments”, Environmental Science and Policy, 103, 58-66.

Sustainability Transition Experiments (STEs), leveraging a transdisciplinary research approach, have recently been proposed as a method to accelerate sustainability transitions. This paper outlines a proposed three-part evaluation framework to assess the process, societal effects, and sustainability transition impacts of STEs. The paper extracts the key insights from multiple literatures, generating a set of indicators to be used in assessing sustainability transition experiments. Particular emphasis is placed on the assessment of longer-term sustainability impacts. We propose a development pathway approach to organize elements of sustainability transition impact into a coherent framework that highlights the inter-relationships between levels of scales in systems transition and foregrounds the role of changes in governance roles and relationships and the role of politics in transitions. The paper offers insights into the challenge of evaluating the sustainability transition impacts of a transdisciplinary research project and provides an important bridge between the evaluation of processes, societal effects, and their link to sustainability transition impacts.

 

Dale, A., Robinson, J., King, L., Burch, S., Newell, R., Shaw A., and Jost, F. (2019) “Meeting the climate change challenge: local government climate action in British Columbia, Canada”, Climate Policy, DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2019.1651244

Local governments have a key role to play in implementing climate innovations as they have jurisdiction over a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting the Climate Change Challenge (MC3) is the first longitudinal study exploring climate innovation in Canadian municipalities. A tri-university research collaborative, it focuses on British Columbia (BC), whose voluntary efforts to set and meet climate change goals were far more ambitious than those offered by the federal government (and almost any other province in North America at the time). These efforts included introducing a carbon tax and the Climate Action Charter voluntary agreement in 2007. Since then, 187 of the 190 local governments in BC have signed the Charter to take action on climate change. Research in the first phase of MC3explored the dynamics of innovative local responses to the coordinated suite of government legislation, complimentary policy instruments, financial incentives and partnerships with quasi-institutional partners. In the second phase, the 11 original case studies were revisited to explore the nature of transformative change in development paths and indicators of change. Methods include sentiment analysis, decomposition analysis of regional/local emissions, and modelling relationships between climate action co-benefits and trade-offs. This paper provides a synthesis of research outcomes and their implications for environmental governance at multiple scales and the potential of policy innovations to accelerate transformation towards carbon neutral economies.

Key policy insights

. Local governments are on the front line of identifying indicators of change in current development paths and policy innovations to effect the necessary changes for transformation to carbon neutral economies.

. Barriers to transformational change include lack of coordination or concerted action across multiple scales of governance, electoral cycles and large swings in leadership, and lack of policy coherence across governance levels.

. Drivers of climate innovation include leadership at multiple levels of governance.

. Understanding the co-benefits (and trade-offs) of climate actions is important for integrated strategies that achieve broader sustainability goals, as well as accelerating more innovations on climate change.

 

Brugmann, R., Côté, N., Postma, N., Shaw, E., Pal, D., and Robinson, J. (2019) “Expanding Student Engagement in Sustainability: Using SDG- and CEL-Focused Inventories to Transform Curriculum at the University of Toronto”, Sustainability, 11(2), 530.

The Expanded Student Engagement Project (ESE) has developed three comprehensive inventories which aim to increase student knowledge of sustainability-related course content and increase student engagement in on- and off-campus, curricular, and non-curricular sustainability projects at the University of Toronto (U of T). The first is a sustainability course inventory (SCI) generated using keyword search based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is the first SCI that has been based on the SDGs. The inventory identified 2022 unique sustainability courses and found that SDG 13 had the greatest representation and SDG 6 had the least. The second inventory is a community-engaged learning (CEL) sustainability inventory which found 154 sustainability-focused CEL courses and identified 86 faculty members who teach sustainability CEL. Finally, an inventory of sustainability co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities revealed that U of T has 67 sustainability-focused student groups and identified 263 sustainability-focused opportunities. These inventories are an important foundation for future initiatives to increase student engagement in sustainability on campus and in the community. The ESE will integrate this data into U of T’s course management system and use the inventories to develop a new sustainability pathways program.

 

Coleman, S., Touchie, M, Robinson, J., and Peters, T. (2018), “Rethinking Performance Gaps: a regenerative sustainability approach to built environment performance assessment”, Sustainability, 10(12), 4829.

Globally, there are significant challenges to meeting built environment performance targets. The gaps found between the predicted performance of new or retrofit buildings and their actual performance impede an understanding of how to achieve these targets. This paper points to the importance of reliable and informative building performance assessments. We argue that if we are to make progress in achieving our climate goals, we need to reframe built environment performance with a shift to net positive goals, while recognising the equal importance of human and environmental outcomes. This paper presents a simple conceptual framework for built environment performance assessment and identifies three performance gaps: (i) Prediction Gap (e.g., modelled and measured energy, water consumption); (ii) Expectations Gap (e.g., occupant expectations in pre- and post-occupancy evaluations); and, (iii) Outcomes Gap (e.g., thermal comfort measurements and survey results). We question which of measured or experienced performance is the ‘true’ performance of the built environment. We further identify a “Prediction Paradox”, indicating that it may not be possible to achieve more accurate predictions of building performance at the early design stage. Instead, we propose that Performance Gaps be seen as creative resources, used to improve the resilience of design strategies through continuous monitoring.

 

Newell, R. and Robinson, J. (2018) “Using decomposition methodology to gain a better understanding of progress in and challenges facing regional and local climate action”, Journal of Cleaner Production 197, 1423-1434.

Decomposition analysis provides a potentially powerful means for analyzing community greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data. However, this form of analysis is typically conducted at larger geographical scales (i.e., national and state/provincial levels), which leaves questions around how to apply this methodology to local and regional contexts. This study explores the application of decomposition methodology to community data in order to elucidate how this form of analysis can be employed to inform local/regional planning and climate policy. The research involved developing decomposition models that focus on two particularly areas important for local climate action – transportation and residential energy. Each model consisted of five factors – population, population distribution, travel (transportation) or energy customer accounts (residential) intensity, vehicle (transportation) or home energy (residential) type, and emissions intensity. Using data from the BC Community Energy Emissions Inventory, the study examined effects of the different factors on emissions changes occurring between 2007 and 2012 in the Metro Vancouver Regional District (British Columbia, Canada). Results from the transportation analysis indicated that population growth and people’s choices in vehicle type had the effect of increasing emissions in the MVRD, whereas travel and emissions intensity factors had mitigating effects. The residential energy analysis indicated that only population effects led to emissions-increases in the MVRD, whereas the other factors had mitigating effects. Community-scale analyses also were conducted to identify municipalities where emissions-increasing effects were experienced more dramatically, for example, travel intensity effects in smaller communities (e.g., White Rock), energy accounts intensity effects in Vancouver, and emissions intensity effects in the District of North Vancouver. The study demonstrated how decomposition analysis can provide regional and local governments with valuable insight on what is contributing to GHG emissions and where progress is being made, which in turn can help these governments focus climate policy and planning efforts to achieve progress toward mitigation.
The paper begins with an introduction on the use of decomposition methodology in energy and GHG emissions studies, and its potential value for analyzing local emissions data. The next sections discuss the analytical approach designed for and employed in this study, as well as describing the data used for this research. The paper then presents the results of the analysis performed on the MVRD. Finally, it concludes with a discussion on the implications of the results of this study for regional and local policy and planning.

 

Coleman S. and Robinson, J. (2018) “Introducing the qualitative performance gap: stories about a sustainable building”, Building Research & Information, 46(5), 485-500.

In the design and operations industries, the performance gap is a common discrepancy found between predicted building energy performance and actual energy performance. The performance gap is considered to have negative impacts for the brand of ‘green’ buildings, designers and operators. A socially based analogue is proposed here: the qualitative performance gap, defined as the perceived gap between what inhabitants expect and their actual experience of the building environment. This concept is explored at a regenerative Living Lab: the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) in Vancouver, Canada. ‘Official’ and ‘lived’ stories about the building were interpreted from sources of building information and interviews. Expectations about and forgiveness of building performance were gained from pre- and post-occupancy evaluations and interviews. The solution to the qualitative performance gap is not to eliminate it, but, in line with the concept of interactive adaptivity, to use the gap to generate new stories and new consequences for human wellbeing. The qualitative performance gap is thus conceived as positively generative, of new stories of place and identity. This work recommends crafting an ‘official story’ of social aspirations, and a communication feedback loop amongst designers, operators and building inhabitants, transparently sharing successes and failures.

 

Book Chapters (2016-2024)

Robinson, J., (2024). Deep Interdisciplinairity and Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-Production, in Darbellay, F. (Ed.). Elgar Encyclopedia of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Deeply interdisciplinary research starts from problems in society (rather than from those in the academic literature); works across multiple disciplines and fields; fosters emergent understanding across the research team; articulates and challenges axiomatic theoretical, conceptual or methodological assumptions; and involves strong partnerships with non-academic participants in the research itself. Transdisciplinary knowledge co-production (TKC) develops reciprocal ways for academic and non-academic partners to work together to address societal challenges such as sustainability and climate change. It encompasses different knowledge domains, including in particular non-academic ones, and different ways of conceiving and enacting the relationship between the development and the use of knowledge. Such approaches challenge a number of well-established research norms and practices. If universities are to engage more actively in addressing societal grand challenges such as sustainability, they need to create significant changes in academic
reward systems, including promotion and tenure criteria, and in models of partnership and engagement.

 

Robinson, J., Dias, D., Ariga, A., Brugmann, R., Côté, N., Henderson, M., Muehlebach, A., Patel, R., Puskar, J., and Vuong, P. (2023) “University Responses to and Obligations for Business Air Travel Emissions”, in Leman-Stefanovic, I. (Ed.). Conversations on Ethical Leadership: Lessons Learned from University Governance. University of Toronto Press.

 

Yamagata, Y., Yoshida, T., Chang, S., Jittrapirom, P., Coleman, S. Robinson, J., Cremades, R. and Neumann, D. (2020) “Case Studies towards Smart Communities”, in Yamagata, Y. and Young, P., eds. Urban Systems Design, Elsevier.

First, this chapter provides two case studies on smart buildings and mobility. We introduce a smart building project applied to a campus located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The case study shows the economic, environmental, and social contributions of smart buildings based on current levels of technological advancements. Then, we introduce two smart mobility projects in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Vienna, Austria. Finally, we show examples of data-intensive information systems for smart city research and design. The case studies show the current progress in implementing smart mobility projects in practice.

 

Dale, A., Burch, S. Robinson, J. and Strashok, C., “Multilevel Governance of Sustainability Transitions in Canada: Policy Alignment, Innovation, and Evaluation”, in Hughes, S., Chu, E.K. and Mason, S.G., eds. (2018) Climate Change in Cities. New York: Springer.

Abstract: Local communities are on the front line of climate action, mitigation, and adaptation implementation. This chapter explores the research outcomes of a tri-university five-year research collaboration studying local climate innovators in the province of British Columbia. At the time the research began, there was a unique opportunity to study multilevel governance between the province and local governments albeit in a national vacuum. Lessons learned from the first phase and preliminary analysis from the second phase are then applied to the province of Ontario poised to take province-wide action. Ontario’s case is different in that there is now alignment between the federal and provincial levels, but less engagement to date with local governments. Our research shows that the active engagement of local communities is essential for accelerating climate innovation and multilevel  governance.

 

Robinson, J., and Maggs, D. (2017) “At the Crossroads: Sustainability and the Twilight of the Modern World”, in Caradonna, J. L. (ed.). (2017) Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability. Routledge.

As the “Anthropocene” solidifies into a common diagnosis of our age, the underlying challenges of environmental sustainability arrive at a crossroads: Can they be addressed from within the dominant paradigm of modernist rationality or do they demand a departure from the paradigm altogether? In other words, does the Anthropocene indicate a difference of degree (i.e. more and better quantification of problems at a global scale, and informing/convincing of publics), or a difference of kind (reimagining ourselves, our worlds, and the nature of the problem itself)? This chapter explores the degree to which conventional approaches to sustainability leave the larger assumptions of modernist rationality (positivist standards of truth; dualist instincts separating fact from value, object from subject, nature from culture; or linear, cause-effect, command-and-control approaches rooted in a belief in the describability of systems and the predictability of interventions) relatively unchallenged, by exploring the development of the modernist worldview itself, viz. the relationship between humans and their environment in the Western cultural history.

 

Cole, R., Robinson, J., and Westerhoff, L. (2016) “Regenerative Sustainability: Rethinking Neighborhood Sustainability”,  in Steven Moore, ed. Pragmatic Sustainability: Theoretical and Practical Tools. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Abstract: In this chapter, we offer some basic principles for the application of regenerative sustainability to the built environment, and propose that urban neighborhoods represent a particularly potent context in which to imagine, understand, catalyze, and assess regenerative sustainability. Neighborhoods represent an effective “niche” that contains much of the specificity and rigor of building-scale sustainable design characteristics, but that introduces a greater degree of the human and ecosystem complexity that exists at the city scale. Explorations and evaluations of regenerative sustainability at the neighborhood scale can therefore serve to highlight the cross-scale outcomes of more specific or localized interventions such as buildings, infrastructure, landscapes, policies, or community initiatives, as well as the relationships between them. As we will show, regenerative sustainability principles moreover hold considerable promise for strategic direction—in terms of both process and performance—to agencies and authorities engaged in promoting sustainability goals and/or participatory planning processes to explore desired neighborhood futures.

 

Holden, M., Robinson, J., and Sheppard, S. (2016) “From Resilience to transformation via a regenerative sustainability development path”, in Yoshiki Yamagata, ed., Urban Resilience – A Transformative Approach, Springer.

Abstract: In this concluding chapter, we revisit the meaning of urban resilience from a political and planning studies perspective. From this perspective, the pursuit of even multidimensional urban resilience leaves a considerable amount to be desired and has given rise to a critical backlash from some theorists and urban activists. In pursuing this line of critique, we offer a response to this backlash that has been articulated against resilience by adding two new concepts to urban resilience planning and action, essential for socially-valuable outcomes of our efforts: development path thinking and the pursuit of regenerative sustainability.