LEARNING OUT LOUD
This is a short profile of our team member Maggie Low, and what inspires her work from a planning perspective.
This recorded dialogue describes key elements of the Transforming Cities from Within learning journey, a year-long community of practice with 12 Canadian city-based teams working on complex challenges at the intersections of climate, equity, and decolonization.
This book chapter uses an intersectional perspective to understand reconciliation as it relates to land, immigration, and anti-racist education.
This is a short profile of our team member Maggie Low, and what inspires her work from a planning perspective.
What Others Are Saying
Reconciliation; Transformative Learning
Research
Climate Equity; Decolonization
Transforming planning processes at the intersections of climate equity and decolonization
2024
Lindsay Cole; Maggie Low
Local and regional governments are facing increasing pressures to address complex challenges of climate change, equity, and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples as entangled challenges. Innovation into how planning processes are imagined, designed, and facilitated is urgently needed as a response to these pressures. It is no longer good enough to work on these challenges discretely, within departmental or disciplinary silos, or solely within the dominant, western colonial paradigm and practices of planning. This article describes a transformative planning process drawing from social innovation, systemic design, and decolonizing approaches. This article is a summary of a recently published open access journal article in Nature Urban Sustainability.
Research
Transformative Learning
Scaling deep through transformative learning in public sector innovation labs – experiences from Vancouver and Auckland
2024
Lindsay Cole; Penny Hagen
This article explores scaling deep through transformative learning in Public SectorInnovation Labs (PSI labs) as a pathway to increase the impacts of their work. Using literature review and participatory action research with two PSI labs in Vancouver andAuckland, we provide descriptions of how they enact transformative learning and scaling deep. A shared ambition for transformative innovation towards social and ecological wellbeing sparked independent moves towards scaling deep and transformative learning which, when compared, offer fruitful insights to researchers and practitioners. The article includes a PSI lab typology and six moves to practice transformative learning and scaling deep.
Research
Eco-social transformation
Prompts for eco-social transformation: What environmental education can learn from transformative design
2024
Lindsay Cole
This paper seeks to bring together two seemingly disparate conversations, design and environmental education, with the intent to offer an interesting, new, useful approach to developing educational responses to the climate and ecological crises engendered by the capitalocene. Beginning with observations on the relevance of design to the creation of alternative futures, we outlineresults from a six-person year-long research project that led us to identify six principles for guiding eco-social-cultural change: all my relations, abundant time, mystery/unknowability, embeddedness/integration, ancient futures, and (re)creative dissonance. We situate this work within transformative orientations to design, which are shown to parallel critical threads in the environmental education literature. We then extend, rework, and reimagine the six principles by suggesting how they can serve as prompts to assist environmental educators to reexamine and move beyond problematic norms of the capitalocene in their thinking and practice.
Report
Social Justice
Chicken on my mind
2024
Kyla Pascal
Local community groups like Black Strathcona and Hogan’s Alley Society are demanding the City of Vancouver pay reparations for the irreparable damage it caused by destroying the neighbourhood. The Black communities of Winnipeg and Edmonton – the latter being the city I call home – also deserve for our cities to recognize Haynes and Hatti’s as historical sites and provide opportunities to commemorate them. But beyond demanding recognition and reparations, Black neighbourhoods and community spaces have never been the jurisdiction of settler governments. We built our own communities and third places, and Vie’s, Hatti’s, Haynes, and Hogan’s Alley are ours to reclaim.
Research
Eco-social transformation
Assembling a Cabinet of Curiousities: Using Participatory Action Research and Constructivist Grounded Theory to Generate Stronger Theorization of Public Sector Innovation Labs
2022
Lindsay Cole
This paper describes how a critical qualitative bricolage of research methods, with participatory action research and constructivist grounded theory at the center, were assembled and applied to support stronger theorization of the work of public sector innovation labs while remaining strongly grounded in the experiences and intelligence of practitioners. We begin by sharing the context for this research, including describing what PSI labs are, the purpose for this research, and an overview of the process and participants. Next, the framing for this approach is described, detailing the metaphor of assembling a cabinet of curiosities. This cabinet contains five main methods and approaches including: critical research bricolage; sensitizing concepts; participatory action research; constructivist grounded theory; and weaving the assemblage together. We conclude by discussing the four key methodological insights generated , the contribution that this work makes to the literature about participatory research methods, and how researchers with a transformative intent can use this in practice.
Research
Climate Equity; Decolonization; Transformative Innovation
Transforming planning and policy making processes at the intersections of climate, equity, and decolonization challenges
2023
Lindsay Cole; Maggie Low
Cities are facing increasing pressures to address complex challenges of climate change, equity, and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples as intersecting issues, and innovation into planning and policy-making processes is urgently needed to achieve this. It is no longer good enough to work on these challenges discreetly, or solely within the dominant, western colonial paradigm and practices of governance. There are ongoing harms being caused by climate work that does not embed justice, and there are missed opportunities for synergies across these domains as they have the same systemic root causes. Cities must adapt and transform the processes and practices of planning and policy-making in order to work at these problematic roots. Drawing on an empirical study, this article describes how social innovation, systemic design, and decolonizing practices can shape a different approach to planning and policy-making processes when working at the intersections of climate, equity, and decolonization.
Reports
Innovation Lab; Transformative Innovation
Circular Food Innovation Lab: Co-creating a circular economy of food through experimentation and learning
2022-2023
Lindsay Cole; Lily Raphael
Reports
Innovation Lab; Transformative Innovation
Circular Food Innovation Lab
2023
Lindsay Cole and Lily Raphael involved
For businesses, addressing wasted food is increasingly challenging due to the changing complexity of food systems. Our Zero Waste 2040 Strategic Plan emphasizes the importance of collaborating with the business community to reduce waste. We and our partners are helping businesses adopt new practices and ways of thinking to conserve food and adapt to changes.
Reports
Climate Justice
Sharing Power:
Codifications and Collective Learnings from
Vancouver’s Climate Justice Field School
2022
Lindsay Cole and Lily Raphael involved
Reports
Climate Justice
2022
Lindsay Cole and Lily Raphael involved
The purpose of the Climate Justice Charter is to act as a ‘north star’ to provide high-level vision, guidance, and accountability to the City of Vancouver and the wider Vancouver community by outlining principles, goals, and other key directions to create the future of climate justice we want. The Climate Justice Charter acts as a pebble to create ripples of climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, racial justice, and intersectionality that are repeated from the smallest to the largest scale, reinforcing that climate action needs to be taken collectively by local, regional, provincial, federal, and international governing bodies. Ultimately, the Charter works to transform both our current reality of the climate emergency as well as the next 500+ years into a future that prioritizes healing and hope.
Reports
Innovation Lab; Transformative Innovation
Tending to What We Want to Grow
2022
Lindsay Cole; Lily Raphael
Reports
Innovation Lab; Transformative Innovation
Navigating Complexity:
The Journey of the City of Vancouver's Solutions Lab (so far)
2018
Lindsay Cole
Reports
Tending to What We Want to Grow: Continuing on the Journey of Vancouver’s
2022
Lindsay Cole; Lily Raphael
Research
Reimagining Intersectionality in Environmental and Sustainability Education: A Critical Literature Review
2017
Mumbi Maina, Jada Renee Koushik, Alexandria Wilson
Recordings
“Innovation Transformed by Action Research.” States of Change Works in Progress Festival
2021
Kyla Pascal, Lindsay Cole, Lily Raphael, Maggie Low, Mumbi Maina
Reports
City of Vancouver Equity Framework: Getting our House in Order
2021
Mumbi Maina
Reports
Navigating Complexity - The Story of the City of Vancouver’s Solutions Lab
2018
Lindsay Cole
Research
Climate Change and Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement in Canadian Higher Education: The Mobilities of Actions, Actors, and Tactics
2019
Mumbi Maina, Jaylene Murray, Maria McKenzie
Reports
Step into the River: A Framework for Economic Reconciliation
2022
Sxwpilemaát Siyám (Chief Leanne Joe, Squamish Nation) and Lily Raphael
Research
How We came to Inhabit These Spaces: Reflections on the Role of Place in Our Individual and Collective Journeys as Emerging Sustainability Scholars
2016
Mumbi Maina
