Emerging Narratives of a Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood: The Case of Vancouver’s Olympic Village

Abstract

Vancouver’s Olympic Village neighbourhood has been credited with playing an important role in shifting the city towards a more comprehensive approach to sustainability. Like many other urban sustainability efforts at the neighbourhood scale, however, little is known as to the actual performance of the neighbourhood from the perspective of its occupants. To help fill this gap, I present a framework for the evaluation of the performance of sustainable neighbourhoods that that combines insights from narrative and social practice theories to explore how certain narratives of sustainable living are created, translated into practice, and play out in the lives of the principal constituents they affect. In doing so, I begin to reveal the qualitatively felt, experiential dimensions of being in this new form of development, with important lessons for the design, construction and management of future sustainable neighbourhood projects. The study shows that a narrative of liveability and the consideration of short-term quality of life benefits is central to the achievement of ecological and emissions goals. However, an in-depth consideration of the needs of lower income populations is necessary to ensure that the benefits of sustainable living are distributed evenly across socio-economic tiers.

Keywords

• narrative
• energy
• Olympic Village
• social practice
• sustainability
• sustainable urban neighbourhood