| Preparing plans for sustainable community development and adopting new policies is relatively easy. Effective implementation of these plans and policies to achieve intended environmental, social and economic outcomes can be much more difficult. It requires corresponding real changes to prevailing servicing standards and infrastructure programs that have been established over time to support community development concepts that are now recognized as being unsustainable. These traditional standards and programs provided short-term solutions and accommodated wide spread vehicle-orientated growth. This thesis, which is based on research in 5 B.C. municipalities, describes traditional approaches to municipal development; explores how these fall short of achieving sustainable results, and reports on barriers to more sustainable approaches. It then explores and presents technical, legislative and procedural direction on policy, bylaw and engineering approaches that support sustainable community planning initiatives by transforming traditional servicing concepts to achieve more sustainable, environmentally sensitive, financially responsible and socially beneficial results. |
