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Sustainability Hamilton's Footprint
In the early 1990s Hamilton, Ontario (formerly the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth) established a Task Force on Sustainable Development and developed a "Vision 2020" to guide the municipal planning process. This attracted international attention and Hamilton was acknowledged as one of the U.N.'s Agenda 21 communities. Unfortunately there has been a whittling away of these gains and Hamilton City Council recently adopted a policy of "allocating all available resources for economic development". Citizens for a Sustainable Community was formed by former members of the Task Force and has continued to foster awareness within the community of the consequences of pursuing growth policies without regard for the environmental and social consequences. The ecological footprint concepts developed by Dr. Bill Rees at UBC (see sidebar) recently inspired us to investigate the relative footprints of neighbourhoods in Hamilton, utilizing information available to community organizations. While the data is not currently available to conduct a full footprint analysis at the neighbourhood level, a variety of sources supplemented by our own investigations permitted us to compare the relative environmental sustainability of six Hamilton neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods Examined in the Study The largest single source of information at the level of neighbourhoods is provided in the census tract data compiled by Statistics Canada for urban areas. The most recent complete data set is from the 1996 census. We examined six of the 120 census tracts in the amalgamated City of Hamilton. We chose urban tracts that were primarily residential with a majority of owner-occupied households, but which had variable ages of housing construction and widely-spaced geographic locations. Hamilton is geographically divided by the 40 metre high Niagara Escarpment running generally east-west across the city. The "lower city" is sandwiched between Lake Ontario and the escarpment, while the remaining "mountain" portion of the urban area is located on top of the escarpment. Three of the tracts chosen were from the lower city, and the other three from the mountain (see map). Table 1 provides descriptions of the six selected tracts. Table One: Neighbourhoods Examined in the Study
Indicators of Sustainability The indicators we examined are listed below. The first three utilized 1996 census data; the next three relied on data collected in the 1996 Transportation Tomorrow Survey; while seven to ten were determined from municipal maps and aerial photos. A 'windshield' survey provided the number of vehicles per household and permitted their division into five categories determined by fuel efficiency. This information was then used to calculate the twelfth indicator (with the assumption that all vehicles travelled the 17,000 km/annum Canadian average).
By knowing the actual value for a particular indicator we were able to give each tract a sustainability score (high value is desirable). Hence, in the case of indicator 1, we identified the number of residential units per hectare. For neighbourhood LS, we obtained a value of 10.31, while LW had a value of 23.78. Other neighbourhoods had intermediate values. After normalizing, we obtained values for LS and LW of 1.00 and 2.31 (=23.78/10.31), respectively. For each indicator, we were thus able to ascertain which neighbourhood scored best, second best, etc. and thus determine an assemblage of sustainability scores could be tallied for any neighbourhood. LW ranked first on six indicators and second on three others. LE had three firsts, four seconds and five thirds. ME had two firsts, one second, and two thirds. At the other end of the scale LS had no scores above a fourth and ranked last on nine indicators. Preparing a composite score, that compared the six neighbourhoods directly, posed a challenge because of the obvious disparity in the significance of the twelve indicators. Composite Scoring The approach we adopted was to seek the advice of individuals with strong experience in sustainability issues, including professional planners, university faculty and leaders of NGOs. Fifteen of these individuals ranked the 12 indicators according to their estimation of how well each might be expected to reflect the relative sustainability of a neighbourhood. They were instructed to assign the number 12 to the indicator they felt would best indicate high sustainability, 11 to the second best, and so on down to 1 for the least important one. Then the respondents were asked to square each score and to modify them if they wished, up or down (without changing the order). Thus, the indicator they scored as 6 (squared to 36), could be altered to any number between 49 and 25. All scores were then totalled and divided by the lowest score to establish a composite factor for each indicator. If all respondents were identical in their thinking, the weightings would have ranged from 1 to 144. However, they clearly made different judgments because the composite weighting factors were compressed to the range 1 to 5. Perhaps this result reflects a lack of a commonly accepted definition of sustainability. Vehicle kms travelled per day per household was ranked highest, while litres of vehicle fuel used and number of households per residential hectare came in second and third respectively. Results of the Composite Scores The three older and more central neighbourhoods scored significantly better than their suburban counterparts. The highest composite neighbourhood score was garnered by LE, closely followed by LW. Meanwhile, third place went to the other older neighbourhood on the lip of the escarpment, MC, followed closely by ME. Not surprisingly, MW and LS ranked fifth and sixth with the latter achieving a composite score of hardly a third of the highest ranking neighbourhood. Major Findings and Conclusions The study found quite dramatic differences in the sustainability factors examined. For example, annual vehicle fuel consumption per household ranged from 2,006 to 3,738 litres. This suggests that the footprint of individual urban neighbourhoods can vary substantially, at least in the categories of transportation and housing. To examine the footprint categories of food and goods and services will require a more comprehensive set of data than was available to this research project. It was found that older inner city neighbourhoods (LE, LW, MC) are more sustainable than the newer subdivisions being built on the outskirts of the city. The inner city neighbourhoods swept the top three positions in seven of the twelve indicators, and two of the top three positions in the other five. Comparing the composite scores of the three older inner-city neighbourhoods with the three outer suburban ones, we found that the former may be twice as sustainable as the latter. Overall, the study suggests that residential development trends in Hamilton over the past several decades appear to have generated neighbourhoods of decreasing sustainability. Municipal transit policies, zoning and neighbourhood planning appear to have some responsibility for this decline. On the other hand, this also suggests that local decision-makers may be capable of significantly improving the sustainability of neighbourhoods, and consequently of the city as a whole.
Bibliography Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth. 1999. All In A Day's Work: Commuter Trends and Patterns for Hamilton-Wentworth, Volume 1, Main Report, Community Planning and Development Division, 26 pp. Rees, William. 2001. Reducing Hamilton's Ecological Footprint - Individual and Community Actions. Lecture delivered at a conference in Hamilton on November 24, 2001. An audio version together with Dr. Rees' overheads is available on-line on the website of Citizens for A Sustainable Community at http://www.sustainablehamilton.org/conference.htm#reesmovie |
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