Urban sustainability and counter-sustainability: Spatial contradictions and conflicts in policy and governance in the Freiburg and Calgary metropolitan regions/ Byron Miller

Drawing on empirical research carried out in the metropolitan regions of Freiburg, Germany, and Calgary, Canada, we reposition the sustainability policies of municipalities within a wider regional and relational framework. This perspective reveals significant epistemological blind spots in the localist and non-relational ontologies that undergird much of the urban sustainability discourse. While the city of Freiburg has garnered world-wide attention for its multi-faceted initiatives and achievements in sustainable urban development, these initiatives have yet to be coherently addressed in the wider Freiburg metropolitan region, leading to a variety of policies and practices in the hinterland that run counter to Freiburg’s ‘green city’ objectives. In a parallel fashion, the city of Calgary incorporated significant sustainability principles in its 2009 Master Development Plan and Transportation Plan –‘Plan-It’– yet such principles have not been taken up on a regional scale. Despite substantial differences in size and developmental history, both cities exhibit a profound disconnection from their regional contexts with regard to sustainable development policies and politics. In both metropolitan regions, conventional growth politics are still paramount. A significant conflict emerges between ‘sustainable’ central cities seeking a ‘sustainability fix’ to their fiscal, environmental and quality of life problems, and more remote jurisdictions seeking to attract investment through low tax regimes and limited development regulation – what we label a ‘counter-sustainability fix’. These contrasting and dialectically related policies have substantial consequences for the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, calling into question policies that promote ‘sustainability in one place’.