A plan for a place

When you think about municipal government, you probably think about roads, sewers, sidewalks, and what is going to be built down the street. Open North Cowichan’s Official Community Plan, though, and you find a much larger ambition. Two frameworks run through the document: “Ecology and Climate Action” and “Social Justice and Equity”. You might reasonably stop at that second one. What is social justice doing in a community plan, and how does it shape the decisions being made here?

The plan gives us a reason to ask. It says that acting on this thinking would mean “significant changes in our values, narratives, and lifestyles”. That reaches into how we live, beyond the question of what gets built where. Before residents are asked to embrace that future, we should understand the thinking behind it, who brought it into the plan, and what putting it into practice would involve.

To follow that story, we need to go back to the ideas themselves. The OCP draws explicitly on a framework associated with economist Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics. It puts people’s basic needs alongside the environmental limits within which society is meant to operate. That is a broad proposition about how society should work. How it became part of North Cowichan’s planning direction is where our investigation begins.

We’ll follow those ideas into the local process: the people who helped shape the plan, the questions residents were asked, and the decisions council made. Then we’ll follow ordinary lives through the future it describes. Someone still needs to pay the rent, get to work, buy groceries, and get home. As we move from the ambition to the details, we’ll keep asking the same question: what would have to happen to make this work here?