Moving from Ideas to Action: Community Actors' Local Implementation of Sustainable Urban Development in the Context of Montreal

The city is a place where many environmental issues are emerging. And these issues are at the heart of disputes regarding access to green space or demands in the areas of quality of life and the environment. These disputes are rooted especially in the many meanings that the term sustainable development takes in the eyes of the different actors, with their differing ideological positions, and in the numerous difficulties in the implementation of sustainable development that have been discussed in the literature. Our paper focuses on the local implementation of sustainable urban development from the perspective of the discourses and practices of community actors in the context of Montréal. The paper is based on the findings of a qualitative study that used semi-structured interviews with various community actors in the Rosemont neighbourhood of Montréal. Our objective is to understand how community actors in this neighbourhood are fostering the implementation of sustainable urban development at the local level. Our hypothesis is that these actors use the concept in a way that allows for a reframing of the issues towards the implementation of sustainable urban development with a broader social scope by incorporating notions of justice, equity and democracy into it. In doing so, they are positioning themselves in opposition to a neoliberal vision of sustainability, where the environment and social inequalities are seen as externalities of development.