Christopher Bryant
University of Guleph, Canada
Biography
Christopher Bryant has a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1970). He was a Professor (all three levels) of Geography, University of Waterloo, Ontario, from 1970 to 1990, Chair of the Department (1980-1983), and director of the Program for Local Development, a Canada-wide program in partnership with the Canadian Association of Economic Development, from 1984 to 1990. He was Full Professor of Geography at the Université de Montréal since 1990 and Adjunct Professor since September 2014. He is also Adjunct Professor with the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph, since September 2012. He is past Vice Chair (1996-2000) and Chair (2000-2006) of the Commission of the International Geographical Union on Sustainable Development and Rural Systems and was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Regional Science from 1997 to 2010.
Christopher Bryant is an internationally recognized leader in research on rural areas and small towns as well as the planning and management of peri-urban agriculture in North America and Western Europe. He is one of Canada’s leaders in the adaptation of human activities to climate change and variability (CCV), notably agriculture for the last 26 years, and community resilience to CCV. One of his main preoccupations in terms of research and practice in the adaptation to CCV is how to integrate community resilience and community solidarity in the face of CCV into the long term strategic planning of such communities. He is also one of Canada's leaders in the fields of strategic planning and management, sustainable development and local and community development. His work on strategic development planning also deals with agricultural development, conservation of the environment (e.g. heritage landscapes, water resources …), and the work on community development and agricultural development as well as environmental conservation also has a strong focus on the role of citizens and a broad range of collective actors in the strategic planning process. Much of his research and interventions in the past 17 years can be labeled action research in which he has accompanied different actors from the local, through the regional and provincial levels to the federal level in Canada.
To date he has published: 113 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 172 chapters in collective works (books and conference proceedings) and 3 others in press, 32 books, edited books and monographs, as well as many reports and other publications. He has made presentations and facilitated workshops at over 550 congresses, colloquia and other events. He is currently Guest Editor for three journals: Urban Science (Special Issue: Urban Food Security); Environments (Special Issue: Agriculture and Climate Change; EchoGéo (journal of the Sorbonne, Paris, France: Special Issue: Rural Governance).
He has one of the longest records of successful research financing from the SSHRC (essentially from the beginning of the SSHRC) in Canada, as well as many other research grants or research contracts from many other agencies, including government ministries.
He has been heavily involved in community economic development since the late 1980s, having had contracts with (examples only) Employment and Immigration (on Community Futures), the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Entrepreneurship Institute of Canada (on strategic planning for single industry towns), Economic Development Canada (on exploring local economic development programs in a variety of countries to identify what can be learned for Canada), and Service Canada (on analyzing
how Official Minority Linguistic Communities are dealt with in various countries), as well as with different communities across Canada (e.g. Haliburton County (ON), Fermont (QC), Hudson’s Bay (SK), and Port Hardy (B.C.)). Some activities involved training teams of citizens to organize and carry forward strategic development planning for and by the community.