A monument to oil in the West Edmonton mall

On the flight to Edmonton, I sat next to Ted, a friendly giant with a pronounced Dutch/Irish accent. He told me how, unable to find work in Ireland, he was flying to Canada with the promise of a job. With the ice beginning to melt, he and thousands of others will work for the summer, cleaning up oil refineries before moving on to the next opportunity.

This story happens to be true. But fans of Thomas "world is flat" Friedman will recognise its type from his New York Times OpEds. Friedman is fond of such globalisation parables, often snatched from receptionists or taxi drivers. As Richard Florida (pdf) and others have pointed out, we should not overlook the world's spikiness. Geography matters, even, or perhaps especially, when it comes to science and innovation. This is why we are so fascinated by Silicon Valley. If we follow Friedman, Silicon Valley could be anywhere, and yet the businesses and universities that populate it show no signs of upping sticks.

While most of the rich world's cities stagnate, Edmonton is a notable boomtown. But it faces an identity crisis. It is North America's northernmost big city and the gateway to North Alberta's oil sands, at the upstream end of the much-debated Keystone XL pipeline. The oil is the source of the city's explosive growth. High oil prices have made the extraction of unconventional, dirty oil economically viable. This requires major capital investment and construction, dragging engineering and various service industries to the region. The city is acutely aware that it is sitting on a problem. Not only is it an ecological disaster zone, if we follow the arguments of the anti-Keystone activists, it is heavily dependent on oil, with its capricious price fluctuations, and desperate to diversify.

The city's new strategic plan reflects its fossil fuel ambivalence:

"Edmonton is an energy city: Energy drawn from the ground and from above; from the sun and wind. But the true power of Edmonton is the democratic spark in its people. Edmonton is a city of design - urban design, architectural design, and environmental design. Walk its safe, leafy neighbourhoods, ride its efficient and accessible transportation system. The city has grown up; now we're building smarter."

In much the same way as the gulf states are doing, Edmonton is trying to become a knowledge economy and it is looking to its scientists.

I was in Alberta to help out with a workshop on nanotechnology and the future of the city, run by colleagues from the University of Alberta's City Region Studies Center. Academics at the University recognise the love-hate relationship with oil as well as anyone. Their funding waxes and wanes with the price of oil. Our task was to see whether and how nanotechnology (the city is also home to Canada's National Institute for Nanotechnology) might play a role in the city's future.

We spoke for one and a half days with 35 local businesspeople, architects, scientists, artists, civil servants, planners and others about the various tensions that would shape Edmonton's future. There was plenty of scepticism, familiar from European discussions, about the novelty of nanotechnology: Was it one thing or many? Does it, as philosopher Alfred Nordmann has put it, "promise everything and nothing in particular"? Could the word "technology" just be substituted for "nanotechnology"? Even if nanotechnology is little more than symbolic, its introduction into a familiar conversation about place, planning and a city's future prompts new thinking. Rather than fixating on "growth" as a quantity, people began to talk about directions. Alberta is clear about its problems – from the ecological impacts of its vast oil sands to the potholes created by its bitter winters. These aren't going away any time soon, but they could be a spur for innovation. Nanotech could be a way to diversify the economy, but first it could be a way for the oil industry to clean up its act.

The workshop inevitably struggled to nail down the wispy global promise of new technologies to this particular city, to find a place in Edmonton for nanotechnology and to find a place in nanotechnology for Edmonton. These sorts of exercises typically generate more questions than answers, but there was some indication of a way forward. Edmontonians talked about making theirs "an experimental city". They had an idea for a first step along this road: a "pothole X-prize". You heard it here first.