The Trouble with Paradise
Imagining a great city is easy. Building it is hard.
'Like an aging supermodel'
- City Making in Paradise: Nine Decisions That Saved Vancouver
- Douglas & McIntyre (2007)
Mike Harcourt is on his cell phone, sitting in the West Broadway Mercedes dealership waiting for his Smart Car to be fixed. He's also been stumping for his latest collaboration, the book City Making in Paradise: Nine Decisions That Saved Vancouver, co-written with veteran planner Ken Cameron and longtime Vancouver civic affairs journalist Sean Rossiter.
Harcourt, who has been B.C.'s premier and Vancouver's mayor, likes his Smart Car. He says it goes 110 kilometres an hour on the highway, gets up to 100 kilometres to the gallon, and a fill-up is $15. "When I want to park it, all I do is fold it up and put it in my pocket."
If only saving a city was that easy -- as easy as the title suggests. Just decide. But as the book does make clear, first you imagine and then you sell, to your allies and your opponents, to politicians, bureaucrats and the public, and then you settle into the really hard work, which is putting policy into practice without losing the thread back to the decision, if in fact you really did decide at all.
The book, breezily written or rewritten by Rossiter, with Harcourt and Cameron appearing as characters in the story, makes all this clear. There aren't really nine decisions; there are nine complicated chains of events, and they often begin with a timely crisis.
Thus the 1948 Fraser Valley flood became the impetus to recognize and act on some regional needs. The autocratic plan to raze Strathcona and Chinatown for freeways and Stalinist apartment blocks resulted in the rise to power in Vancouver of The Electors Action Movement and the firing of Vancouver's autocratic chief planner. The uncontrolled sprawl of housing onto some of North America's best farmland provoked the creation in 1973 of the Agricultural Land Reserve by a short-lived NDP government.
In these moments of difficulty, visionary planners and advocates can win us over to a better way.
Beyond petty partisanship
The book was conceived when Harcourt and Cameron spoke at the 2005 memorial for Walter Hardwick, the Vancouver academic, bureaucrat and city councillor, about his under-acknowledged contributions. The book finds others to credit. There's Tory political organizer Tom McDonald, who pushed for regional planning in the late 1940s. There's the man McDonald found in Tennessee to do the job, Jim Wilson, who helped lead the first regional planning efforts in the 1950s. Early 1970s GVRD planner Harry Lash gets his own chapter for championing ideas and processes -- he promoted the phrase "livable region" and created a very open model of consultation and decision-making -- that persist today.
At SFU Harbour Centre, where the book was launched on September 7, Wilson was in the very large audience. So were people like Darlene Marzari who, along with young storefront lawyer "Ho Chi" Harcourt, fought to defeat Vancouver's Chinatown freeway plan. Influential planner and Liberal insider Peter Oberlander was there, as was former NDP MP Margaret Mitchell. Current powers Mayor Sam Sullivan, Coun. Peter Ladner and new Vancouver director of planning Brent Toderian were in attendance. Former NPA councillor and SFU City Program director Gordon Price moderated the discussion.
This diversity of the crowd reflected another planning truth that the book makes clear: there isn't much room for mindless partisanship if you want to build a city that works. Two people in the book who figure prominently in driving the success of the Vancouver region are former Vancouver mayor Gordon Campbell and former Vancouver NPA councillor George Puil -- Campbell for aggressively promoting the GVRD's late 1980s Choosing Our Future process, Puil as a key player in creating the TransLink regional transportation authority.
Consensus is worth the trouble
Both these chapters illustrate a central aspect of good planning. It's not easy to get buy-in from the province, the feds, and countless municipal politicians through a regional district structure that depends hugely on consensus. But such a process does have the benefit of requiring that the public and politicians talk a lot about values and goals, and as a result decisions are usually supported once they are made.
Ask Mike Harcourt if we'd be better off if the system were different, if the GVRD (recently renamed Metro Vancouver) had more authority to overrule local councils, or if the district extended up the valley all the way to Hope, and he's not interested in sweating those details. He wants to establish the principles, divide the tasks, and get to work "rather than muck around with governance structures".
He thinks, and few would argue, that the mega-city experiences of Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal have failed, and that consensus-building isn't such a bad thing. He does, however, want "a double devolution" of power (by which he really means more authority over taxation and spending) from the federal government to the province and from the province to "places." Ultimately, it's in those places -- where politicians, planners and the public have all their collective feet on the ground -- that consensus can be built in support of plans that work.
Right now, however, it's clear we need an engaging public discussion of a few more good ideas. Sure, we've been largely successful in creating "cities in a sea of green" -- compact town centres surrounded by protected farmland, watersheds and parkland -- through effective zoning and transportation choices.
However, the book argues that while our region may be livable, it's not sustainable. "It's unacceptable that there are homeless," Harcourt told the crowd at SFU last Friday. "It's unacceptable that our kids can't afford to buy housing in their own hometown."
Spark is missing
Harcourt agreed with former NPA city councillor Alan Herbert, who asked the authors of the book if the sense of excitement that drove some of our region's successes is now missing. "We need to provide people with the opportunity to be engaged," Harcourt said. "I think there is a huge appetite among the public about sustainability issues."
That, in fact, is a key objective of the book. In documenting past successes, and detailing how they were achieved -- through leadership that engages constructively with the public and other governments -- the authors want to show not only what we've accomplished but what we need to do in the future.
There is, in a book that is generally a feel-good manifesto, some delicately implied criticism of the GVRD's inward-looking inertia and the province's tendency to grab power when it can. Of course there's also the federal government's tendency to, well, be in Ottawa.
There's not much in City Making in Paradise about Vancouver's irritating and potentially dangerous sense of self-satisfaction. Yet in an interview Harcourt quotes Ken Cameron as saying "'We're like an aging supermodel, getting by on looks and reputation.'"
The former premier says he's committed to reinvigorating our particular regional effort to excel, and is setting aside his provincial and federal roles in treaty-making and national advocacy for cities. "Let's become the most sustainable city in the world -- now." As such, he's chairing the committee that will suggest new directors for the province's controversially reconstituted governance structure for TransLink.
Harcourt wants our rapid transit network finished, much faster than current plans require. "We've got a half-assed system now."
Rapid transit yes, but who's first?
Although we have had some success at driving effective land use through transportation planning, no other issue highlights the potential for municipal self-interest and rancour. Just ask members of Vancouver's last COPE council, which was divided on no issue so much as the decision to build the Canada Line to Richmond.
Harcourt has supported the line in the past, and wants to focus on what else we need to do. Cameron, who has worked as the manager of policy and planning for the GVRD and now heads the provincial Homeowner Protection Office, figures the line was a mistake that will disrupt Vancouver bus service and draw development onto Richmond's flood plain.
Both, however, would agree that senior governments are often too fixated on big projects at the expense of more mundane needs. Quite simply, we need to be always on the ball, attending to details big and small. When we look back, it should only be to learn from our successes and mistakes.
While Harcourt decries the dysfunction of the Downtown Eastside, he won't brook any suggestion that the NDP was complicit in aggravating its problems by proceeding to deinstitutionalize Riverview before sufficient community-based alternative housing was in place. He sets out a variety of federal and provincial decisions that "allowed the problem to get away from us," but he doesn't labour those issues. "It doesn't matter who did what when," he says. "To solve homelessness you build homes."
However, Harcourt says he doesn't think new social housing should be built in the Downtown Eastside -- only replacement housing. And he believes we need to think not so much of the small Downtown Eastside so much as the larger East Downtown.
Harcourt declares that we need to spread facilities to care for the addicted, the mentally ill and the homeless around the city, and decries the opposition in Dunbar to proposed social housing there. "These are your kids," he says to those who loudly opposed the plan.
He believes we can eliminate homelessness, although he doesn't think the often-touted objective of eliminating homelessness by 2010 is realistic, arguing that doing it by 2015 is an achievable goal.
'Single-family zoning should be banned'
Both Harcourt and Cameron have the same answer when asked if Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan's "eco-density" is more than a phrase that's been trademarked by the man himself. "I don't know," says Harcourt. "It's hard to tell," says Cameron. "It's still early days." He adds that the concept is really "old wine in new bottles."
Then both men wade in to the density issue with blunt declarations that would make most politicians quaver. "If the city is serious about eco-density, I could show you a chunk of land where it could put six to eight thousand people," says Harcourt, declaring that the former Arbutus corridor rail line is no longer needed for transit. He adds that the public needs to settle for less living space. Cameron tops his collaborator with the blunt statement "Single-family zoning should be banned."
All these issues show how contention can distract us from first principals. For Harcourt and Cameron, right now the first principal relates to that slippery word sustainability. Harcourt defines it as creating prosperity and eradicating poverty without sacrificing the future of our economy or our environment.
And who would oppose such a goal, until you get down to the specifics? Like what's prosperity? Yet there is a looming crisis that our political leaders can capitalize on. "People are moving from a recognition of climate change to panic," says Cameron. "If we do everything right here, it will simply affect some fraction of two per cent of the greenhouse gases in the world."
However, Cameron notes that if we succeed we can export our expertise. "If we can't do it here, then what hope is there for the economies where it will be truly essential?"
'Paradise Makers' Speak
Harcourt, Cameron and Rossiter kicked off the SFU City Program's Friday evening Paradise Makers Lecture Series. The series continues with planner and former NDP cabinet minister Bob Williams (Oct. 5), architect Rand Iredale (Oct. 19), and planner Ray Spaxman (Nov. 2). Admission to public lectures is free; reservations are required. For details click here. Also, on Sunday, Sept. 16 at 5 p.m. former Vancouver co-director of planning Larry Beasley will give a free lecture at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
oeanda
17-09-2007
these comments are
these comments are weird.
seriously, people, urbanity is not a conspiracy. cities aren't some recent invention dreamed up by the illuminati, they're as old as - and a hallmark of - civilization itself.
the migration of rural labour into the city is one thing, but if you have moved out of the city into the country, onto formerly productive land, to lead an unproductive life, it is the wealth of the cities that permits you to do it. you may find it distasteful that the city exists, but it will sustain you in your comfortable retirement by generating the wealth that keeps food on your table and drugs in your veins.
for those that actually live in the city, that wish to stay there, that recognize that urban living is far more energy- and materials- efficient than rural living, making it better doesn't mean abandoning it to rot. it means taking measures to see that positive change occurs.
clubofrome
17-09-2007
Many Hurdles...
Education being near the top of the list. Read oeanda's comments and try and decode what the meaning of this statment is.
My radar goes on whenever I here wealth generation or cretion without seemingly any understanding of what wealth is. Does this person mean hard currency? Wealth on paper like those profitting from inflated housing prices? I hope the commentor will take the time to explain these words. Frankly it's probably just a reflection of mainstream thinking that says property values will just continue to rise and therefore the region is constantly creating wealth. Bubble heads... If it's not sustainable, it's not going to be liveable. It's only the timeline to be determined. No matter what the intention of the authors of this book, it's attempt at planning anything is completely eroded when they admit we are not now living sustainably. Sustainability, like wealth is just another word mis-understood by the public and used in most of the useless buzz phrase rhetoric repeated day after day until swallowed by those who can't or won't think for themselves.
Fiat lux
17-09-2007
Where did you get the idea
Where did you get the idea that urban life is more energy/materials efficient ?
Look up the estimated water use (not consumption) of an urban person. Also the costs of commuting not only to the people, but mainly the ecology.
There's nothing wrong with cities, but when there are 10 or 18 million people jammed into small areas, it is a crime against humanity and the ecology, as the pollution they produce is, alone, a major disaster.
NAFTA has jammed 17.5 million into Mexico City. Who benefits ?
Ed Deak.
G West
17-09-2007
oeanda
I would like to see some actual evidence that this statement is, in any but a very studied and constrained manner in a particularly unreal and manufactured environment, actually true. In the day to day linearity of the vast majority of city dwellers lives it certainly is not.
In fact, I suspect, given the modern city and looking only at items such as food, transportation, storage, refrigeration and air travel that it is demonstrably untrue.
Furthermore, without the rural and truly productive realm the city would simply revert to cannibalism or starve. In any case, after a few months it would be empty, hollow and deserted - a few stray dogs scratching amid the long grasses growing up around, over and through the cracks in the deserted asphalt.
ubiquitous
17-09-2007
to be urban or not to be urban
all due respect ed, but while you may detest the big city, I think that your comments are unfair (as are oeanda's). I live in the middle of vancouver ofr 15 years, I now live in a rural remote community. I did so not because I think that one is better than the other. I did so because at this stage in my life, the benefits of rural living appeal outweigh the benefits of city living. It's a lifestyle choice; it's about tradeoffs. I may drive more now in the country, but I spend less time (a lot less) sitting in traffic jams and I have more time to spend with my family. That's just one example.
And I don't think that there's any point arguing who's more energy efficient. I've seen people in the country who blow my mind with how wasteful they are - as I have seen in the city. At the same time, I've seem people in the city living incredibly sustainable lives (community garden plot, no car, etc.), whereas, where I live, I know of folk who use the faintest amount of resources to live (live off the grind, grow their own food, etc.)
I think that it's more productive from our so called progressive side that we find common ground and cut the urban vs. rural living crap out of the equation.
oeanda
17-09-2007
clubofrome, i made no
clubofrome, i made no comment on whether or not the current system or means of generating wealth were ideal, only that cities are crucial to the system as it exists. if you live in the country, your standard of life, the technology you use, the food you eat (farmers didn't invent roundup-ready canola), the medicine you take... all this depends on urbanization and the division of labour.
by all means, work to change the system, but doing it from your cabin in the woods, on the internet, on a website based in and drawing most of its readership from the city, is surely an exercise in irony.
i'd like to see some evidence to your counter point.
question: is a bus more efficient, per passenger, than a car? yes. question: is central heating in a high-rise more efficient than heating a single detatched house? yes. say you have a grocery store that serves 10,000 people. in the city, those people live within as little as a 1km radius. in the country? even if every single customer of that grocery drives in both instances, the city, owing to its density requires the use of less fuel. it's an unrealistic comparison, of course, because many of the people in the city don't need to drive to the store. if fact, it's often faster to walk.
so you're in the country, close to a farm. does it supply everything you need, year round? i've been to a rural grocery store, too. most of the winter produce comes from california or south america. the fraction of any canadian's diet - rural or urban - that comes from local produce is small. it's all shipped from somewhere else.
where would you have them go? seriously? los angeles is a city of 18 million people, situated in a desert. it's already the biggest metro in the world. would you have them scattered across the mojave, have water piped hundreds of miles to each home, have them drive hundreds of miles (more) to buy food? what would they do for a living? i mean really, what do you propose?
if the sight and smell of humanity's concentrated filth offends you, too bad. just because yours is in low enough concentrations that you can ignore it doesn't mean you're not contributing to the gradual death of the planet. i live in a city and i drive my car about once or twice a week. everyone i know who lives in the sticks drives at least 50km a day. there just isn't any room for argument there. suburban life is wasteful.
oeanda
17-09-2007
http://tinyurl.com/3bs22g Qu
http://tinyurl.com/3bs22g
G West
17-09-2007
I think the key is defining your terms
Rural and agricultural sustainable living is sustainable - city living (despite a few garden plots) isn't.
Without the country the city would starve - most urban North Americans live lives that have no productive aspect to them whatsoever. Shut off the power to the city and the whole thing grinds to a halt.
Ref: Montreal and much of urban Quebec during the ice storm...
Fiat lux
17-09-2007
The biggest problem is the
The biggest problem is the deliberate attempt by governments to depopulate the countryside and hand it over to big business, in the mining, agriculture and forestry industries. We can see this all around us. Years ago we had dozens of small mills all around us, now 2-3. All the forest contractors are all gone, the mills operate with a fraction of the labour force of 30 years ago, while their energy and timber demands went up by thousands of percents.
This is called "economic efficiency".
The long term plan is to have imported slave labour do the work, as according to the "market economy" form of thinking: "Canadian labour priced itself out of the market".
Hundreds of ranchers will go broke this year on account of lousy beef prices and poor haycrop.
The low prices are not on account of glut on the market, but the deliberate conspiracy of the feedlot corporations to create shortages by forcing ranchers out of business, while jacking up prices in the stores.
Then the lands are picked up by the carpetbaggers and held for subdivision after the abolition of the ALR, or for major food shortages, so they can sock it to people in the cities.
We had some old friends visiting over the weekend, who brought some "prime cut" store bought sirloin steaks, as if we didn't have any. We ate them as a form of courtesy, but
normally wouldn't feed them to dogs. Full of grease, called "marble", and God only knows how many doses of chemicals. Tasted like ....
BC could feed tens of millions with organic, prime beef, but there's "no market" for it, because the markets are controlled by the carpetbagger mafia, who prevent people both from living on the land and to eat decent food.
Of course the biggest enemy of economists is any degree of self sufficiency, which can only be achieved in rural areas. We can live on our OAPs like kings, while in the city we would have to eat dogfood to survive. But this doesn't jack up the phoney GDP, so it must be eliminated and people forced to buy everything.
Ed Deak.
jimmy_laroux
17-09-2007
Hooray for Density!
Grumpy,
Deification? You mean in the economist city rankings? :)
Are denser cities necessarily less affordable? I'm not so sure. And anyway, as I pointed out in this thread, http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/31/Coleman/,
the GVRD is not very dense at all.
And traffic congestion is the result of low-density, automobile centred development. This happens in cities with which have even lower population densities than Vancouver. So I don't think you can say that the few, small islands of density, swimming in the great sea of sprawl that is the GVRD, could be blamed for this traffic.
I agree with Cameron's statement that "Single-family zoning should be banned."
clubofrome
18-09-2007
oeanda, no offence taken...
Just pointing out that what ever you were trying to say didn't work. You didn't explain your wealth creation statementent period. Then you say urbanization is critical to the system. The systemic herding of humans into urban consumption pens? The equivalent of human feed lots. The system of diversity and cultural centres and markets may have worked once but not in this day of greed and exploitation. It's no wonder we repaeat our mistakes over and over with the flock bleating out the mantra of the overlords. Wealth creation! Wealth creation! Sorry pal, but I gotta call bullshit on you... don't think of it as a bad thing.
skeptikool
18-09-2007
Good on ya, Mike
Mike Harcourt ain't no size-challenged person so, with his SmartCar, nice to see he's putting his money where his mouth is - in what he chooses to drive, that is.
Off topic? I don't think so since how we get around has much to do with a region's livability.
If, and when, the SkyTrain grid serves the whole Lower Mainland, there will be no lack of ridership and I think it will be the envy of many cities throughout the world.
I believe we might have been much closer to that goal if the system had not, in my opinion, first served politicians and contractors and, in spite of being in an earthquake zone, been much overbuilt.
Going underground along Cambie has been a costly error that, perhaps, we're too fast to attribute to NIMBY-ism.
speedo
18-09-2007
on the other hand...
Was Paris made the most beautiful city in the world by consensus?
Geof
18-09-2007
Limitations of low- vs high-density GHG study
oeanda, I took a look at the study you cited. I would be cautions about it as it has a number of limitations. However, I actually suspect these limitations result in the study under representing the difference in GHG emissions between low and high density development.
The study only looked at three factors: construction materials for the dwellings, energy use, and transportation. Other factors (e.g. traffic congestion, infrastructure, maintenance, contents such as appliances & furniture, food) were not considered. Obviously larger houses in the suburbs have more stuff in them and incur greater infrastructure costs.
The study assumes 3.0 people per house in the suburbs, but only 1.8 per unit in the high-density development. One would expect people living together would be more efficient. If high density units for families were more common, the efficiency figures for high density development would improve further.
The study suffered from several limitations. It only considers one high-density building and one subdivision. It assumes a building lifespan of 50 years. It uses Canada-wide averages of energy use for single-detached and 5+ story apartments (presumably to the detriment of the building in the study, which has 15 stories).