Wednesday, March 10, 2021

City-builders and change-makers

Vancouverism by Larry Beasley. UBC Press 2019 —
"When I say “we” in this story, I will be talking about Ann McAfee and myself and our band of planning professionals, along with the other professionals in all the departments that make up the City, because we were always on the front lines together — often fighting a very hard fight. I will also be talking about our political masters, particularly those who sponsored the innovations. For me, close allies were Councillors Gordon Price and Jim Green, and Mayors Gordon Campbell, Philip Owen, and Larry Campbell. They were intelligent leaders, who often showed courage in their embrace of what we suggested. But the “we” will also include the developers and private design professionals who were constant collaborators, as well as the citizens who threw their hats into the ring to take part in what we were doing.
Of course, we were all led by the chief of the City — known humbly as our city manager. Our generation was very lucky to have extraordinary, even brilliant, leaders in Ken Dobell and then Judy Rogers, who built on the legacy of the genius who preceded them, Fritz Bowers (I mean that seriously, he was a Mensa)."
UBC Press | Vancouverism By Larry Beasley (emphasis mine)
I first saw Vancouver on an early Spring day in 1971. I walked across the Hastings Viaduct, demolished a year or two later. It was a mill town. False Creek was home to a working cooperage (Sweeney’s), mud flats and sawdust burners. I loved it, joined thousands of my generation and settled.
South East False Creek was about to become, throughout that decade, an influential model of waterfront industrial lands repurposed as a mixed-use, mixed-income, pedestrian oriented urban neighbourhood. My group of friends gravitated to this new waterfront community and enthusiastically took to the adjoining Granville Island Public Market area and its intense mix of new uses with traditional industries and small trade shops.
Among my group of friends happened to be the daughter of City Manager Fritz Bowers. Meant little to us then but serves now as a point in time from which to examine how this visionary, transformative False Creek redevelopment came to catalyze the maturing of a mill town into a confident Pacific Rim city.
A number of historic global forces acted on the development of Vancouver over subsequent decades. The 1986 World’s Fair, the return of Hong Kong to China, the Winter Olympics, the arrival of highly mobile global speculative investment capital. It’s clear also that the mill town of 1971 had in it inherent qualities—of geography, culture and climate—that would at some time attract the country’s and the world’s attention.
These forces and natural gifts were harnessed by the vision and ambition of a succession of city managers and progressive departments of planning and urban design and courageous political leaders, among them those mentioned by author Beasley above.
Home is now, and for about the last 30 years, Nanaimo, a city of 100k people on the east coast of Vancouver Island, on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation.
Nanaimo is a university town (Vancouver Island University) with a deep sea port, home to a large regional hospital and the administrative centre of the Nanaimo Regional District. The largest city by population on Vancouver Island, Nanaimo is a key transportation link to the the central, and west Island and it is the region’s administrative, financial, and arts and culture centre. The city has attributes and advantages the envy of any medium size city, but Nanaimo is also held back by decades of modernist city planning: low population density, the mall and sprawl development model.
Canada’s population is projected to double or even triple this century. To benefit from the opportunities this population growth will create, university towns like Nanaimo will need to invest in urbanization, in the public realm, in the traditional city centre neighbourhoods, redirecting public monies that now subsidize sprawl. Otherwise they will lose out to the largest cities that will continue to attract the greatest share of talent and investment.
There are large idle development lands, including downtown waterfront acreage, under public ownership in the city centre. There is, too, city centre acreage adjoining the VIU campus, that is slated to be ceded to the Snuneymuxw First Nation as part of a negotiated settlement of the illegal confiscation of a traditional waterfront village site land claim.
Link : These six Census Areas comprise Nanaimo City Centre
False Creek North “is not an accidental neighbourhood, not a neighbourhood that came together because one developer did something here and another developer did something there. This is a neighbourhood designed by the City, in consultation with developers and the community. The City was in the driver’s seat. The City led the effort, making sure the result met the larger needs of what this neighbourhood needed to be in the city at large,” Larry Beasley, Council for Canadian Urbanism, Legacy Tour video.

Nanaimo finds itself in a time of historic opportunity to create one of the country’s most socially just, progressive, and prosperous mid-size cities in the country; in fact this was as true 10 years ago. But we were then, as we are now, without the courageous, visionary leadership that former City of Vancouver co-chief planner Larry Beasley details.
Nanaimo’s City Hall took an ill-advised turn to a neo-conservative model about 10 years ago, neglecting investment in the public realm and even going so far as eliminating the position — and the proactive public role—of Director of Planning and Urban Design.
Link : Community building initiatives we should have been working on over the last two years, efforts accelerated with urgency in 2020.
Making this corporate mindset shift 10 years ago was not that difficult and neither would be its reversal to a civic mindset: a focus on the public realm, on the greater common good, on community-building investments, value-creation. Nanaimo must with urgency empower (and decentralize to neighbourhood planning offices), under a progressive Director, a Department of Planning and Urban Design.
Public space is “where social equity and enlightened self-interest come together. It is the economic counter to the ultimately self-defeating neo-conservative legacy of neglect and withdrawal that leads to private wealth inside gated communities and public squalor without… quality of life and quality of place have a value equal to, if not greater than, traditional factor costs (i.e., land, labour, and capital).
Cities and regions that compete with each other primarily on cost are engaged in a losing game — “beggar thy neighbour” policies inevitably lead to a race to the bottom and impoverishment of the public realm and public services. — Ken Greenberg  Toronto Reborn

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