As 2012 comes to a closes and our Spacing Vancouver contributors take a well deserved break, we would like to take the opportunity to look back of what we’ve covered over the last 12 months. Each day this week, we will be posting some of our favourite posts from the past year.
Wither Vancouver?
Originally posted on July 25, 2012
[EDITORS NOTE: Lance Berelowitz is one of Metro Vancouver’s important urban critics and thinkers. Each of his writings – be it the poignant commentary on Vancouver’s distorted outward looking public space in Metropolitan Mutations or the thoughtful insights in his more recent book Dream City – demonstrates a perceptive understanding of the local socio-political landscape situated in a larger global context. That is why we are happy to post the following article recently published on his Urban Forum Associates website.]
Special Feature by Lance Berelowitz
It’s been more than six months now since the Vision Party-dominated Vancouver City Council fired the City’s last Director of Planning, and still no replacement is in sight. Recently it emerged that Council has reorganized the Planning Department and is in effect eliminating the Planning Director position, instead advertising for a General Manager of Development Services (which will incorporate the Director of Planning’s statutory functions) who will report directly to the City Manager’s office. This is unprecedented. The position is being politicized, presumably to ensure that the incumbent is more directly under the control of Council and more consistently on message with Vision’s ideological mission.
A source tells me that the City Manager recently called in several representatives of the design and development industries and academia to ask them what they thought the successful candidate needed to possess. An appreciation of development industry imperatives and the approvals processes seemed to be high on the list of key attributes. Having a long-term urban planning vision for the city did not, apparently.
Meanwhile, several high-profile and contentious development projects have been approved or are in the pipeline, including a major new rezoning in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood that Council approved despite widespread and broad-based opposition (including several planning and design professionals).
The other night, an Urban Land Institute panel discussion brought together three former Directors of Planning (Ray Spaxman, Larry Beasley and Brent Toderian) to talk about where the City of Vancouver is going. All three, to a remarkably consistent degree (and quite independently of each other, according to a source), expressed concern for the city’s future, in general, in the face of mounting issues, and for the future of the City of Vancouver’s planning vision, in particular. One former director, Ray Spaxman, likened the City of Vancouver to feeling as if we are “on an Easter egg hunt. Council is rushing off after density, they’re rushing after lane housing, they’re rushing after cycle paths. They’re all rushing after the latest panacea that happens to offer some solution but isn’t.”
There is a growing sense that this Council is determined to ram certain things through regardless of staff advice, public process, or absent a larger vision (excuse the pun). Or if there is a vision, it seems increasingly ideologically driven, with little room for dissent.
What’s going on?
Is Vancouver increasingly just trading on its good looks, as another former director, Larry Beasley, put it? And what happens as the city ages and those looks inevitably start sagging and getting wrinkled?