vancouver city guide for insurgent 21st century …
TRANSCRIPT
VANCOUVER CITY GUIDE FOR INSURGENT 21ST CENTURY PLANNERS AND URBANISTS
SEVEN SPACES BASED ON A REVISIONIST HISTORY
Warning: Reader Discretion Advised
To those of you who came to Vancouver and picked up this tour book, hoping it would lead to you
spots where you could admire Downtown’s modern skyline from Granville Island or watch sea planes
from Canada Place, let me begin with an apology. By reading the following content, your flawless
perception of Vancouver may be tainted. In addition, your view of good planning, for which Vancouver
arguably has set one of North America’s best examples, will be challenged. This ‘tour’ of Vancouver
spaces recognizes that there are many stories of city and its development history. Let’s refer to just
two: the dominant narrative and the buried narrative(s). I re-evaluate the dominant narrative by
showing you the buried narrative(s) through a few chosen places, architecture, AND people (note:
people, not only buildings, are what create the city).
This is not intended as an unbiased guide to the city and its place-making efforts. Instead, this book
remains critical of the Enlightenment planning perspective, which falls in line with many accounts of
planning history which you might have previously heard. More specifically, the themes and people
discussed for each tour stop may include people of color and people of the non-male gender, pre-
colonial uses of space, and often upsetting content rather than feel-good images of spaces in the city
imposed by Western colonialist planning paradigm. Just like Peter Hall’s account of history of planning
cities, to decide what to include in this guidebook was not easy, nor was it easy to obtain the
information. Certainly, a lot of information had to be left out. However, this book disagrees with Hall’s
interpretation of selecting artifacts, themes, and people that represent 19th and 20th century urban
developments to “tell just so much about the world as is necessary to explain the phenomenon of
planning” (Hall, 2002, p 5).
In this decolonized guide to Vancouver’ spaces, I deem it necessary to tell the story of oppressed
communities and the spaces they occupy or occupied but also demonstrate cases of perseverance and
empowerment. Such stories are often the hardest to unearth and the most important to expose for the
sake of social progress in our communities. This is not only due to the lack of written history (as
opposed to oral accounts) of the hidden stories, but also due to suppression and erasure that made
sure these stories would never be dug up again. The tour is neither sequenced thematically or
chronologically nor focused on a few protagonists of the city and their grand visions of the future.
Rather, it is told to reveal a mosaic of community perspectives, emphasizing quality over quantity.
Table of Contents
1. HOGAN’S ALLEY: THE NEIGHBORHOOD BEFORE SLUM CLEARANCE
2. KOERNER PLAZA: A PLACE OF MIND (OVER BODIES)
3. CAFÉ DEUX SOLEIL: WHERE THE ARTS/ MUSIC
EPISTEMOLOGY COMES ALIVE
4. THE OLD AND THE NEW: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
AND BURNABY MOUNTAIN
5. THE VILLAGE OF WHOI WHOI: STANLEY PARK BEFORE
IT WAS A PARK
6. MOLE HILL COHOUSING: PLANNING FROM BELOW
7. MUSQUEAM GARDEN: GARDEN UTOPIA MEETS
INSURGENT CITIZENSHIP
1. HOGAN’S ALLEY: THE NEIGHBORHOOD BEFORE SLUM CLEARANCE
Walk across from Keefer Place, glittering with towers, to Union Street, the gateway to Strathcona. Start west of the viaducts and head east. From the top of the bridge, glimpse that which Harland Bartholomew and other so-called heroes of the city modern movement (like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses) envisioned for Vancouver: an open horizon with tall glass buildings, BC Place and Science World within view. Upon exiting the viaducts, you will end up on a small street harboring yuppified food joints like the Union and The Tuck Shoppe. These sites and scenes constitute the image of cutting-edge modernity, and post-industrialism that followed, to outside admirers (and investors). They make Vancouver and its history of place-making look reputable, impeccable, and hip. But what about the institutional racism that helped create and justify the viaducts you just walked across? The same urban renewal mentality which destroyed the Bronx helped wipe this area, once upon a time a ‘colored neighborhood’, off the map. We could easily glance over this history or pity Strathcona for being a victim of a ruthless ideology to demolish spaces in the name of creative destruction. Rather, we want the aspiring insurgent planners reading this book to appreciate Strathcona for its rich cultural history as one of Vancouver’s vibrant neighborhoods, a place of food, music, and pride for the African-Canadian community in the 1960s. This tour stop aims to expose planners to the various angles and heroes, such as Wayde Compton and Zena Howard, behind this neighborhood’s history and present state. We hope planners avoid resorting to the same mistakes of displacement, erasure, and forgetting and begin the process of remembering and restoring.
Further reading: City of Towers; Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives on Preservation Planning; Regional Blocs, Regional Planning, and the Blues Epistemology
2. KOERNER PLAZA: A PLACE OF MIND (OVER BODIES)
In many obvious ways, this space represents the fantasies of many a visionary of the City
Beautiful Movement, like Burnham and Bartholomew. Notice the obsessive use of the straight
line, symmetrical geometry, wide vistas, glass materials, and theatrically staged monuments
(Irving K. Barber and the Koerner libraries). However, insurgent planners should not just take
for granted the meaning this space evokes. Let’s go deeper and examine how the deliberate
structuring of this space exemplifies the male-dominating, Western land ethic and how it might
be used, whether intentionally or not, as an exclusion device. An insurgent planner should be
mindful of the potentially detrimental discourses that help retain the Ivory Tower’s position of
power. Did the designers of the campus initially want to control certain bodies, particularly those
that are threatening and disruptive the campus’ reputation as a moral, orderly academic
powerhouse? The building’s design evokes the tradition of Newness; it successfully exhibits this
“special blend of avant-garde eccentricity” Hall uses to describe modernist principles (2004, p
261). Though the dominant narrative behind this space may be the pursuit of the production of
knowledge and construction of beauty, other narratives such as the suppression of protest and
feminist ways of knowing in terms of organizing space on campus may tell us a lot about its
hidden history. The construction of a new Reconciliation Center, which utilizes indigenous
principles of design, within this space hints at a transforming ethos, in which fantasies of control
and a habit of problematizing ‘bodies’ may give way to values of community and mutual learning.
Only by first recognizing the existence of white male desires around spatial configuration can
the decolonization of space occur.
Further reading: City of Monuments; City of Towers; Poem of Male Desires
3. CAFÉ DEUX SOLEIL: WHERE THE ARTS/ MUSIC
EPISTEMOLOGY COMES ALIVE
By showing the achievements of professional planners in the city like those behind the Livable
City Strategy, this book would be contributing to the already embarrassing record of urban
history. This history left out the contribution of diverse communities and alternative ways of
planning and knowing (i.e., community building, the arts as an engagement tool) outside of
master planning. Instead, I want to bring the focus onto the individuals and communities that
have been marginalized such as the black, indigenous, and LGBTQ communities. They have
comprised a persistent form of place making and social, economic, and cultural development. I
now introduce you to Café Deux Soleil, a place where various ontologies can coexist and
activities that involve remembering, healing, and planning comes alive. Here, planning isn’t a
future-oriented activity, but it involves grappling with historical and ongoing struggles. Various
individuals occupying this space have developed systems of explanation to interpret crises of
modernization such as displacement and resource extraction. In this site, many a master of
spoken word, improv, and music have performed their reflective art pieces, often within the
genres of rap, blues, jazz, and traditional indigenous music. The activities occurring within this
space help establish a ‘safe haven’ and a refreshing change from top-down control to bottom-
up resistance.
Further reading: Regional Blocs, Regional Planning, and the Blues Epistemology; Racial Inequality and Empowerment; Remember, City of Towers
4. THE OLD AND THE NEW: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
AND BURNABY MOUNTAIN
Take the bus or train toward the SFU Burnaby Campus. Upon arrival at the university, you will
see a concrete monumental masterpiece, the typically austere work of Vancouver’s notable
architects, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey. The space consists of concrete pillars, a pond,
and open terraces; it is one of Vancouver’s relics of the modernist age. Assuming the role of an
insurgent planner might lead one to ask who was denied access to the space. In addition, we
would make attempts to understand the larger context and history underlying this space. First,
it is important to mention that according to various sources, First Nations communities had
virtually no input into the design of the SFU campus. In addition, we will have to venture beyond
the SFU campus, spatially and temporally and familiarize ourselves with the traditional cultural
properties and practices on Burnaby Mountain. In its 1000-year history, this mountain has played
a role for the Coast Salish people as a hunting and gathering site. Today, it continues to play an
important role, acting as a battleground for the Coast Salish peoples against the oil and gas
industries. Recall the arrests at the Kinder Morgan pipeline protests and see that more than just
a modernist architecture project, this place remains a nucleus for conflicting space claims and
resistance. We think telling more than one story, or more accurately, telling the ‘whole story,’ is
needed to inspire insurgent planners into safeguarding what has been neglected in cultural
heritage practice.
Further Reading: Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives on Preservation Planning; City of Monuments; City of Towers
5. THE VILLAGE OF WHOI WHOI: STANLEY PARK BEFORE
IT WAS A PARK
If left up to a Western-centric urban historian to impart knowledge about Stanley Park, he might
begin the account of its history from 1888 onwards. He might tell you the park was inspired by
Frederick Law Olmsted’s design ideas and that the City of Vancouver’s Parks Board was another
hero behind the transformation of the supposed virgin forest into an emblem of sustainability,
livability, regionally-conscious thinking for the city. It is the duty of this insurgent planning guide
to problematize this image as a distortion of history. Under the rhetoric of regional planning,
Stanley Park was crafted into the pristine landscape it is today by prioritizing so-called higher
uses of land. In our insurgent account, we add that this framework called for removing,
destroying, erasing, cleansing, and falsely replicating the history of the space from the original
Whoi Whoi village. We must recognize the original communities who inhabited the space and
used it for their traditional activities. These communities include the Musqueam, Squamish, and
Tseil-Waututh and later, the early European settlers whom the City labelled as ‘squatters’. By
referring to this space as Whoi Whoi rather than Stanley Park, we revisit the past by recognizing
how other accounts have minimized First Nations contributions to place-making in the city and
ignored the misdeeds of “aggressive land campaigns” (Sandercock 1998, p 101).
Further reading: The City in the Garden; The City in the Region; Indigenous Planning, Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives
on Preservation Planning
6. MOLE HILL CO-HOUSING: PLANNING FROM BELOW
In Making the Invisible Visible, Sandercock (1998) states that “the possible is rooted in
heterogeneity of lived experience…the ethnographic present” (p 53). A space need not be a
utopian experiment nor the brainchild of a white male, socialist Enlightenment intellectual.
Planning is not just a science, but also an art (Hall 2004, p 393). If this guidebook’s mission is
to re-educate planners and urbanists about what planning for the possible looks like, then along
with dispelling myths about what makes Vancouver a planner’s paradise, we must highlight
some planning successes not normally discussed in textbook accounts of Vancouver’ s planning
history. Here we offer an alternative account of what constitutes the well-planned city.
Vancouver’s recent co-housing experiments, which aim to improve urban life for women by
women, exemplify the envisioning of alternative urban futures outside of a heteronormative
planning perspective. It shows that planning heroes were not all men living between the 18th
and 20th centuries but that women have played and continue to play a huge role in city making.
The cohousing experiment is not outward looking, state-led, top-down, master planned, or
utopian. Rather it is community-led experiment where eco-living meet feminist, social design
and is executed today to meet practical and current needs through its alternative live/work/play
environments, intergenerational community living, community-based childcare, and localized
food production, all while empowering diverse social, age, and gender groups.
Further reading: Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship; Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives on Preservation Planning; City
Planning for Girls; The in the Garden; The City in the Region; The City of Theory
7. MUSQUEAM GARDEN: GARDEN UTOPIA MEETS
INSURGENT CITIZENSHIP
The world of planning that Hall acknowledges in his 500-page history extends beyond the
state-led or market-based development activities since the evolution of the urban sanitation
movement, the garden cities movement, the regional cities movement, the modernist
movement, the renewal movement, and the more recent neoliberal and postmodern
movements. Planning is not only about architecture and dimensions of space, but about the
people who inhabit that space. An alternative planning investigation, the one used to inform
this guidebook, would look at the “insurgent form of the social embedded in the present”
(Sandercock 1998, p 54). For a while, it was thought that that the original inhabitants of
Vancouver did not engage in ‘proper’ planning and were unfit as stewards of the land by
leaving it vacant instead of converting it to higher purposes like large-scale agriculture and
property development. However, this space demonstrates that planning by these communities
does indeed occur in the form of living with the land. Unlike Howard’s Garden City vision and
Wright’s dream of the Broadacre City, this ‘back to the land’ initiative emphasizes the values of
community building, accessibility, and inclusion in our inner cities. Indigenous planning, in the
form of a historical clan system, regional trade networks, and ecologically-conscious land use,
pre-dated Western colonial planning. Planning has been as much about the social as the
physical. The Musqueam Garden at the UBC Farm is just one recent example of where this
planning with the land and for the wellbeing of the community. It is the epitome of insurgent
citizenship and an underappreciated form of place-making for its mutual learning, healing, and
community building benefits.
Further reading: Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship; Indigenous Planning; Racial Inequality and Empowerment; The City of
Theory; The City of Monuments, The City of Highways
Works Cited
Barman, J. (2007). Erasing indigenous indigeneity in Vancouver. BC Studies, (155) 3, 3-30.
Hall, P. (2014). Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design since 1880. John Wiley & Sons.
Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project [Web log post]. (2016). Retrieved October 2017, from http://hogansalleyproject.blogspot.ca
Puzon, B. (2017). “The history of Coast Salish peoples on Burnaby Mountain”. The Peak. Retrieved October 2017, from ….
Sandercock, L. (Ed.). (1998). Making the invisible visible: A multicultural planning history (Vol. 2). Univ of California Press.
Wolfe, J. (1994). Our common past: An interpretation of Canadian planning history. Plan Canada, 34(4), 12-34.