Imagine for a moment that you’re driving your car or riding the bus up the Georgia Viaduct, then past the Art Gallery on Georgia Street - so stately and official looking with all its neoclassical charm. In a straight line you traverse the grid of crossroads, through the valley of shimmering highrises that line the broad thoroughfare as it curves into majestic Stanley Park.
People jogging on the seawall, riding their bikes, walking home with groceries in hand, animating the sidewalks with their busyness, offices, residences, restaurants, parks and retail all beautifully thrown together in a hectic but surprisingly coordinated way.
Ideas come and go, but a measure of permanence remains in the lasting presence of those ideas within the built form of cities. Vancouver is one of the youngest, newest major cities in North America. Because of this it has been subject to much experimentation and adoption of innovative and controversial ideas that have been put forward by urban thinkers as it has grown and developed in the past century and a quarter.
In those few blocks above that you’ve just traveled you’ve also traveled through a good portion of that diverse urban thinking and planning practice.
We tend to move through our urban environment relatively shut off to the historical context and language of architecture and planning - architects, planners, urbanists, designers and a few other hyper-aware types aside.
Granted, we the aforementioned cabal geek out on this stuff week in week out, and it could be argued that all but the boldest of planning interventions and architectural expressions are quite innocuous when you’re rushing around between work, picking up the kids at school and everything in between. Side note, doesn't it feel good to pick up the kids at school again?
As Vancouver’s municipal election fast approaches I can’t help but be even more hyper-aware of the development of the city I have grown up in, the city that has grown up around me, as I consider the various parties and candidates vying for influence of our town’s future. This three part piece will take a look back at what urban ideas, themes, and trends have literally built our city, where we might be going, and how our vote plays a part in Vancouver’s future urban development.
In those five blocks we traveled through earlier, from the eastern edge of the peninsula to Stanley Park, we encountered the influence of many great urban thinkers of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Robert Moses’ freeway-centric planning, most famously exhibited in New York City’s parkways and expressways and closer to home, Portland’s bridges and freeways that hack right through its urban core. Yes Portland, that Portland, is replete with Robert Moses' influence. But also with that of his detractors.
In Vancouver our viaducts were erected to connect to a similar Robert Moses-esque freeway system that was never built, thanks to Vancouverites organizing in opposition to it. Similar to Jane Jacobs in New York. A little further on we travelled past Daniel Burnham’s City Beautiful Movement at work in our neoclassical Art Gallery. Creating a stately public monument that projects a very deliberate antiquated civic aesthetic.
Modernists like Le Corbusier with his grand totalizing designs for efficient and “liberating” cities gave us clearly separated zoning with modernist towers climbing above urban corridors, Georgia Street reminds me of a sketch from his Radiant City. We saw sidewalks filled with pedestrians, eyes on the street as Jane Jacobs put it, and finally we came to Stanley Park, a jewel of Garden City planning ethos made popular in the early 20th century by Ebenezer Howard, and emulated by others who felt the cure to bad urbanism and the horrors of the industrial city was a reintroduction of nature. Enjoy James Howard Kunstler’s amusing and entertaining diatribe about this here. Our urban environment has been indelibly shaped by the ideas of great urban thinkers and the successive political leaders, planners, developers and architects who have put them into practice over the decades.
So with all that in mind, what kind of city is Vancouver? And where is Vancouver going?
Vancouver is many things to many people. To some it’s first and foremost a port city, a gateway city for importing and exporting resources and commodities. For others it’s a leisure city and a retirement city, while for others still it’s a startup city, a city of students and a city of innovators.
It’s an investment city, drawing capital from the reaches of the globe, while at the same time it is a broke, indebted and unaffordable city to many of its inhabitants. Vancouver is a multicultural city, a mongrel city, and a global city, yet an intensely local city (see you at the farmer's market). It’s a colonizing city, a hegemonic city of capitalist cultural reproduction, yet it’s a city of activism and resistance.
Above all these things Vancouver is a young city, coming of age in a complex time of change and challenges. Ones that perplex, bend and shake institutions. Vancouver is growing into itself in the crucible of a paradigm shift between the past we've tried to hold on to and the future we are being thrust into it.
In this respect there has never been a better time than now to draw upon the ideas and dreams of great urban thinkers and to question which of them are reflected in the various civic parties and candidates we have the opportunity to choose from several weeks from now.
So between now and November 14, this series of posts attempts to do just that. Posts that examine Vancouver in the context of Great Urban Thinkers and considers how their work or their ideas have contributed to our city taking shape in the way that it has. How their ideas may help us make sense of where we’ve come from and perhaps where we may be going. I hope you’ll check back and comment.
I hope we can have a conversation about our city that will be useful to us as urban citizens as November 15 fast approaches. We only get this chance once every three years (every four years after this election) and I for one think we should approach it thoughtfully.