Vancouver City Guide for Insurgent 21St Century Planners and Urbanists
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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.