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.