Adventures in Sustainable Urbanism by Robert Krueger & Tim Freytag & Samuel Mossner

Author:Robert Krueger & Tim Freytag & Samuel Mossner [Krueger, Robert & Freytag, Tim & Mossner, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development
ISBN: 9781438476490
Google: 7j68DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44900774
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Field Trip

THE CHINATOWN FREEWAY DEBATES: THE GEORGIA AND DUNSMIR VIADUCTS, STRATHCONA, AND HOGAN’S ALLEY

You might wonder why a tour of Vancouver’s sustainability policies is starting beneath a freeway overpass. It’s not technically a freeway overpass—because there’s no freeway, just the overpass. We begin this tour by standing under an artefact of the past. The concrete roadway above us is the Georgia Viaduct, a remnant of a failed plan to bring a freeway through the heart of Vancouver in the 1970s. Public opposition to this plan is often credited with “saving” the city, its walkability, its neighborhood feel. In stories of Vancouver’s success as a sustainable city, it is a defining moment.

Coupled with a middle-class preference for suburban development, a narrative of “urban decay” accompanied urban planning in North America from the 1950s onward. In Vancouver, the rationale for implementing large-scale urban restructuring projects was based on this narrative and undergirded by a stagnant economy, depopulation, changing—often racialized—populations, and increased crime and poverty. These modernist projects often consisted of highways, public housing developments, and modernist high-rise office buildings, while destroying historic neighborhoods and displacing (often poor and nonwhite) communities. While the depopulation and stagnant economies were not as severe in most Canadian cities as they were in the United States, urban planners, politicians, and economic stakeholders nevertheless worried about these tendencies (Ward, 1999).

Vancouver was no different; city planners and business stakeholders advocated for auto-centered development as a way of rationally moving people—increasingly traveling by cars—in and out of downtown; easily linking existing commercial centers; and increasing truck access to the main port (Liscombe, 2011; MacKenzie, 1985). The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, built in 1972, are the only completed part of a 1960 development plan, put forward by the Vancouver Board of Trade that advocated a forty-five-mile network of freeways linking up the metropolitan region (MacKenzie, 1985). The appetite for car-oriented development was so great that, with the 1960 Board of Trade plan still on the table, Project 200,2 a Vancouver waterfront redevelopment was introduced around the same time. It included an “oceanview” freeway running along the scenic English Bay and the destruction of the oldest parts of the city—Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona—in favor of Modernist high-rise towers and a freeway exit leading commuters straight to their parking garages on the waterfront. However, Project 200 never came to fruition. In 1971, the federal government stated that money slated for urban redevelopment in the province of British Columbia would not be used for a freeway system in the Vancouver region.

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