Here’s the unedited text of my most recent column in Business in Vancouver:
Ah, Paris: the city that lives up to its cliches. They really do play sentimental accordion music on the streets, the elderly busker in the Metro really is singing “Je ne regette rien,” the women really are astonishingly chic. (Do they all take scarf-tying lessons in kindergarten?)
The mystery of Paris is what you don’t see. How do they manage to wire a town for the 21st century that looks like it hasn’t changed since the days of Haussmann? Where are the garbage dumpsters? In fact, where’s all the traffic? This is, after all, one of the densest cities in Europe.
Take the entire population of Metro Vancouver, concentrate it all in the City of Vancouver minus the downtown peninsula, build hardly a thing over eight storeys, and that’s the Ville de Paris. But that is not where I am.
I’m sitting in a conference centre in La Defense, the largest corporate centre in Europe. This cluster of highrise headquarters for France’s biggest corporations rises just beyond the low-rise arrondissements – a shadowy skyline at the western end of the historic axis that begins with the Louvre Pyramid and climaxes at the Grand Arche.
EPAD, the public body responsible for La Defense, has brought together representatives of the world’s businesses districts, from London’s Canary Wharf to Shanghai’s Pudong, to talk about sustainability. Well, I figure, isn’t everyone?
But the rhetoric they’re using would make David Suzuki seem almost reticent. The tone is set by Patrick Devedjian, the President of EPAD: “We are fighting for the survival of the planet.” Says Bernard Bled, the General Manager: “We are in a race. Everything is secondary to climate change. We have an absolute obligation to pool our knowledge, skills and know-how to steel ourselves against the impending dangers.”
This isn’t just Gallic excess. Debbie McMullen, head of the London Plan Team designing the east end of the city for the Olympics, affirms that her Mayor, Ken Livingstone, is passionate about climate change. “The future depends on how we deal with it.” When the keynote speaker, former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, argues that carbon pricing will come in the form of a tax on the exports of jurisdictions that fail to price in the cost at source, no one blinks. Hello, Alberta.
And hello, Vancouver. We, it seems, have come close to what the conference agrees will be the new model for business districts: we have “mixity” – above all, a large residential population that gives vitality to what are otherwise sterile, single-use corporate centres that shut down at five. La Defense, for instance, has 150,000 jobs and 20,000 residents within an area roughly equal to our downtown peninsula, where 135,000 people come to work but where 85,000 live.
Around False Creek, at least, we have densities equivalent to or above those in Europe. Because we’re a city without freeways, core Vancouverites have adopted an equivalent lifestyle: we walk, we shop locally, we enjoy the spectacle of the street.
And just when I’m thinking we have so much more to do, that we’re still not taking sustainability seriously, that no leader would speak with the frankness or urgency of those at La Defense, I check the home-town news on line.
Surprise: the provincial government has become the first jurisdiction in North America to introduce a carbon tax. That balloon has flown.
We have lived up to our own cliché. •
Hi,
It’s about time that more governments pulled their weight in dealing with this problem, but I have a feeling that they will leave it to the public to do, and will only act when forced to do it.