My Business in Vancouver column:
There may be just over a thousand of you – graduates of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) – but you’ve swung above your weight.
SCARP grads have served not only Vancouver, but also cities all over the world. Some have gone on to be leaders: a premier, a prime minister, mayors and councillors. Some are even developers. For 60 years, SCARP has trained the people who plan and shape the world we build.
Credit for the school goes to Peter Oberlander, the professor who convinced American philanthropist Paul Mellon to write a cheque for a half-million dollars to really get the place going. And it was Oberlander who played a critical role in the Great Freeway Fight in 1971 when he resigned in front of a packed meeting of council as head of the planning commission after delivering his report – and delivered the death blow to the freeway’s credibility.
In the end, though, SCARP remains Oberlander’s most important legacy.
From the 1970s on, it was the “community” in SCARP that distinguished the school. A generation of planners became not bureaucratic bylaw crafters and masters of the coloured maps, but “facilitators for the community” – articulating the concerns of citizens who were fearful of the kind of growth that could demolish their neighbourhoods but felt voiceless in the face of “progress.”
When neighbourhood planning was introduced to Vancouver in the 1970s, its ranks were populated by SCARP graduates and interns employed and trained by the city. And because Vancouver has special powers through its charter and could control zoning and development in a way that gave planners some remarkable powers of discretion, this was the place that became the laboratory for “the livable city.”
Indeed, Vancouver began to take for granted that it was one of the world’s most livable cities. It also began to take for granted that it could accommodate growth without disturbing its cherished quality of life.
During the 1990s and 2000s, it was almost easy. One set of planners could focus on shaping growth in the places where it met little resistance – the north shore of False Creek and Coal Harbour – and all the new neighbourhoods on brownfields and underperforming asphalt – Arbutus, Collingwood, East Fraser Lands – while leaving the developed parts of the city, from the West End to Kensington, more or less alone.
At the same time, another set of planners was charged with traditional neighbourhood processes, particularly in places where the growth rate had slowed to practically zero and people were anxious about any change, except rising property values. Planners were there to help ease these neighbourhoods into the future, but never so fast that it would change their character, which, as growth slowed, became measured in ever-tinier increments.
It worked.
Since Expo 86, Vancouver built enough condos, townhouses and apartments to accommodate both the homegrown and the newcomer – perhaps a couple of thousand new units a year – without much complaint. The planners exercised regulatory authority, negotiated agreement and accommodated growth with such skill that they achieved almost mythical status. And then they went on to teach at SCARP, where they could assess their students, hire the best and train them in the culture of the city – in the same way that the engineering department did at another UBC school.
SCARP, however, was just not a parochial finishing school for the city on its border. It increasingly emphasized sustainability at an international, almost planetary, scale and broadened its catalogue by attracting a more diverse faculty. But it’s not clear today whether it can accommodate itself and its values to a different set of requirements for its hometown.
In the 2010s it will no longer be easy for Vancouver to accommodate growth. It is essentially built out. And finding space for that additional 1,500 to 2,000 units a year without disruption to existing neighbourhoods is probably impossible. Unfortunately, change that’s acceptable isn’t change that’s sufficient. Even as some communities grow more resistant to visible change – like some West Enders’ reaction to new highrise proposals – the need will grow greater.
SCARP and the Vancouver planning department have always had a mutually supportive relationship. At 60, the school can reflect with pride on its past and decide whether, in the spirit of Peter Oberlander, it can now be the forceful advocate for a different kind of city. •
