Views on a Vancouver in Decline

Okay, PT readers, time to move on from the Spaxman piece before Godwin’s Law comes into play.  Here’s another chewy piece to get you going …

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Exit, Voice and Loyalty for a Vancouver in Decline

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Meg Holden, Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University (mholden@sfu.ca)

Personal caveat: I believed in the prospect of urban sustainability before it was fashionable. The rise of environmental sustainability policy in the 1990s in B.C., when I was an undergraduate student – historic events and initiatives like the Commission on Resources and the Environment, the Land and Resources Management Process, and the Clayoquot Sound protests – were formative for me.

At the same time, rather than keep me in the woods, this all drove me to continue my studies in New York City, when poor graduate students could still afford to live in Lower Manhattan, when opting to cycle on the streets meant you probably did have a death wish, just like the drivers shouted at you from their windows. I came home to B.C. before Michael Bloomberg’s dreamweaving machine proved to the world that big, loud, and tough cities could also be green, provided sufficient pipes to pour the capital.

I raise this caveat to say that my readers have every right to be suspicious of my pro-urban bias on sustainability. But my reader, it isn’t what you think. I do not think our cities, not even Vancouver, are the solution to the problem we wealthy people have with limits, nor the problems we have living alongside more-than-human nature. At the same time, I don’t think that old saw about “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” applies to urban sustainability work, here or elsewhere.

The case I’d like to make is that: for a civilization in decline, as ours is, our cities offer us more opportunity to learn from our mistakes. That’s it. I don’t think we have much hope for much more. Nor do I think this is as pessimistic a stance as it sounds at first blush.

Vancouverites, our city is also in decline. I cringe to write this, knowing that most of you readers will have invested significant heart, years and material contributions to Vancouver’s success as a city. I want to say to all of you, head-on: the decline is not your fault. Most of it is not of our choosing or our making. And yet, here we are, with ever more to prove to ever more watchful creditors; making ever more frivolous and private demands of a limited, though rich, piece of our planet; and less patience, a lower margin of error for our experiments that may fail.

No, I’m not talking about the real estate “bubble” – I don’t have to, the sense of decline in our city is so much more tangible. We’ve lost touch with the idea of a clean green city when we are ready to accept a proposal for an expanded pipeline in which one graphically articulated possible scenario has oil gushing into the Fraser River from the Port Mann bridge to the George Massey tunnel. And a majority of us are nonetheless not sufficiently bothered to consider not driving in a car.

We are facing 1-2 degrees warmer temperatures in the same generation that will see a million new residents. We see declines in the vitality of all natural systems on which our lives ultimately depend, from the beleaguered bees to the acidified shellfish, to the foreshore and waters that suck up our pollution without us even bothering to monitor what all we are toxifying, most of the time. The air quality implications alone of becoming a major global hub for coal and tar sands oil transportation to fuel hungry shores – need I list the other risks and disastrous hypocrisies inherent in playing this ‘gateway’ role?

Declines in equity, with homelessness on the rise again at the bottom of the spectrum and reckless wealth burning rubber and plastic almost anywhere you cast a glance, responsible for that pervasive sense of confusion, betrayal, and distance from other people that so many of us carry in our gut. Declines in hospitality, particularly severe when you face the fact that we are not taking care of all our children, 1 in 5 of whom lives in poverty province-wide, the worst record in the country.

Declines in the place-specificity, the unique and creative local attitude that we once brought to setting and cementing our city’s plan, as we chase the bigger fish of international exchange, branding and recognition.

Declines in even the memory of the meanings of this place, when we boast mindlessly of #1 rankings on resilience and liveability indices made by itinerant power brokers who see the world as an unevenly distributed soup of soylent green, who care nothing for our specific fruit trees, lookouts, farmers, park benches, let alone ideas, heritage, children and old folks.

What do we know about organizations in decline? The brilliant American political strategist from a generation ago, Albert O. Hirschman, summed up the options for dealing with organizations in decline in three simple words: exit, voice, and loyalty. Both exit – voting with your feet, getting the hell out of Dodge – and voice – lodging a complaint, lobbying your representative, organizing a protest, speaking to management – are legitimate ways in which members of an organization take action when they notice decline.

But the more you care about an organization, the more you want to use the power of voice instead of the power of exit. The reason is straight forward: when people leave an organization in decline without first telling others why they are going, the organization loses important, timely information it could use to improve itself. Over time, this becomes a compounding problem as the only people left to speak for the organization in decline are those who weren’t able to recognize the decline in its earlier stages or who didn’t care enough about the decline to leave. It turns out that a move from exercising exit to exercising voice is also a move toward local democracy, which is important when the organization in question is your city.

The good news is there are signs of a shift from exit to voice in Vancouver. It is flawed and full of warts, but it is still an important trend to hang onto, certainly in the face of the flat-out race away from voice that we see at our higher order organization in decline: the Government of Canada. Put the Canadian people and the Government of Canada together on the beach in bright sunshine and you could hear the grains of sand weathering underfoot.

After World War II, that’s how we North Americans treated our cities, too. We abandoned them, we invented the suburbs, and many of us have been holding our tongues in the garage ever since. Most American cities have never recovered from this exit. Lucky, lucky us, Vancouver fared considerably better at that time.

Nowadays, across our whole region, a new idea is sinking in: the idea that there is no exit from the city. More and more, we are all in. The Translink Mayors Council, consisting of urban and suburban municipalities, is united in its advocacy for more, better public transit; our only true glutton for automobile dependency is the Province. A 60-storey tower is going up in Surrey City Centre; a 10-storey apartment building sits proudly in Pitt Meadows, comfortable that it belongs there. When all but one of Metro Vancouver’s municipalities is now building more multifamily than single family homes, the suburban/urban split of the last generation no longer applies. When you pop your head into a public meeting at any of the region’s town halls to find advocates for high-density housing and development on the same side as farmland advocates, the split no longer applies. Across the region, we are all coming around to a realization that a good city region is the best we might just get.

(The action of exit is out of favour, in our city, but we are nevertheless being “exited,” treated as an invisible, insignificant, ineffective populace by higher orders of government. We are being treated like no more than a logistical hub with some kinks in it by the Province and by the Government of Canada, when it comes to their priorities of managing the flow-through of fossil fuel resources out to international markets as quickly as possible.)

We are exercising voice when we get, and when we give, serious kinds of publicly-articulated goals and plans, solemn treatment to public participation in local governance and to other kinds of public displays and even private conversations about our city. I would even include as exercises of voice: new forms of partnerships, new roles and cross-over relationships. The exercise of voice is anything that draws out new participants and voices, new ways of turning voices into other kinds of actions, that we wouldn’t have thought of without the conversation.

It is of course almost complete cacophony, at present. Very literally babble, in the sense of many different languages speaking past one another, all at once. And sometimes hugely conflict-ridden, like when thousands converge in Langley against a proposed medium density housing development, when a youth organization experiments with growing wheat in the city using some public funds, or when a well-used road for cars gets converted into a sparsely-used road for bicycles. The key to the power of voice is the very fact that so many of us care enough about this stuff to reach up to pull out our hair and start hollering.

Loyalty is the third key to Hirschman’s framework, and it is what the outcome in our action to save Vancouver from decline really hinges upon. Loyalty, our feelings of attachment of self with our city, is what compels us to choose voice over exit in a spirit of hope. Loyalty can also interfere with the signals provided by the other two kinds of action – leading people to fail to recognize evidence of decline, to refuse to exit and to keep their mouths shut. Loyalty always plays some role in decisions about responding to decline in an organization that has personal meaning and value. The question is: to what idea, what version of Vancouverism are we loyal?

Are we loyal to the Vancouverist thinking that busts urban planning and policy conventions, like the notion that downtowns are not intended for “living first,” that land use and transportation are two separate planning issues, as are agricultural and green space planning, that a functioning metropolitan region has only one core, that social housing is a different animal than market housing? Or have we already settled for the piecemeal Vancouverist vision that gave us bite-sized brands like “ecodensity” and “Vancouver green capital”?

Are we loyal to a Vancouver that strives for equity, the outlandish idea of “revitalization without displacement” and 55% affordable housing in Vancouver’s False Creek South, that gives us an almost-legal, absolutely vital, subsistence economy street market every Sunday in Pigeon Park? Or have we shrugged this off for the aggressive green city that vaunts its performance on international green, livable, and resilient ranking lists regardless of the validity of these lists, and brand-conscious images of “resort city Vancouver” (try singing it to the Club Med theme: “hands up, baby, hands up …”)?

Are we loyal to strong, infrastructure-based, ground-up ideas of how to build an energy-efficient, non-polluting city that can continue to operate to our benefit and our children’s benefit even as sea levels, temperatures, energy and commodity prices, and populations rise, as shocks become normal, other orders of government sometimes hostile, and as disposable incomes shrink? Or are we willing to swallow the docile, nihilist, face-saving, voluntary checklist sort of approach, negotiating in the dark and aiming for no more than a zero sum game, winning a competition amongst a league of cities all sinking into a warming, churling, churning tide, becoming increasingly hostile to one another, losing real ground radically as the stakes rise?

Much depends on what piece of Vancouver’s vision and history we are loyal to, and how we gather our powers of voice to recognize and respond to our city’s decline.

A version of this article was presented at the SCARP Symposium Planning the Metropolitan Vancouver Region: A Critical Perspective, April 16, 2014.