Thanks to Patrick Foong Chan, my friend at the City, for sending me this article “The branding of Vancouver”.
Green is to Vancouver what “love” is to Paris, “history” is to Rome and “movies” are to L.A. And that’s not just tree-green, veggie-green, or 420 green. It’s dollar green. – Denise Ryan
The article, by Denise Ryan, notes that Vancouver’s “green brand” has been evaluated at a worth of $31 billion. The brand is put at risk from oil spills, pipelines, non-sustainable agendas, and the urban fabric we may choose to make. What is there to lose with your brand? Without a strong brand, your city risks losing its investment capital from any markets related to it.
The piece underscores the affect a strong brand can have on housing affordability, which is a valid concern. Personally, I am also concerned that if we only consider Vancouver’s “green-ness” as a brand we may also corporatize the whole city in the process. One of the big problems I have with corporations is they don’t take any risks, and a monoculture is forcibly overlaid onto an otherwise unique and creative bunch of people. Despite much praise for its success, I consider perfectly clean Olympic Village an example of overvaluing the brand and undervaluing the culture. Spandex Urbanism, as it is called by Bruce Haden.
Green Brand personified as architecture? – Model of Olympic Village
I think for Vancouver to mature as a city, we will have to appreciate that sometimes the City is going to have to experiment outside of the brand. The agony over the new Vancouver Art Gallery design has been illustrative of important brand experimentation. I personally believe this kind of work should not be so quickly dismissed because it is different from our existing brand. Of similar controversy is moving the Downtown Eastside Famer’s Market from Carrall Street into an armpit of Vancouver – to avoid tarnishing the “brand”.
I recently spoke with Janette Kim, principal of All of the Above, who suggested that the brand can be subverted to the benefit of the community: “the green brand can be used to seduce corporations into doing good.”
How many intangibles are left unaddressed when our city is designed around a brand? Should we embrace our “green brand” or is there an alternative approach we can take to Vancouver’s urban design?
We love our “green” brand. We like nothing more than to hear people from elsewhere say “Oh Vancouver, you’re so green.” But when people come from some of the most polluted places on earth to buy up our real estate, we’re not so happy.
The greener we get, the more the world will see us as a safer haven for whatever they have to save, and that mostly means themselves and their money, both of which can only put more pressure on the real estate market. With record-setting pollution in China this year and a growing awareness among the Chinese people that it will get worse for decades before it gets better, there are more people than we can possibly imagine thinking that Vancouver would be a better place to live and raise their kids. We should be planning for that.
Speaking of branding, I’d say calling what happens in Pigeon Park a “farmers market” sounds pretty optimistic.
Here’s Keith Ippel in the Globe & Mail on Vancouver’s strengths, seen from the point of view of an entrepreneur and advisor to startup companies. And the strength is in the green brand, he says.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/we-only-need-one-silicon-valley-vancouver-has-its-own-strengths/article28761374/
“For too long, Vancouver has been known as a copycat city – first Hollywood North, now Silicon Valley North. It’s time we stop trying to emulate others. Instead, we should embrace our unique identity and role in the global tech scene on our own terms.. . .
. . . . For Vancouver, the framework is already solid, with the passion and talent for sustainability and impact already ingrained into much of the city. What needs to be done is to create a cohesive plan between stakeholders and major players such as the government, educational institutes, capital and the community at large. The city as a whole must embrace the new focus if it is to be cultivated and brought to display on the global stage.”
+1 … I think the ‘Green City’ is a great brand, and that it should be more than just a brand, it should be intrinsic to the city.
We should be more than a name, if you prick us, should we not bleed green?
I wrote this as the last post in ‘my’ week editing the blog … that there are so many things which could make the city truly green, and that I hope we start down that path. There are so many green industries here (from tidal energy, to hydrogen cars, to battery powered ferries … Vancouver truly has the ability to own ‘Green’ if it would try.
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/no-space-for-sunny-in-a-greenest-city/
God I despise cynical talk about branding, like originality needs to be covered by a veneer. “Branding” is a word from the myopic world of corporate marketing, and it is often used to co-opt substance and reverse-bake it into fluff, like authenticity can be formulated. Millions are made holding marketing conferences on branding for people who can’t think for themselves.
Vancouverism and killing freeways and bringing high density to downtowns and creating the Livable Regions Strategic Plan and linking nodes with rapid transit and converting private industrial waterfront space into public space and protecting urban farmland and achieving 50% walking/bike/transit mode share and focusing on the human scale in urban design and creating West Coast Modernism along with local Neo-Modernism using sustainable materials and an urban economy that thrives when resource commodities are down ……..
These are not the products of identity that some board is paid to conjure up for a city. Furthermore, most of the above components were intrinsically green decades before solar PV came down in price and green roofs became the fashion of the day.
This talk of branding is like saying the Beatles were the product of corporate marketing. The fact is, they went against the grain of the music industry marketing strategies of the day and wouldn’t give up their originality for the world. They were turned down by Decca Records. EMI picked them up only reluctantly. The corporate branders choked on their dust for years.
The fact that your cannot brand authenticity is proven by history.
I think you confuse corporate branding with a city brand. They are related but different. As you pointed out a city can’t create or fully control a brand. But it can do its best to maintain the brand (if it’s a positive perception) and maybe even improve it if possible, by how the city is run, develops and markets itself to businesses and tourism. It would be foolish for Vancouver to disregard how it is perceived in the world.
+1 (we were writing at the same time)
I said you cannot brand authenticity. It stands on its own. Branding doesn’t. It has to be wrapped around the authentic or else it is hollow.
And the city most certainly does have a corporate communications department that deals with branding on a daily basis.
My main point is that the Art Deco Marine Building of the 30s and Art Phillips’ TEAM-inspired freeway extermination project of the early 70s did not arise from a real estate communications or tourism strategy. They came from fine design and urbanism principles and speak for themselves.
A brand needs to be authentic, otherwise it doesn’t work and it’s not a brand. A brand is not a marketing gimmick or a communications tool. A brand represents in people’s minds what the city is about.
Further, if Gregor and Vision really want to do something authentic other than the Greenest City Plan, then let them obtain some bollocks to up-zone large open lots and have a competition or an award for innovative ideas to develop a Western Canadian sustainable residential model that addresses our high land prices, climate change and design excellence.
It won’t get any greener than that.
Agreed. Greenest City implies efficient housing that departs from the North American model. We need creative, sensitive, low-impact ways of bringing density to our single-family neighbourhoods, and the city should play a leading role in facilitating or sponsoring solutions. Laneway houses have been a success, but it makes lot titles even more expensive and adds to rental stock only. We need stratification and subdivision to allow more ownership at this scale. I think the backlash in Marpole to modest upzoning between Granville and Cambie discouraged the city from taking further risks in other single-family districts. But it has to happen sooner or later, and easily ties into Greenest City goals.
I completely agree. I think it can be done. Using incremental rezoning approvals on a small number of lots, perhaps with an annual cap on approvals in each neighbourhood, could work at a politically acceptable level. At least the tendency to buy/sell land assemblies and demolish at a Gold Rush pace would be dampened.
Look at the amount of new row-house zones that got approved in the west side Marpole (hardly any), and then look at the relatively substantial up-zoning that occurred in Norquay on the east side (lots of row-house/stacked townhouse zones). Maybe the city should focus on Eastside neighbourhoods that are less resistant to change.
Norquay wasn’t without a lot of protest too. I think both areas had towers on specific sites, so that added fuel to the fire.
I am talking about small-scale, incremental change, such as the conversion of occasional two lots to a half dozen rowhouses, not the wholesale demolition of an entire block at one time. Scale is probably one of the biggest issues here. In my neighbourhood large lots have been divided in two, several houses demo’d in a 1:1 replacement, and many new lane houses built all in a six-block square area within just a few years without mass protest.
If this housing issue cannot get resolved by career politicians out of a trembling fear of every NIMBY squeak and chirp, then we are indeed destined to outrageous prices and a crimped supply for a long, long time. Or we get rid of career politicians who are paralyzed into inaction. It doesn’t require radical action to start the ball rolling, and it will not require the wisdom of Solomon to maintain a steady state of incremental change.
I thought Norquay was small scale incremental change.
If I had things my way, I would immediately upzone 90% of the single detached homes in Vancouver, to row-house.
One important note, however, is that you’re correct that the Beatles didn’t spring out of a branded ‘British Invasion’, almost immediately after they hit it here, other brands did, and their being british gave them a social imprimatur which made it significantly easier for them to gain traction. They weren’t created by the brand (well, some basically were) but they were ‘made’ by it!
The corollary is Silicon Valley, Apple didn’t spring up because of its branded ‘Silicon-ness’, however, between ’74 and the early 80s, the brand ‘Silicon Valley’ was in significant use, and I think it would be hard to argue that its brand hasn’t had significant influence in the perpetuation of the area’s success. Yes, it needed to also walk the walk … but having done so, it was certainly aided by talking the talk.
You mention West Coast Modernism, I mentioned several other local green businesses types (and there are certainly others) … these are here intrinsically, and you’re right, have nothing to do with any branding, but recognizing that we have, luckily, these intrinsically green things here makes it reasonable to now name-this-thing-that-exists, and go with it.
There is a lot of power in naming things. In doing so, you go a long way to making them real, which in this case, ‘the Greenest City’, ain’t no bad thing, so long as there is the walk to go along with the talk.
There’s a good post here about naming things: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2015/01/three-golden-rules-naming-something.php
”
Rule #1: Don’t Overthink It. A name means nothing till those using it make it mean something.
Rule #2: Narrative. The best names have a story behind them that evokes the purpose and mission of the thing being named.
A name is just a word till it means something, and stories are how we give things meaning.
”
I can think of a lot of good that could be created by making some good stories about Vancouver’s ‘Green’ name/brand … you might be right that ‘you can’t brand authenticity’, but you can express your authenticity through a brand.
Vancouver is in many ways a green city, this is an authentic truth, lets make sure it stays that way, and also be creative in making it better/greener, and finally. lets address that which isn’t.
“They [the Beatles] weren’t created by the brand … but they were made by it.”
If you look at the timing and the music they were initially told to play, the “brand” followed far behind their highly original and creative arc for eight solid years and 500 original tunes. Originality sold their records, not marketing or communications strategy. EMI quickly learned to give them space and follow their lead in the studio, and tossed their former board-dictated rules into the bin.
It’s never been the same since.
Actually, parsing my sentence correctly, I didn’t say the Beatles were made by the brand, I said that other bands sprung out of a branded ‘british invasion’, and those bands were made by it (the ‘british invasion’). The Beatles were the first wave that created that which became the brand, (and in fact, the first mention of the term which became the brand ‘British Invasion’ did even precede their first show in the USA).
This allows my corollary to read the way I intended also: that West Coast Modernism didn’t spring out of a ‘Greenest City’ brand, but it was the among first wave of Green (first nations were a much earlier part of this wave yet), the existence of which allows us to recognize that a brand exists.
I agree with you completely that when you start talking about the brand, you have to start walking the walk, otherwise you do lose authenticity. I would like nothing more than for the city to be authentically the Greenest City, it isn’t yet, but it has good bones to start with.
Note also that the Rolling Stones started up at the same time and knew the Beatles just before the first EMI recording contract was signed. Both bands were playing the hard rock of their day with an emphasis on guitars and high energy vocals when the industry execs saw them as too underground and preferred Pat Boone and comedians.
BTW, the books written by Mark Lewisohn on the Beatles (and the era) are excellent.
Yes branding is important ( I have touched this topic in a old post, An avenue in Neuilly), but What we means by “green”?
Below is how my 1990 tourist guide (Guide du Routard) describes Vancouver:
“Surrounded by mountains and ocean, a beautiful, thought modern, city with great natural parks where respect of the Nature is obvious”.
That was the brand of Vancouver then, and is still now: it is perceived as “green” by association with “nature”, no more no less….The Olympic village, and all “greenest city” agendas have virtually nothing to do with this: you can see similar “green” agenda everywhere in the world (and the Vancouver one is rather tame compared to the Parisian one). Anyway building a city brand requires a time horizon much greater than an electoral mandate, and you build a brand only on asset you have, which are able to differentiate you from other, not the one which can be easily replicated everywhere.
To quote Dominique Alba (head of the parisian APUR) visting Vancouver in 2012:
Paris’ assets is the city itself, Vancouver’s assets is its surroundings.
So where Paris has spent considerable effort (especially under haussmann) to magnify the city,by levelling hills, widening and rectifying avenues alignment to open perspectives on the city landmarks, nowadays protected by “view corridor” (some in the 70’s has been destroyed, see here, but now those corridors are cherished). Vancouver has its view cone policy, protecting the perspective, and allowing the city to interact with, its beautiful surrounding: the main assets of Vancouver on which a brand can be build (unfortuantely, lately it has been put under threat here and there).
Vancouver cannot reasonably be compared to Paris. Some of the things we admire about the City of Light (now there’s a marketing phrase for you!) cannot possibly be replicated here, such as razing the DTES in order to punch through military-friendly boulevards, or imposing one material on all buildings in the core (limestone). I would never want to see the often violent Parisian history replicated here.
Central Paris is also economically distorted in the extreme because of the massive, blanket 19th Century heritage preservation bubble. I’m not saying heritage should be eliminated, but when done at such a large scale there has to be a relief valve. It was very wise from an economic point of view to build out the periphery as an economic release and to supply office space and housing for the poorer workers who keep the central city running, though architecturally and urban design-wise there are parts that are undesirable. The fact is, without the periphery, Central Paris would have collapsed economically long ago.
The things we can take to heart here about Paris is the sense that architecture, culture, history and art matter and can be brought right down to the street in a very big way where it’s accessible to all. Here, our streets are pathetic, mere conduits for traffic. The transit system struggles with the regional population of 12 million, but it works well when it’s adequately funded. Still, Paris achieves around a 60% walking/transit mode share, which is phenomenal, and individuals and families can save enough by not owning a car to afford to eat at a huge selection of wonderful cafes and attend concerts and museums more often.
Lastly, as you allude, Paris is not the product of marketing. It is original. Branding and marketing are only the thin skin covering the authentic body. Vancouver has more originality that you give it credit for too. But an obsession with ancient Eurotopia will not offer comparisons with any sense of equanimity with a very young city founded on colonialism.
I wonder how much the city paid to find out what our “green brand” is worth? Probably more than they will pay the Orwellian home energy efficiency scanner to drive around the city surreptitiously scanning your house for “greening” opportunities. Probably a lot more than they’ve spent looking at why so many of those homes are empty.
From the article. A professor speaks:
“Typically, market-oriented, competition-oriented greening has a perverse, paradoxical effect which involves driving low income people out of the centre of the city, to the suburbs and outlying areas.”
When you move the main transit users to the suburbs, and attract higher income people into the downtown who use transit less because they prefer cars, the carbon footprint of a region actually increases. …”
We all know that even though we are constantly hearing that more and more people are moving here and the zeitgeist buzz-words are that we must plan and build for the, “million more people that are coming”, we hear from TransLink that transit ridership is down. Maybe the professor is on to something.
What to do? Quickly zone for cheaper buildings to stop the flight to the suburbs is one possibility. Drop some of the onerous green imperatives to reduce costs and to allow people to renovate old buildings? We must remember that the pain we feel about the massive number of heritage house demolitions is partly because the City will not allow renovations without all new bells and whistles of sustainability and uber-green-ness and this usually far too expensive and impractical. It’s cheaper to knock it down and start again.
We really are so holy and pure and becoming quite Disneyesque. Were Norman Rockwell alive I’m sure he’d move here too.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/branding+vancouver/11686117/story.html?__lsa=e55b-9dd2&utm_content=bufferdbe47&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer#ixzz40RKl6KgN
While I agree that building more housing variety and supply will be beneficial, we depart on separate philosophical paths about the “green agenda” supposedly outpricing housing. Far from it. There is a Building Code, and to bring an old house up to Code for just the basic plumbing, structural frame, electrical, and general safety, can be expensive even before “green” items are added. Even so, average building costs have not increased by leaps and bounds even with “green” elements; these components are nominal.
You are also ignoring the very significant savings in life cycle operating costs with efficient appliances and heating systems and extra insulation. There is payback period, and it can be reached well before the 25-year mortgage amortization periods ends. All this can be subsidized with third party money from a rented suite.
You are also ignoring the fact that the bulk of Vancouver’s higher prices is in the land, not in the detached home structures, which are still pretty average when contracted new, but which have actually gone down with the latest assessments.
One thing I haven’t ignored is that the costs of renovating to bring an old building up to code is not something that anyone can add to a mortgage.
The cost of buying is high enough, so finding the cash for the initial down payment is a big challenge. If a buyer does not have a few more tens of thousands for updating renovations it can only be borrowed with collateral, which most young buyers do not yet have.
Yet another reason the young and the newly married will head out to new developments, which are already up to code and fully mortgageable.
The onerous and myriad city rules, regulations and costly permits that also apply to renovations as well as new builds are just another heavy burden that ensures the continual rapid demolition of the existing aging homes of Vancouver.
Indeed, I have friends who bought a character home with every intent of a massive renovation, until the hassle of the city’s “green” regulations convinced them just to tear down and start from scratch.
Can we please be clear to distinguish green code from every other bit of life-safety code. There is really very little in the code that has a ‘green’ justification as a priori reason for existence.
Additionally. Vancouver’s code varies little from the rest of the NBC, so you incur little real penalty from Green Vancouver vs anywhere else, and many codes regarding energy efficiency do pay for themselves over time if there is a cost.
There isn’t necessarily enough done to amortize the costs of efficiency over time, and reduce/eliminate the up front costs. But other places have done so. And so could that be done here.