Is this any way to build a city?

A new community center development at Kingsway and 7 th is a singular disaster of missed opportunity. This is how cities get ugly.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The physical space of the city we live and work inside of never came about according to anyone's master plan. Instead, each small patch of land was built on, or not, according to the desires and the relative political power of a vast array of people, from the various owners of that patch of land, to bureaucrats at City Hall who interpret and enforce development rules, to elected councilors who create the rules.

The result is the intricately woven hodge-podge of conflicting and compromised desires unevenly achieved over the space of a century, in the case of Vancouver, and ultimately represented by the streets, buildings, and parks that surround us.

Results can vary. One can tour cities around the world and think of them as singular organisms, and then declare them to be beautiful or ugly, convenient or frustrating, bustling or quiet, and prosperous or poor. The good attributes-beautiful, convenient, bustling, and prosperous-arise less because of wealth or geography, and more because of the leadership, vision, and energy of specific individuals who, in each good city's historic story, galvanized their citizenry and marshaled the power of their popular opinion to bring about the creation of real physical installations, be they specific buildings, or systems like transit, or individual parks.

There are forces that gather in opposition to the creation of beauty and convenience in cities, even if they aren't embodied in any particular humans. (There must be these negative forces, or every city in the world would be supremely beautiful!) Often it is bureaucratic inertia that harbours the resistance. Or it is a prevailing mindset among a citizenry that has them conditioned to collectively think bigger achievements are not possible, or to fail to even imagine such bigger achievements.

It is expecting too much to rely on the private sector to generate and satisfy the conditions that encourage leaders with vision to come to work in a city. It is an inescapable, iron-clad rule that in private capitalism, firms exist for the sole purpose of generating profit for their share owners. If private companies show concern about the positive development of the city in which they do business, it is only an accidental, fortuitous concern incidental to the main project of generating profits. Whatever leadership and vision can be found in the private sector cannot be relied upon as genuine, and cannot be trusted. The moment private company accountants declare support for the civic creation of green space to be one penny less profitable than the paving of parking lots instead, whatever that company said about green space, and its importance to the virtue of a city, is totally out the window. Investors will not have it any other way.

That means that if a city is to succeed at becoming beautiful, it can only begin to do so on the public sector side of the economy. Private developers can be urged (or tricked) through various incentives and penalties to contribute to the beauty and convenience of a city only when an example of what is possible is placed before them, challenging them to keep up. The people can only demand better from the private enterprises operating and making money in their city when they are able to imagine something better. They can only imagine something better if they see examples of it first.

This is why cities in which more citizens have traveled around the world are typically more beautiful and prosperous cities, and why cities whose citizens are closed-minded and insular are ugly and poor.

This is also why it is so important to see to it that public sector developments in one's city break new ground and lead the way by example to the more beautiful and convenient and prosperous city that the citizens imagine and desire. Public sector developments are rare events in a city, but as rare as they are, they remain the only possibility for citizens to imagine and express what they wish their future to be like. If the public sector-the City itself-does not expect much beauty or convenience in its own developments, the future of that city is bleak indeed, for that low aim will be the standard for all others creating developments in that city.

The proposed development by the City of 1 Kingsway, currently a City-owned vacant patch of land at Kingsway and 7 th Avenue, is a near perfect example both of what is possible, and the distance from there to what is being aimed for. In a city like Vancouver, straddling the cusp between becoming beautiful, and settling for uninspired drab, it is projects like this one that can tip it one way or the other.

Vancouver has not developed into a notably beautiful city. Nor is it particularly convenient, bustling, or prosperous. Take away the stunning panorama of snow-capped mountains that ring the city, and the sparkling Pacific Ocean that fronts it, and you're left with a widely sprawled-out, uninspired congealing of wood and plaster houses surrounding austere steel and glass towers that speak more to utility than to aesthetics. It is revealing that the site of spontaneous civic celebrations, like the local hockey team's near championship ten years ago, is a mere retail shopping street. Further east up the same street is the site of large public sector-created buildings and yards where officially-sanctioned public events are conducted. But this public space is routinely spurned for the private space further west when the public is left to their own choices.

This is a city, in other words, that should be most concerned to take advantage of whatever opportunities that present themselves to start creating a more beautiful and convenient city. It has relied too long on the natural beauty of its surroundings, a crutch that has ironically retarded the aesthetic development of the city.

The land at Kingsway and 7 th is where the City has proposed to build a large new combination civic community center and apartment complex. It is a large enough project for citizens to expect something special can be done here, and it is as central in the city as is possible. It is, in other words, about as perfect an opportunity as any citizenry can ever hope to see to establish a new, higher, standard in city development, and to turn a long neglected city toward the higher achievements of beauty, convenience, and prosperity. In a city famous only for having no "there," here is a chance to put a "there" there, right in the city's heart.

So what does the City have proposed for the site? A car-oriented, glass-and-plaster block curtailed everywhere by the dictatorship of humourless accountants and pleasing only to the eye of a blind bureaucrat safe in the knowledge nothing will be noticed by anyone else either. It is the inevitable result when leadership is in the clammy grip of the accountant and vision is in the jaundiced view of the bureaucrat. If this building proceeds as planned, we're as doomed to misery as any downcast and cowering Iron Curtain city of Eastern Europe ever was.

In the larger city, this development may seem insignificant. But it is the accumulation of just this kind of insignificant decisions that determine whether the city will overall in time be beautiful or not. Someone at City Hall ought to take another look and, as they say in poetry class, seize the moment.

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