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The “ideas” contest to brainstorm new options for Vancouver’s viaducts and the East False Creek flats was the most successful in the city’s history: more than 100 entries, 4,000 voters in the “people’s choice” online voting, 15,000 ballots cast, hundreds of online comments from the public.

But when the panel of eminent judges released its decisions last night to a packed auditorium at SFU Woodwards, there was only one point of agreement. This proposal received both an honorable mention and a win in the “people’s choice” category.

When the proponents’ names were unveiled — neither judges nor online voters knew who developed the proposals — the team included a remarkable group including Norm Hotson, Larry Beasley, Jim Green, Margot Long and many more.

Here’s the city’s summary of the entire contest:

[Read more →]

The city’s latest report on building permits, issued in the dying days of the election, confirm what is obvious to any door-knocking politician: Vancouver’s neighbourhoods are changing rapidly as builders upgrade homes — and add laneway houses — in every part of the city.

Just three years ago, as voters headed to the polls to elect Gregor Robertson for the first time, the global economy was in free fall. The October 2008 numbers reflected the end of the city’s long building boom. A few months later, building permit activity had dropped by at least half and the new Vision council was scrambling to find $50 million in savings to balance the 2009 budget.

Four hundred and twenty-eight residential units were approved in October this year, compared to 130 three years ago. (By January 2009, the number had dropped to 34, of which 18 were replacements)

Today it’s hard to find a city block in many parts of the city without new construction or renovation. Vancouver specials are being tossed out for a 21st century update: much larger, centre-plan, two-storey homes with full basements, quality stucco exteriors and much finer finishes. (The granite front steps on many of these homes are notable for the observant canvasser.)

Laneway homes, a controversial aspect of 2008 campaign, are routine now: 162 have been approved so far this year, but they weren’t even listed in 2008.

The global economy is still in deep trouble and the US housing market is so grim that cities like Cleveland are bulldozing foreclosed homes to “save” neighbourhoods. Here, in Lotusland, we’re still building, but fewer and fewer residents can afford to buy. It looks like existing homeowners are responding with a quiet housing expansion program right under our noses.

Did “common sense” put Toronto in near-terminal decline? That’s the disturbing conclusion of veteran Toronto urban affairs writer John Lorinc, who traces Toronto’s crumbling transit infrastructure and fractured politics to Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution of the 1990s.

With Suzanne Anton’s NPA crew offering voters a Vancouver version of Harris’ “common sense” platform in the Nov. 19 election, Lorinc’s deep analysis of “How Toronto Lost Its Groove and Why the Rest of Canada Shouldn’t Gloat,” published in the latest issue of The Walrus, makes for unsettling reading.

Harris’ first blow came in 1995, according to Lorinc, with a botched amalgamation of a dozen cities into the Greater Toronto Authority, a “smaller government” scheme that left the region with 25 mayors, 244 municipal officials and a destructive competition among larger municipalities for economic development and senior government funding.

The second hit came in 1997 when Harris “relieved” municipalities of education funding obligations but handed them the cost of public transit and housing. (Although Lorinc holds up Metro Vancouver’s governance system as a model, it arguably has many of the same deficiencies.)

Of course, Vancouver is not the GTA and a Vancouver election is not the same as an Ontario election. But the “common sense” philosophy is a direct link between Harris, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and the NPA platform. All in all, it’s a cautionary tale.

Emily Carr's War Canoes: are those high rise condo towers on the horizon?

The breathtaking new show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection, can be read two ways.

It is both an extraordinary review of BC art from earliest contact to the present, but it’s also a challenge to voters to think about the future of the gallery itself on the eve of a civic election.

The show is a stunning collection of masterworks of BC art. The remarkable First Nations masks, that date from the pre-contact days to the present, are a show in themselves. But they are juxtaposed with work by Emily Carr and E.J. Hughes, as well B.C. Binning and Jack Shadbolt, in ways that force the viewer to think critically about the province’s past and future. (The amazing collection of work by Mexican Modernists like Diego Rivera seems both utterly out of context and a surprisingly good fit. It is, at least, a glimpse into the Audains’ world view.)

Will it incorporate First Nations or exclude them? Will the arts be seen as fundamental to to our future? Or will we remain the resource extraction economy that is so evident in Hughes’ work?

Equally critically, will the gallery expand enough to allow exhibits that could even raise these questions? [Read more →]