Penny Gurstein tells Kitsilano crowd that the collaboration between residents and the city that created the neighbourhood they love is no more.
By Carol Volkart
For those who love their neighbourhoods, whether it’s Dunbar, Kitsilano, or any of the city’s other 20 distinct areas, Penny Gurstein has something to tell you:
They didn’t just happen. “We didn’t just get a really great neighbourhood by accident . . . it was really good planning that did this.”
Gurstein, a retired UBC professor, was referring to Kitsilano, where she’s been a resident for 26 years, plus more as a student. But in a March 18 speech on community planning, she was really talking about the unique 1970s planning approach that turned Vancouver into a city of distinctive neighbourhoods that are still beloved today.
“What happened in Vancouver was that there was this really amazing confluence of politicians, planners and citizens who really saw the worth and the importance of doing neighbourhood planning in a really robust effective way,” said Gurstein, one of 12 urban experts giving talks this spring on neighbourhood-based planning.
But that’s all changed, the former director of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning said in her speech, part of a Local Focus series that will bring local architect Brian Palmquist to Dunbar Evangelical Lutheran Church on April 15.
“We are back to the worst kind of top-down planning, planning without any real insight of city building, led by politicians with a shockingly low level of civic understanding who are not listening to their planners nor the citizens who elected them,” Gurstein said. “This is kind of the worst I’ve ever seen in terms of governance, city governance.”
How did we get from robust consultation to a council holding their hands over their ears and singing “la la la” while residents try to make their points?
Gurstein took us back to the 1960s, when a top-down administration bent on urban renewal planned to ram a freeway through downtown, destroying heritage neighbourhoods along the way. The ensuing public backlash led to a “really significant shift from top-down urban renewal” toward resident-led participatory planning in the 1970s, she said.
“This was a time when there was meeting after meeting, people were really excited about giving their input into what made their neighbourhoods so special.”
It was an era of community activism, strong residents’ associations, and supportive senior governments. Gurstein recalled the federal government even had a ministry of municipal affairs, which disappeared in the neoliberal years to come. In Vancouver, citizen activists and academics joined forces to win a majority on city council in 1972 under the banner of The Electors’ Action Movement (T.E.A.M.), the inspiration for the current TEAM for a Livable Vancouver civic party.
T.E.A.M. “worked really well with city planners and heeded their advice,” Gurstein said.
“This was really quite unique. It didn’t happen before because we had, like all other cities, we had a very, very top-down bureaucratic response. So there was a council, there were planners but they really believed in general planning for the whole city rather than for neighbourhoods.”
Now the pendulum has swung back to the pre-1970s era.
Gurstein painted a grim picture of what public participation is like now, based on her own experience of addressing council on plans to freeze the building of new supportive housing. She was one of about 100 speakers, with about 200 outside City Hall urging against the plan, but council passed it anyway.
Speakers were limited to three minutes and councillors couldn’t ask them questions. In-person presentations were discouraged in favour of phone-ins, and only a few people were allowed in council chambers at any time. The council agenda was even changed the day of the meeting, making it difficult for people who had taken time off work to speak.
“What is occurring in our city is not meaningful public participation,” she said. “Decisions are already made and public input is ignored. It’s become simply a requirement with no intention of incorporating public values.”
“They’re not listening. And so I really feel very disenfranchised from this city right now.”
Gurstein said the time has come “to take back our city.”
There’s a fundamental problem with council, she said in answer to a question about why councillors, even from very different parties, are buying into the majority party’s current direction:
“I really don’t think that council as constituted has a real understanding about how to create cities. I don’t think they have an understanding of how to create affordable housing.” Instead of listening to experienced longtime staffers, she said, they are hiring new people who “will just confirm their own narrative.”
She said she knows junior staff are “really terrified. They don’t feel like they can have any kind of say in this. When we really created a great city was when the elected officials, the planners and the citizens were all working together.”
Gurstein would like to see a change in the way the city is governed. For all the problems with the ward system, it would be better than the current one, she said. “This party system is not working for us.”
She also recommended strengthening existing neighbourhood associations and beginning to demand accountability from our elected representatives.
She said she’s read statements from some of the potential candidates for the Oct. 17 civic election, “and it strikes me how little they know about how to create affordable housing. They say yes, they want it, but how are you going to get it? You know, do you know anything about housing?” Similarly, she said she’s noticed there is precious little mention of how they plan to engage with constituents.
As for what citizens can do, she urged people to get active. Attend all-candidates’ meetings “and ask some really hard questions and keep pounding them,” she said. (One audience member commented that it’s hard to do that when some candidates refuse to attend such meetings.)
In answer to a question about how to empower people, Gurstein suggested everyone think about what they can do to get 10 to 20 other people engaged in civic politics and talk to them about alternatives.
“There are so many other alternatives. We don’t have to have this top-down bureaucratic authoritarian regime that we are now in,” she said.
“I’m worried, you know. This has been going on not just with ABC but before ABC, so I think we need to be really rethinking how the city and how does city council really function because I don’t think it’s functioning at all right now.”
Gurstein’s talk at St. James Community Square was the second in a 12-part free series organized by Local Focus, a Vancouver-based project aimed at improving civic engagement through raising public understanding of how local government works.
The 12 speakers, who are giving their talks in neighbourhoods throughout the city, are urbanists, planners, academics, and architects with decades of experience in their fields.
To sign up to attend remaining talks, go to
https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/community-planning-matters-4821906
For videos of delivered talks, go to