Vancouver author Matt Hern’s new book, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future, offers examples of how our city’s sustainability achievements and failures can serve as case studies for other cities.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: Vancouver as model (and warning) for urban future

Vancouver’s so-called “world-class city” status was vigorously debated by media while the international spotlight shone here for the 2010 Winter Olympics, but author Matt Hern has been contemplating the argument for much longer. While travelling the globe over a period of three years, Hern wrote about Vancouver from the vantage point of various world metropolises. He returned home to launch his resultant book, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future, last month.

The 41-year-old Hern, who is also an urban studies lecturer and the director of the Purple Thistle Centre, a youth-run arts and activism centre in East Vancouver, challenges the notion of British Columbia as the “Best Place on Earth” in his book, which explores the possibility of a sustainable, urban-focused future. Vancouver serves as both the inspiration of this vision and a sober warning.

“I’ve never encountered a city as smug and self-congratulatory about itself as Vancouver,” says Hern in a Commercial Drive coffee shop that has served as an ad-hoc office for his work. “I like Vancouver — I’ve lived here for 20 years now — but, really? This is the best we can do? This is the province with the lowest minimum wage in Canada. Once again, British Columbia leads Canada in the rates of child poverty.”

Given the immense — and increasing — divide between the haves and have-nots in the city, Hern is interested in how Vancouver can evolve to meet the needs of all its citizens. “We’re going to have seven billion people on the Earth [by 2011, according to a United Nations projection]. Is there any possibility of an ecological future?” he asks. “It has to be an urban future.”

One prominent problem with Vancouver, Hern says, is that its poorest citizens are no longer able to afford to live in the city and benefit from the social capital of an urban environment. “Poor people now are forced farther and farther into the suburbs,” he says. “Young, single mothers, young families with working-class incomes — they’re not living in those downtown apartments. They’re buying houses in Surrey, they’re buying houses in [Port Coquitlam] that are under-served, if served at all, by public transit. You get these families living an hour away from where they work, in these hellish suburbs, with only simulacra of community.”

Suburban sprawl, Hern says, is what must be avoided to ensure a sustainable future. “The project of what a good city might look like has to be a re-invigoration of the idea of democracy and citizenship,” he says. “If we are going to live compactly, we are going to live densely... [But] a city of glass, a city of skyscrapers, is not really my idea of a healthy city, nor is it necessarily required for density.”

As the founder of the popular Car-Free Day festivals in Vancouver, Hern is passionate about the possibility of sustainable transportation methods that don’t require car ownership. While the Car-Free events will expand to six neighbourhoods in Vancouver this year, Hern says it’s a small gain compared to the rest of the world. “I think we’re cautious,” he says. “We have such a choreographed public space, people tend to defer to planners and to authority. So, the idea that we could just do it — do stuff — rubs Vancouverites the wrong way.”

In two weeks, sustainable-transportation enthusiasts from around the world will gather in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the first-ever international conference on Ciclovías [citywide, protected bike paths] and car-free Sundays. The symposium is organized by sustainable-transportation guru Gil Penalosa, a former parks and recreation commissioner for the City of Bogata, Colombia, and current director of 8-80 Cities, a Toronto-based advocacy group for sustainable transportation. “This is about seeing the city in a different way,” Penalosa says. “It’s not just a recreational point of view; it’s sort of an exercise in social integration.”

The beauty of social integration that Penalosa sees on the streets during a successful car-free day is one key for what Hern sees as a sustainable future. “In many ways, the best thing that could happen [to Vancouver after the Olympics],” he says, “would be a collapse of our attempt to become a world-class, global city, and to force the city — economically — to re-imagine itself as a sustainable city, as a city that genuinely cared about all its residents, as a city that could [think] about economic thriving as something other than just straight gains for the very wealthy.”