Vancouver: The Sustainable City (original) (raw)

Vancouver exemplifies the richness of the many processes that set the civic culture of large contemporary cities. This paper focuses on what drives the social and economic construction of Vancouver, pointing to the complex linkages that tie agents to their environment. It shows that, in Vancouver, power arises from strong popular control and local democratic and participatory values, where group interactions produce and co-produce community development. The Vancouver regime is open yet stable, socially progressive yet fiscally conservative and pro-development. It is a regime that upholds an activist, tolerant and entrepreneurial civic culture. It emerges from an ongoing process where the openness of the regime is renegotiated in each neighbourhood and around each policy arena leading to the emergence of a culture of ongoing participation where civic, neighbourhood, ethnic and business groups constantly re-invent the city. The global economy, scholars argue, is impacting the local and regional social and economic fabric of cities, and their politics. Over the last decade scholarly debates on local politics, power, and economic growth have increasingly focused on the social construction of local economies and the politics of places. It is my contention in this article that focusing on the civic culture of the city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, contributes to our understanding of what drives the social and economic construction of a city, and its capacity to thrive in the global market place. The material presented in this article suggests that Vancouver's civic culture results from a unique blend of activism that is both socially progressive and fiscally conservative, and is perpetuated by very active and engaged civic groups, and a systematic ongoing process of open consultation/evaluation managed by various local, municipal, and regional governments. This results in continual negotiation and renegotiation, and production and reproduction of local policies, bringing about the unique local–regional politics of the Vancouver regime. In Vancouver, local activism is directly correlated to the invention of a sustainable open regime. After a brief review of scholarly discussions on the fundamental roles of structural trends and the agency of cities that emerges from local politics and local–global linkages, this article is divided into five sections that address successively Vancouver's history and culture, power system, value system, decision-making system, and innovative thinking. 1