Densification in Vancouver - and its relationship to postmodernism

Postmodernism




4.0 - Introduction: Defining the new middle class and its relation to modernism; introducing the concept of regulation and an historical overview of the postmodern transformation of Vancouver



In the previous chapter, shifting investment patterns were used to classify urban development. However, since a mode of urban development is also bound up with the institutions and cultural norms that filter and modify the economic forces that ultimately shape the city, it is now the time to address the issue of regulation, and look at the institutional webs which further modify the look of the city. In this chapter, the emphasis therefore shifts away from the economics of urban development. Instead of examining how a regime accumulation affects the production of urban space we will now look at how distinct modes of regulation pattern, organize, and modify the production of space. By undertaking this examination the focus of our inquiry necessarily shifts to the study of culture, and the politics of the local state. Also, because the urban middle class have been the main agents responsible for shifts in the regulatory order of the city, this study of regulation will explore how the history of the middle class is bound up with the evolution of modernism and postmodernism. As the shift from modern to postmodern planning in Vancouver will show, the link between the middle class experience of modernity is pivotal to understanding how the postmodern city came about.

After using Marshall Berman’s discussion of modernism, Bourdieu’s analysis of culture and class, and Henri Lefebrve’s insightful study into spatial ideologies, a more precise definition of urban regulation will be formulated which will then be used to study how the rise of two diametrically opposed systems of regulation came about in the City of Vancouver. Although planning only represents one strand of urban regulation, as we shall see, what happened to planning in Vancouver can, nonetheless, be viewed as a microcosm of broader the regulatory transformation of the city.
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One: The modernization process, modernity, moderism.

Because the study of postmodern regulation requires that we understand something about the nature of modernism some clarification about the terminology to be used is essential if confusion is to be avoided.
Beginning with modernism, in “Keywords” Raymond Williams (1976) states that modernism is derived from the latin word modo, which means just now. However, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that the word takes on its contemporary associations. At first the word modern was used as a negative adjective. According to William (1976, p.174) ancient Greece was then viewed as being superior over contemporary culture. However, the writing of early humanists, such as Varsi, show that being modern was used as a positive adjective when the Renaissance period was compared to the Gothic period that immediately preceded it (Varsi, 1963,pp.16-17). With the further secularization of culture and the rise of science, to be modern took on more positive connotations. Not only did being modern become an adjective for the superiority of the present over the past, it also began to connote development and improvement which set the stage for birth of the notion of progress.
In All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman captures the tension between the past, the present and the future, that arose from this new world view when he remarked that:
The modern transformation, beginning in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation, places both these worlds on earth, in space and time, filled with human beings. Now the false world is seen as a historical past, a world we have lost (or are in the process of losing), while the true world is in the physical and social world that exists for us here and now (or is in the process of coming into being) At this point a new symbolism emerges (Berman, 1982, p.106)

Furthermore, Berman goes on to say that modernity exists at two levels. The first level is located in the objective realm, where the modernization process operates. Here Berman remarks that:

The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing images of the universe and out place in it; the industrialization of production which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them half-way across the world into new lives, rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth, systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasing powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers,; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market. In the Twentieth century, the social process that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called “modernization”(Berman,1982,p.16)

The second level refers to the subjective manifestation of the modernization process. Rather than look at the material processes responsible for this flux, this second level is concerned with the cultural representations that try to make sense ofchange. Although the most potent representations are to be found in the arts, these representations peculate through out the entire field of culture. Most particularly, as we shall see, they can be found in the precepts and norms which govern the regulation of urban space.
For Berman, this subjective realm constitutes the core of modernism. To quote Berman:
These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have to be loosely grouped together under the name of modernism(Berman, 1982,p160.

Thus, if the modernization process feeds the process of change, it is the raw experience of flux that comes out of the change that is created which defines the experience of modernity. In turn, these are the experiences that eventually coalesce into representations that define the discourse of modernism. So if modernity refers to the experience of time and the self conscious awareness of change, then we see that modernism refers to the cultural representation that are constructed from out of this experience.
Before the advent of moderntiy time was static. The experience of time was largely framed by natural processes. For this reason cyclical perceptions of time pre-dominated. Even when pre-modern conceptualizations did acknowledge progression, the experience of time usually followed a circular march which involved turning back to the place of origin. Unlike the experience of modernity, which denoted permanent forward movement and constant transformation, pre-modern representation of time tended to embrace equilibrium rather than flux, which reinforced the status quo rather than create a framework that prepared individuals for continuous transformation. However, with the expansion of market relations, the rise of bureaucracies, which accompanied the expansion of the market, and the quickening of technological innovation, which came with the expansion of the market and the growth of bureaucracies, the traditional order began to dissolve, and a new way of experiencing time began to take hold. Linear conceptions of time began to supplant cyclical conceptions. Instead of remaining static the experience of time became dynamic.

With the progression of the modernization process it became harder to expect that the present would always remain the same, or that the future would be like the past. Nonetheless, even with the flux created by constant change it is possible to ascertain the identity of three distinct epochs over the five-hundred year history of modernism. For example, Berman divides modernism into three distinctive epochs: Each epoch corresponds to a particular phase of development within the middle class, and to the broader evolution of the modernization process. The first epoch runs from the start of the 16the century and end with the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790’s.. This epoch was shaped by the dissolution of the traditional society and the emergence of a new secular order. Although the influence of the middle class increased during this time, the control of aristocracy was still in control.19th century modernism is the name Berman gives to the second epoch. This was a period marked by the overthrow of the aristocracy and middle class assertion of political and cultural hegemony. Finally, Berman identifies twentieth century modernism as the third epoch. To Berman this third epoch is the one we still live in. Because of the constraining influence of large corporations and the modern welfare state Berman feels that the cultural representations associated with twentieth century modernism are much more vapid than those produced in the 19th century. Berman also identifies several different strands of twentieth century modernism. And it is here, as one strand of twentieth century modernism that Berman situates the discourse of postmodernism.

This is the point where the Berman’s typology diverges from the one that will be used in this study. Rather than viewing postmodernism as one strand of twentieth century modernism, in this investigation postmodernism is taken as the cultural signature of entirely new epoch (Jameson, 1998). Instead of three epochs, there are four. And it is the presence of this fourth epoch which will become the starting point for the analysis of the postmodern transformation of the city.

Consideration of the postmodern city can therefore be seen as part of a much larger epochal transformation. One that goes far beyond the regulation of the city. If twentieth century modernism laid bare the preponderance of bureaucratic rule, postmodern representations did the exact opposite. Rather than glorify the bureaucracy, postmodern representation exposed the growing ascendancy of the market. Just as the advance of the market involved the dissolution of the status quo, so too in the cultural field, the advent of postmodernism would signal a new era, one that would bear the stamp of a new populism marked by cultural relativity and the promotion of differences rather than the search for order Accordingly, postmodernism emerged as a culture of transgression. In all fields of endeavour this would occur as the influence of postmodernism grew. As pre-existing distinctions began to dissolve and old hierarchies began to be undermined, all forms of authority were challenged

As the evolution of modernism and the history of the middle class will show, even with the broad sketching in of distinct epochs, the link between material existence, the experience of modernity, and the generation of cultural representations is not simple, or necessarily a straight forward relation of cause and effect. Despite the commonalties that have been outlined so far, there is still room for considerable variation because the translation of the experience of modernity into a system of cultural representations is highly mediated: with changes in the division of labour differentiating the middle class response to the experience of modernity.

Two: The Evolution of the Middle Class and the History of Modernism


With the link between the modernization process and the experience modernity now laid out, the role that middle class stratification plays in the history of modernism can now be explored.

Unlike the modern and postmodern era, the first powerful middle class social formations that began to emerge in the 16th century were made up of merchants and small industrialists. There was a nascent professional strata as well. But until the later part of the nineteenth century this professional strata was much less influential than the merchant middle class.

Because its livelihood depended upon the use of economic rather than cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), even though this merchant middle class needed bureaucratic rule to preserve order and promote trade, there was a natural antipathy to the arbitrary constraints that naturally came with the expansion of state power. That is why this social class became the seed bed for the promulgation of laissez-faire ideologies Later on, when the industrial revolution further shifted the balance of power in favour of the merchant middle class, these ideologies would guide the middle class deconstruction of the traditional codes which had hitherto governed both the social and economic sphere. In the United Kingdom and the United States, in particular, this would set the stage for the laissez-faire policies which were to shape urban development in the early and middle part of the 19th century.

As already mentioned, the shift from the laissez-faire city to the modern city began with the growth of large corporations and the emergence of the modern state. The growth of bureaucracies was also fueled by the militarization of society (Mann 1986; 1993). Together these developments brought about the rapid expansion of bureaucracies. From this expansion a new division of labour was created which provided the genesis for emergence a new middle class strata composed of professionals. Unlike the merchant middle class, who depended upon the ownership of the means of production, this professional strata (which we will now call the traditional middle class) relied upon the ownership of cultural capital.

What is important to note is the relative autonomy of the merchant middle class, and contrasting state of dependency of this new professional strata. If the power of the merchant middle class rested upon its ownership of economic capital, the power of this new professional strata depended upon powers that was delegated to it by large bureaucracies. With its well being dependant upon the maintenance of bureaucratic control, this traditional middle class became champions of conformity and order. Respect for hierarchies therefore became more important. Using the tools that were provided by the emerging fields of business management, city planning and social work, a modern system of regulation arose which would help bring about the hierarchical segmentation of the domestic sphere and the work place. In the workplace the most extreme form of this segmentation would become identified with Taylorism, In the consumer arena, as we shall soon see, the same imperative for order and segmentation would become apparent with the birth of modern planning.

Particularly if we look at the traditional middle class generation that came of age during the Great Depression and the immediate Postwar era, what becomes discernible, is the impact of scarcity. Not only was the high period of twentieth century modernism (1930 to 1960) shaped by bureaucratic dependency; the concern with getting by that arose out of the experience of scarcity also created an experiential context for the glorification of Labour and a flowering in Socialist ideology. Disciplined by the Great Depression and the needs of war, the social ideology of the traditional middle class that came of age after the war was shaped both by economic necessity and conformity to bureaucratic rule. That is why the engineer stands out as the most prominent icon of twentieth century modernism. For in the personae of the engineer, not only is the connection between modernism and militarism made visible, in the engineer what we also see symbolized is the middle class allegiance to bureaucratic rule, and from this, the social conformity that followed from obedience to this corporatist order.

Social conformity was further buttressed by the demographic situation of the traditional middle class after the Second World War. Besides the Great Depression and the social and economic constraints that came with a world war and then a cold war; the range of options for the traditional middle class were further held in check by the reassertion of family obligations that came about with soaring fertility rates, which reached historic highs in the 1950’s when a century-long secular decline in the birth rate was temporarily reversed. With the nuclear family cast as the only acceptable domestic arrangement for most of the middle class, twentieth century modernism became identified with the rigid segmentation of gender roles and the adoration of domesticity. Women were therefore encouraged to leave the workforce and return to the hearth. Furthermore, both women and men had to face the additional contraints imposed by the rigis social expectations that came out of the glorification of the nuclear family.

Modernism reached its apogee in the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, by the mid 60’s its influence would begin to diminish as market rule began to assert itself in the consumer field. This was helped along by the rise of a new middle class generation that began to challenge existing bureaucratic norms. Out of the resulting cultural ferment, which became known as the counter culture, a new array of oppositional ideologies appeared that would form the basis of a new system of postmodern representations. A new array of values based more upon superfluity rather than necessity, self-actualization rather than social solidarity, individual differentiation rather than social conformity, and the pursuit of desires over needs, set the background conditions for the creation of a postmodern consumer culture (Kettle 1984; Levitt 1984; Ricard 1994; Owram 1996; Crosariol 1997; Frank 1997; G/M 1997cc).

Thus, changes within the modernization process created the backdrop for the emergence of a new middle class and the birth of postmodernism. How this happened can be briefly summarized as follows. Here post war prosperity, the growth of the information and entertainment economy, falling births rated, the qualitative transformation of the middle class that was brought about by the dramatic expansion of the university, and the shift from Fordist to Post Fordist methods can be cited.

Responding to an array of opportunities which were not present when the traditional middle class came of age in the 1940’s and 1950’s, this new middle class was more able to construct an action space for itself which was more autonomous. Coming of age in a period of affluence rather than scarcity, at a time when market rule rather than that of bureaucratic rule was becoming ascendant,, the outlook and aspirations the new middle class began to follow a path which was markedly different from the traditional middle class who had come of age during a time of bureaucratic ascendancy.

Particularly in the entertainment and advertising industries this would become the case. As more activity in these two sectors began to focus upon the manipulation of desire rather than the satisfaction of needs, new opportunities for the untrammeled play of the market were created. The eroticization of popular culture and elimination of sexual taboos, with the demise of the Hayes code, illustrates this point. For even into the 1970’s a program like The Jerry Springer Show, or Sex and the City, would have simply been inconceivable.
It is not hard to see how these development would temper the outlook of the middle class who worked in this fast growing sector. For here transgression rather than allegiance to existing bureaucratic norms would became central to profit making and success. The rapid expansion of universities also provided another dynamic forum for the middle class to assert more autonomy for itself. Here the sheer size of university expansion provided opportunity structures and career paths for the new middle which had been unavailable to the preceding generation.

Because the university and the information and entertainment sectors became critical incubation grounds for the new middle class, what happened in the cultural realm takes on special strategic importance with regard to the evolution of the economy and the expansion of market rule that followed. And nowhere would the shift from bureaucratic to market rule, and so the shift from modernism to postmodern, become more obvious than in the arts. For as the essayist Susan Sontag noted: "Art is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility (1966,p.296)."

The advent of Pop Art provides one of the best examples of the attitudinal shift which began to take shape in the early 60’s. During the modern era high art deliberately attempted to set itself apart from mass culture, and buffer itself from economic influences of the market. If modern art critics such as Clement Greenberg (Hall and ULanov 1972, p.157) had viewed resistance to commodification as one of the primary social functions of modernist high-art, for Pop artists, such as Andy Wharhol, the opposite would be the case. Instead of creating buffers against the market, this new art movement received its energy from the embrace of the market, and the world of mass consumption.

Even though the postmodern embrace of the market did not lead to an exact recreation of the attitudes and cultural representation that had existed during the laissez-faire period; nontheless, the shift away from bureaucratic rule and the embrace of the market did lead to a revival of attitudes which had been common during the 19th century. Although they are not identical, this helps to explains some of the obvious commonalties that exist between postmodernism and 19th century modernism.

In the economic sphere, but outside the entertainment industry, the shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of production also created conditions which favoured the adoption of a postmodern norms (Piore and Sabel 1984). Here increased global competition and shorter product cycles created much more flux and indeterminacy in the market which also challenged the status quo. Furthermore technological innovation made flexibility more important in the workplace. As a result, even in large organizations individual initiative started to be looked upon more favourably. Not surprisingly, for the middle class the image of success began to change dramatically. Instead of William Whyte’s organizational man, bohemian representations appeared which made the artist and the entrepreneur, not engineers, the icons of the postmodern era. As this happened an artistic mindset began to replace the engineering mindset that had once symbolized the dominance of bureaucratic rule and the power influence of militarism during the modern era.
Thus, when Bourdieu looked at this new middle class he would remark that:

The most indeterminate sectors of the social structure offer the most favourable ground for the operation which, by transforming old positions or creating new ones ex nihilo, aim to produce areas of specialist expertise. And the emergence of this new petite bourgeoisie, which employs new means of manipulation to perform its role as an intermediary between the classes and which by its very existence bring about a transformation of the position and dispositions of the old petite bourgeoisie, can itself be understood only in terms of changes in the mode of domination, which, substituting seductions (read postmodernism) for repression (read modernism), public relations for policing, advertising for authority, the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic integration of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than inculcating norms (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 153-4).

Again, it is important to note how the suspicion of large bureaucracies and the stress on individual initiatives are, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, classic petite bourgeois characteristics. With the re-emergence of these values a special affinity between the 19th century modernism and postmodernism appeared which, highlights some of the similarities that can be drawn between the merchant middle class and the new middle that came of age in the 1960’s. Just as laissez-faire ideologies, which defined 19th century modernism, were used to deconstruct the traditional pre-modern order in the middle of the nineteenth century, so too, would a whole array of interconnected neo-liberal ideologies re-emerge in the 1970’s and 80’s as a postmodern critique of the modern order. Only this time the critique would be focussed as much on cultural matters as economic ones. For as Bourdieu observed:

The new petite bourgeoisie is predisposed to play a vanguard role in the struggles over everything concerned with the art of living, in particular, domestic life and consumption, relations between the sexes and the generations, the reproduction of the family and its values. It is opposed on almost every point to the repressive morality of the declining petite bourgeoisie whose religious or political conservatism often centres on moral indignation or moral disorder, and especially the disorder of sexual mores" (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 366-7)

As already noted, other than vanguard sections of the emerging information economy, such as Hewlett Packard, this attitude first became pervasive in the rapidly expanding cultural industries. In turn, the space created by this industry for this postmodern perspective would increasingly influence the outlook of the middle class. For as this industry grew in response to the extension of mass culture a distinctive and relatively autonomous popular culture for the new middle class arose that would provide jobs and, by doing so, establish an economic base for the new middle class. Moreover, the ideological control of this sphere would give this class influence out of proportion to its numbers.

The sheer impact of demographics also set the new middle class apart from the traditional middle class. .So not only did coming of age of the new middle class during a period of affluence set it apart from its predecessors, its much larger size a created a critical mass within the consumer sphere that gave the new middle class much more autonomy in the market place, allowing a new consumer culture to take shape outside the strict controls of administered capitalism. Unlike the immediate postwar period, when a few large corporations had been able to control the configuration of the consumer market for the traditional middle class; with the counter-culture a new subversive pattern of consumption emerged. That is why the first physical manifestations of the postmodern city appeared in the retail sector, as unorthodox consumer spaces took shape in zone of discard. In Toronto this happened in Yorkville. And in Vancouver these same counter-cultural spaces emerged in Gastown and in Kitsilano.

In part these new retail spaces can be viewed as just an extension of a broader youth culture, however, what also becomes apparent about this culture was that for the first time in the twentieth century a popular middle class culture arose which defined organized itself by around opposition to bureaucratic rule. Instead of marketing conformity, this new consumer order craved novelty and constant differentiation. This experimentation was also fueled by the expansion of the university, which provided a new market for these unorthodox consumer spaces. In this regard it is no accident that the most important subversive spaces appeared in areas such as Yorkville and Kitsilano, which functioned as bohemian outposts for an ever growing university population. Moreover, declining birth rates, and the rapid expansion of graduate education also greatly increased the time which could be given over to experimentation (Levitt 1984; Anderson 1995; G/M 1997Za).

Besides the emergence of these new bohemian communities, in the domain of mass culture, the declining influence of bureaucratic rule was most clearly illustrated by the gradual dissolution of the moral codes that governed the production of popular films and music in the United States up to the 1960’s. Once again, this shift was abetted by declining birth rates. With fewer children to take care of, the new middle class had the time and energy to participate more fully in a culture of conspicuous consumption, one that would became the direct antithesis of the famial suburban culture of the 1950’s.

For this reason the university became an important incubation ground for postmodernism. Not only did it help to incubate new consumer markets that were connected to the counterculture, the institution itself became a key battle field in the cultural struggles of the new middle class, with the informality of collegial education and the bohemian or artistic mode of living associated with the university life establishing a new model that would diffuse outwards into the workplace. This stood in marked contrast to the modern period. In the modern era the bohemianism associated with the university was regarded as an adolescent and transitory phase in the life cycle of the middle class. However, with the shift away from bureaucratic rule to market rule, and the move away from the engineering mindset to the artistic mindset, bohemian modes of living started to become a permanent fixture of middle class life, one which would increasing define how the middle class would attempt to live long after it had left the university. As we shall see, this new way of living and working would also act as a catalyst for the creation distinctive postmodern consumption patterns. In order to make inroads into the fast growing and lucrative market that came into existence because of these attitudinal changes even large corporations would eventually have to embrace norms that they had once regarded as being subversive.

Once again, when looking at the rise of this bohemainism it is important to keep in mind the impact of declining fertility. If birth rates had not declined the resources and free time to engage in this artistic mode of living would have been severally constrained. Due to the shear size of the new middle class and the extra resources freed up because of the reduced burden of child rearing, the new middle class was able to constitute itself as a powerful consumer class.

As this overview of the genesis and evolution of the middle class has shown, there is a link between the material circumstances that shape a class and the ideologies it constructs for itself to realize its interests, or to make sense of the world it lives in. And this will eventually have an impact on the city. Although the new middle class can be identified as a distinct social group in the workplace because of the positions it occupies in a new division of labour that arose from out of the expansion of the information and entertainment economy; it would be as consumers, not workers, that this class would become the most important agents for the transformation of the city. This explains why the first observable postmodern spaces in the city were retail establishments. In addition to this, in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, where their numbers were large enough, the new middle class also became a political force. As the postwar history of planning in the City of Vancouver will show, during the 1970’s this new middle class became a powerful political block. Developing a distinct postmodern agenda for the city, the new middle class intervened directly in the government of the city. And by doing so it was able to refashion the bureaucratic and political culture of the city
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Three: the nature of regulation

Having looked at the background forces which produced two distinctive ideologies: one which was modern, and the other which was postmodern,it is now the appropriate time to clarify what is meant by urban regulation. Usually when we think about regulation the creation and enactment of formal laws and regulations is what immediately comes to mind. However, if we enlarge the definition of urban regulation to include the social norms and the symbols which also guide our actions in the city then the analytical scope of regulation broadens considerably. Using this broader conception we see that the judicial aspect of urban regulation only makes up one part of a much larger regulatory ensemble. Conceived in this way, three different dimensions of urban regulation can be identified. In addition to philosophic constructs, where plan making and the enactment of formal regulations, such as zoning bylaws, define the sphere of action, the regulation of the city is also affected by social and aesthetic constructs. How these three dimension overlap and intersect with each other, and the ensemble of effects which follow from this interaction, is what establishes and defines a regulatory regime in a specific city over time.

Of the three dimensions that will be examined, philosophic constructs are the most formal and abstract expression of urban regulation. Henri Lefebvre's (1991; 1996) called these spaces conceived spaces. As the name suggests, these representations of space are the product of formal intellectual labour. This is the sphere of activity engineers, planners, architects and landscape architects primarily work within.

The social dimension of regulation is much more amorphous than the philosophic one. If the spaces regulated by philosophic contracts can be viewed as conceived spaces of the city then the social constructs that people use to make sense of the city can be viewed as the lived spaces of the city. If philosophic constructs create formal representations of reality, social constructs work in a more informal way, with people often guided by norms that they may not even be conscious of. While philosophic constructs are used by intellectuals, professionals, and bureaucrats, who assert their control over space by projecting abstractions on to space, social regulation usually works itself out in a more low key fashion. Here space tends to be reconfigured incrementally, responding to organic processes that are not premeditated or planned. These spaces are the spontaneous products of civil society rather than the products of formal intellectual discourse. That is why Lefebvre was able to define this sphere as the realm of lived spaces, or the domain of everyday life.

Finally, there is the aesthetic dimension. Aesthetic constructs regulate space in two ways. When they are used to establish meaning and convey social transcendance they operate on the symbolic level. .However, when they are used to define social distinction, they operate within the consumer realm, where market forces exert more influence. Like philosophic constructs, aesthetic regulation is concerned with the manipulation of physical rather than social space. Unlike the philosophic dimension, however, the motivations for organizing space are quite different. Whereas philosophic constructs are mostly the product of professional discourse, aesthetic constructs are a product of social class. Although aesthetic constructs influence the organization of social space, they work their influence out in a more calculated fashion, but not in the formal manner that applies to the application of philosophic constructs. Because some deliberation is required to inscribe social status or to mark out social transcendence these space are less organic than the social spaces of the city. As LeFebvre remarks, these spaces are the spaces of representation. For it is along this dimension of regulation that the inscription of class distinctions and symbolic representation rise to full prominence.

According to which dimension of regulation we look at, there is a wide variation in the empirical phenomena we need to take into account when looking at the regulation of the city. For example philosophic constructs tend to be exert most of their influence on the activities of institutions. Because philosophic constructs usually involves the formal exercise of state power this aspect of regulation finds its most significant expression in the political realm. However if we center our attention upon the sociological dimension of regulation the emphasis shifts away from politics, and the actions of institutions, and becomes more focussed upon the activities of social groups, and the behaviour of individuals. This changes again when we look at the aesthetic dimension. Here the creation of sacred spaces and the marketing of space to create spaces of social distinction becomes the focal point.

The regulation of the city therefore has to be seen as a multi-layered process which operates on a number of different levels. Over time the interplay of each of these three dimensions create a distinct spatial matrix, which produces a regulatory regime which establishes norms that guide the organization of space in the city.

4.1 Comparing and Contrasting Modern and Postmodern Systems of Urban Regulation.

Having looked at the three dimensions of regulation, we can now proceed to a more specific examination of the eight contrasting attributes which set modern and postmodern regulation apart from each other along the three dimension of regulation that have been mentioned so far.

Beginning with the philosophic dimension, two contrasting sets of attributes stand out. For example, if decision making in the modern era was marked by monological processes, in the postmodern era decision making was defined by the use of dialogical processes. Similarly, each system of regulation made use of opposing spatial representations. Whereas modern systems of regulation were guided by abstract representations of space; during the postmodern era more organic representation of space started to come into use.

Moving to the sociological dimension of regulation, changing gender relations,,the normalization and commodification of urban sub-cultures, and changing views about density make up the three contrasting attributes which set the postmodern era apart from the modern era.

Finally, when we look at the aesthetic dimension, three more contrasting sets of attributes can be singled out. The first attribute has to do with space and social status. During the modern era social status was conferred by moving to the suburbs. However, during the postmodern era this was challenged by the new middle class, who left the suburbs behind and moved back to the city. The second set of contrasting attributes were organized around the following dichotomies: machine space versus pedestrian spaces, futurism versus historicism, and the street versus the highway. Lastly, the final distinction had to do with the transformation of producer spaces into consumer spaces

4.1.1. - Philosophical contrasts

Looking at the philosophic dimension of regulation, as already pointed out, two defining characteristics stand out which separate the modern era from the postmodern epoch. One has to do with relations of authority. The other has to do with the representations of space. In the modern era monological systems of control defined how planning in Vancouver was carried out. However, during the postmodern era, this monological system would be replaced by one that was dialogical in nature. Similarly, when we looked at how space was conceptualized by planners two contrasting ways of representing space can be identified in each period. For example, during the modern period abstract representations of space predominated. By contrast, in the postmodern era more organic representations of space started to be used as geographical and historic context became important considerations.

With regard to planning, Vancouver provides a particularly useful example of how this transformation occurred. Not only did the reconfiguration of planning show the background influence of bureaucratic and market rule; the presence of two powerful planning directors highlighted the play of two completely different sensibilities which defined the operation of monological and dialogical systems for making decisions in Vancouver.

However, to better appreciate how planning unfolded in each era we first need to look at the specific economic and political conditions that set the stage for the emergence of planning in Vancouver. For example, the incomplete transformation of Vancouver during the modern era had great deal to do with the Federal Government. Since freeway construction and urban renewal largely defined the program for the modernization of Vancouver, the failure of the Canadian Government to initiate a massive freeway and urban renewal program, as had been done launched by the Federal Government in the United States, greatly limited the resources that were available for the implementation of the Sutton Brown Plan.

Another macro political and economic factor which prevented the complete transformation of Vancouver during the modern era had to do with the militarization of society. Unlike the United States, the influence of the military in Canada declined significantly after World War Two War (Whitaker and Marcuse 1994). To see how this affected planning one only has to see at how defense considerations were critical to the freeway program that was adopted by the United States. As well, the involvement of the automobile lobby made a big difference. In the United States, for instance, it would have been much more difficult for Robert Moses to have launched his massive freeway program for New York City without the support of auto makers. .Similarly, it is possible to speculate that if Sutton Brown had been supported by a powerful automobile lobby the history of modern planning in Vancouver might have taken a different turn.

While these different circumstances are crucial for understanding the history of modern planning in Vancouver, it is important to keep in mind that these influences only shaped but did not necessarily determine the final outcome of the modernization process in Vancouver. Although these background circumstances established structural impediments which prevented the comprehensive transformation of Vancouver during the modern era, local politics also played a role in the final outcome. Here it is important not to forget that these external obstacles were almost overcome by Sutton Brown. However, because they were not, the 20-year development plan of Sutton Brown Plan ended up having a very limited impact upon the city. By contrast the more modest plan put forward by the Bartholomew Plan, which was sponsored by the Vancouver Planning Commission, ended up becoming far more influential.

A closer look at the evolution of planning in Vancouver also tells us a great deal about the growth and maturation of regulatory regimes. Like the evolution of postmodernism, twentieth century modernism developed in two distinct phases. During the formative years a new regulatory regime usually appears as an oppositional ideology. As the pre-war history of planning in Vancouver reveals, a new regime usually forms as part of a larger middle class social movement. In the case of modern planning the middle class agitation which brought about the creation of this regime has since become knows as the Progressivist movement. However, as a regime gains acceptance the more radical or subversive features are filtered out (Gerecke 1976; Gunton 1991).

With the radical streams of modernism filtered out, monological systems that reflected the advance of bureaucratic rule became predominant In the United States, Robert Wiebe (1967), in The Search For Order, and Roy Lubove, in The Professional Altruist (1965) describe how the values of big business and the organization format of corporate capital eventually became the model for the reform of urban government during the progressivist period. Similarly, in Saving the Canadian City, Paul Rutherford looked at the urban progressivist movement in Canada and noted the same thing –- as he states:

The amateur had no place in municipal administration. Only the professional, it appeared, had the requisite skill to ensure that the city would function smoothly and efficiently. Such assumptions underline the often unconscious elitism of the reformers. Paradoxically, the campaign for municipal reform, which had arisen in part out of a demand for greater public control of civic affairs, resulted in the consolidation of authority in the hands of an even more authoritarian body, the civic bureaucracy. (1974, p.xx)


How this happened in Vancouver during the modern era can be illustrated by looking at the competition between Harland Bartholomew and Thomas Adams. With his Henry-Georgist leanings, and his focus on conservation, Thomas Adams clearly represented the more radical stream of planning. By contrast Bartholomew’s focus on protecting and enhancing property values plainly resonated with the corporate establishment..Thus twenty years after the Bartholomew Plan (which was published in the late 1920’s) the same business inclinations are carried forward by Vancouver’s first Planning Director, Sutton Brown, who states unequivocally that: planning should be seen as a business operation where "the techniques and processes normally adopted by big business (Sutton Brown 1954)," were to be the model that would be followed. Hence, long before there was even a formal planning department, the choice by the Vancouver Planning Commission to hire Bartholomew had already set mold for the business orientation that would prevail after the War.

Still, none of this was necessarily preordained. Chance and contingency can never be underestimated. If Adams had been chosen over Bartholomew, the complexion of modern planning in Vancouver might have been quite different. Similarly, if the Sutton Brown agenda had been able to speed up the implementation of his plan by a few years, or the formation of a new political block by the new middle class delayed for just a few more years, Sutton Brown's twenty year development-plan rather than the Bartholomew Plan might have become more influential.

Thus, we see that before modern planning was formally integrated into the civic bureaucracy the resources devoted to the regulation of space were negligible. There was a plan created by Bartholomew, and a zoning bylaw that came out of it, but very little in the way of resources to enforce either. For example, when the Vancouver Planning Commission was established in the 1920s only $4,000 dollars were allocated to planning (Bland and Spence Sales 1951). In 1950, the last full year of the Planning Commission's operation, twenty-three years after it was established, the resources devoted to planning had only climbed to $17,000 (Bland and Spence Sales 1951). With one to three employees from city hall seconded to help with the work of the Vancouver Planning Commission the planning was obviously a weakly developed function within the local state apparatus.

However, with the implementation of the Bland and Spence Sales Report and the creation of a planning department for the City of Vancouver this would suddenly change. By 1953, the first full year in the operation of the Planning Department, the budget rose $79,000. Afterwards the budget soared, reaching $220,000 by 1956, an eleven fold increase over 1950 budget for the Planning Commission (CV-1a). From one or two employees performing planning duties in 1950, the number of planners climbed upward to 25 in 1954 (Sutton Brown 1954). This growth continued throughout the 1950s. So by 1960 the number of personnel in the Planning Department had increased to 32.

The surge in resources devoted to planning would only be during the beginning of the postmodern era when another massive infusion of resources was required in order to deal with the regulatory demands posed by densification the application of postmodern rather than modern protocols for the regulation of space.
For example between 1972 and 1975 staff levels doubled as the number of personnel in the Planning Department increased from about 45 to 90. Similarly the budget of the Planning Department rose from $1.3-million in 1973 to $6-million in 1989, the last year of Ray Spaxman tenure as planning director. What is interesting to note about these numbers is that they reveal more resources were devoted to the postmodern transformation of Vancouver than modern transformation of the city Even after Spaxman left the department resources allocated to planning continued to rise, approaching $10-million in 1997, with the number of employees in the department approaching 200 (CV-1a; CVPD-41; CVCO-42).

One - Monological and Dialogical Systems of Decision Making

Having sketched in the history of modern and postmodern regulation we can now look at the first of eight attributes that set modern regulation apart from postmodern regulation. Starting with the philosophical dimension of regulation, we can begin by looking at relations of authority. Here two neologisms can be used to describe the difference that exists between modern and postmodern systems of rule. In the case of modernism, relations of authority and the production of knowledge were guided by a monological system of decision making. By contrast, when we look at how authority is constituted in postmodern systems of rule, and how knowledge is produced, we find dialogical systems rather than monological systems predominate.
As the word monological suggests, this system of control is both reductionist and homogenizing. Only one logic is present. Control is therefore centralized, and decision making takes place in a hierarchical fashion that is top-down and linear in orientation. Authority originates at one point and flows downward in one direction. For this reason monological forms of rule are particularly suited to the operation of large and centralized bureaucracies. So it is hardly surprising to find that this form of regulation emerged during a time marked out by the ascendancy of bureaucratic rule.

When given spatial form this systems of control resembles Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican. As Foucault (Rabinow 1984) remarked, Bentham’s panoptican can be viewed as a map of the geography of power that came into existence with the expansion of the bureaucracy and the emergence of new disciplinary knowledge, of which the field of planning would become one example. As Bentham’s panoptican illustrates, this system of control presupposed that the external world could be rendered into a docile and inert entity through the operation of reason. By classifying and segmenting the external world reality could be tamed with help of all knowing professionals. Consequently, when we look at modern planning we find that abstract intellectual categories take precedence over organic or historical categorizations of space. And the knowledge of the expert is given priority over that of citizen, whose involvement in the decision making process is expected to severely contrained. These points are clearly stated in the Bland and Spence Sales Report when it is remarked that:

In planning by commission the expression of public opinion is projected into technical and administrative ramifications - in planning by municipal government the expression of public opinion should not be able in any way to effect the technical considerations involved in the preparatory stage of planning proposals (1951).
Monological systems of control not only established a technocratic model for urban government -- where the administration of urban space replaced the politics of urban space -- it also embodied a system of knowledge which transformed urban space into abstract space. In such a system space was viewed as inert matter, its chief attribute simply defined as extension. Long before the birth of modern planning, or Bentham’s panoptican this way of looking at the outside world was laid out in Descartes Discourse On Method. In this work Descartes made the point that it was possible to organize all knowledge about the external world from one single vantage point. Separated from all external influence, this disembodied subjectivity would be able to construct a clear picture of the external world and thereby impose some discipline upon external reality. In this way, understanding the essential nature of external reality was assumed to be possible by the operation of a single consciousness, detached from the world but engaged in a detached monologue with itself about this world.
This form of contemplation objectified and pacified the external world reducing its components to inert objects that could, presumably be manipulated and moved around by the process of detached reason alone. Consequently, heroic assumptions about the presence of an all-embracing subjectivity, one that could take charismatic form in the shape of one all-knowing individual consciousness, or as a form of collective consciousness in the shape an omnipotent system of bureaucratic rule.

So nearly three hundred years before the inauguration of a system of monological rule in the Canadian city, Descartes had already set out what Bland and Spence-Sales or Sutton Brown would do in Vancouver . As Descartes states:

There is less perfection in a work produced by several persons than in one produced by a single hand. Thus we notice that buildings conceived and completed by a single architect are usually more beautiful and better planned than those remodelled by several persons using ancient walls that had originally been built for quite other purposes. Similarly, those ancient towns which are ordinarily very badly arranged compared to one of the symmetrical metropolitan districts which a city planner has laid out on an open plain (read abstract space) according to his designs (Descartes 1956, p.8).

Dialogical rule stands diametrically opposed to the form of rationalism that Descartes outlines in his description of the city. As the word suggests, dialogical systems of rule involve negotiation over rule-making and boundary setting. This, in turn, precludes the imposition of just one logic. Unlike the modern era, where master plans set the direction for planners, with the initiation of dialogical rule during the postmodern era the relevance of master plans becomes problematic.

With no single direction clearly outlined, decentralized rather than centralized decision making becomes pivotal to dialogical systems of rule. Expertise is not monopolized by professionals. Neither is the production of knowledge about the city made the product of one all-knowing authority. In dialogical systems there is no centre. No system or framework is felt to be all-encompassing or sufficient unto itself. In comparison to monological systems of rule power is configured quite differently. Bentham's panoptican structure now becomes a maze. With dialogical systems of rule there are no predetermined paths for making a decision and it is not possible to gain a complete picture of what is happening until the actual process of formulating a plan of action is begun. With dialogical systems of planning pyramidal structures give way to more amorphous configurations, where information flows as much in a horizontal as vertical direction. Web-like structures appear, where information and even power becomes dispersed. As a result, decision making processes will tend to move along a more circular rather than linear pathway.

So when dialogical systems of rule were adopted planning becomes more process-rather than end-state-oriented. The need to produce a comprehensive plan that will set one direction for the city becomes less important to the planning process, since indeterminacy rather than certainty is recognized as the guiding principle. Instead of a plan, guidelines that are created through trial and error, and continuous public dialogue become the preferred method for regulating urban spaces. Again, as the word dialogical suggests, negotiation rather than the imposition of order becomes the basis for urban governance. Unlike monological forms of decision making, where the expert is responsible for making the most important decisions; in a dialogical system the expert is forced to share knowledge and power. Here the planner does not act as some final arbiter. Instead the planner becomes just one of the many participants involved in the process of plan making and policy formation.

The postmodern origins of the anarchical attitude toward authority that defined dialogical processes of decision making in general and urban governance in particular have a lineage which is easy to trace. Here, The Port Huron Statement written by student activists in 1962, can be cited as the first formal manifesto of this new approach to governance. Largely written by Tom Hayden, then a journalism student at the University of Michigan and Richard Flack, the president of the Students For A Democratic Society, this poetic declaration about democratic process would crystallize thinking about dialogical thinking which would be absorbed by the new middle class across North America over the next decade. With 100,000 copies produced soon after its release, the Port Huron Statement would stoke one of the first political fires of the counterculture {Adelson 1972 pp.203-248; Breines 1982, pp.6-19). As Stewart Burns remarked:

The Port Huron Statement had a big influence on the emerging politics of the New Left, and on the student movement generally. It provided a script that would be acted out by thousands, then hundreds of thousands with more or less coherence, until SDS would ultimately toss it into a dustbin. The delegates who left the camp at Port Huron after five days of non stop deliberation did not know that - along with SNCC - they had set the stage for the great surge of grass-roots democracy in the 1960's (Burns 1990, p.58).

More than this, however, the Port Huron Statement would also solidify into discourse, for the first time, the habitus of the new middle class. In the statement, the first stirring of the artistic sensibility that would colour the dialogue of postmodern planners such as Ray Spaxman, was articulated here for the first time. In this document, questions about scarcity were absent, as was any evidence of the engineering mindset which would have created a bridge to the working class sensibilities that were still modern in their productivist orientation. For what the Port Huron Statement revealed about the New Left was that a shift in perspective had taken place. No longer were the most important problems located in the productive sphere. As the following quote will show, they now resided in the sphere of consumption. As the document states:

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacity for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things - if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to"prosperity," cannot justify the mutilations of the present . . . We would rather replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance, by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of this life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation. . . . That decision - making of basic social consequence be carried on by public grouping; that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating a pattern of social relations; that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community; that the political order should. . . provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to related men to knowledge and to power so that private problems-from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation-are formulated as general issues (Adelson 1972, pp. 206-207).

At first glance it may seem far fetched to cite this American document as the inaugural text for dialogical rule in the Canadian city, nevertheless, if the genesis and diffusion of postmodern discourse in Canada are examined, the link between the vocabulary of this document and the language of urban reform becomes obvious to see. The quote just taken from the Port Huron Statement could easily be slipped into any of the texts produced by the most noteworthy urban activists of the livable city - such as Axworthy (1970), Lorimer (1970), Sewell (1972), Clarkson (1972), Pasternak (1975), and Aubin (1977) -- who were to chronicle and formulate a new discourse on the city that would eventually find its way into the recommendations that were made in the Hellyer Report or or Shaping The Future, which set the tone for the kind of planning that would be carried out in the City of Vancouver for nearly twenty years.

Rather than being concerned with objective forces or material constraints, we see a middle class using a subjective language which reflected its coming of age during a period of affluence. That is why the tone set in the Port Huron Statement resonates so clearly in the confessional tone of much of the protest literature on the city that came out in Canada during the 1970’s. Even the artistic sensibility so closely associated with the postmodern personae can be found in ruminations of one of Canada's most prominent urban reformers when, in his book, Up Against City Hall, John Sewell writes:

My interests- theology, art, literature, American Foreign policy, my girl friend- were all falling apart. In the end it was an argument over what sort of direction my life would take. Would I continue my English Studies? Would I return to law? I have few tools to deal with the choice since up to this point I had lead a leisurely life (Sewell 1972, p.11).

Also, the ideological connection between the Port Huron Statement and urban reform in Canada becomes more understandable if the cultural dynamic of the counterculture is studied. As Levitt (1982) remarked: the Canadian new left was largely content to use American programs like the Port Huron Statement. Aside from propinquity, the intellectual culture of the Canadian new middle class was heavily influenced by the migration of 100,000 draft dodgers (Surtees 1996) and the movement of anti-war sympathizers from the United States into teaching positions which were opening up at Canadian Universities. These people would become became carriers and popularizers of the dialogical systems of rule that were first articulated into formal postmodern discourse with the Port Huron Statement (Adelson 1972; Levitt 1984, pp.48, 149-150).

Because the background conditions were ripe for the diffusion of this new attitude towards authority, it did not take long for these ideas to enter into specialized discourses like planning. Just three years after the Port Huron Statement the ideas advanced in this document would percolate into planning discourse with the publication of an influential article on dialogical planning entitled "Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning" by Paul Davidoff in the Journal of the American Institute of planners, in 1965, (Faludi 1973). This literature on dialogical planning was simply a subset of a much more voluminous discourse on the subject of communitarianism and urban governance that arose on both the Left and Right ends of the political spectrum when the shift from a modern to postmodern system of regulation started to take place in the late 1960's (Castells 1989; Mingione 1991).

In Vancouver the switch from monological to dialogical systems of decision making became particularly noteworthy because of the leadership provided by two starkly dissimilar planning directors, and the dramatic play of events which brought about the end of one regime and the beginning of another.

Whereas Spaxman represented the artistic archetype that defined the postmodern sensibility; both literally and figuratively Sutton Brown embodied the mindset of the engineer. The operation of two different sensibilities would also be reflected in the occupational backgrounds of the personnel employed in the Planning in each period. For example, in the early modern period (1952 to 1962), when the Planning Department was just being set up, there was an infusion of staff from the City Engineer's and Building (CV-2, p.71). The bias towards engineering was also was further accentuated by the selection of an engineer as the first director for planning when Sutton Brown was hired (VP-1).. With GF Fountain hired as the next director after Sutton Brown left the Department to become a city commissioner in the late 50’s, yet another engineer was put in charge of the planning. Hence, with the Departments first two directors lead by engineers, the influence of engineers was firmly imprinted on the institutional culture of the Planning Department during its first ten years of operation. While the third director, Bill Graham, was trained as an architect, Graham basically followed the engineering groove that had been set out by Sutton Brown. In fact nothing really change until the 1970’s until when Bill Graham was replaced by Ray Spaxman. With advent of Spaxman, there is radicaly shift away from the utilitarianism which had marked the Department. With more architects and designers hired aesthetics now became much more important.

With Sutton Brown’s image of the planner as an "executive-engineer", the corporatist nature of bureaucratic rule in the modern period was clearly etched in the department (Sutton Brown 1954). Long after Sutton Brown left the Planning Department, this engineering mentality endured,, not the least because all planning policy was vetted by the Board of Administration which Sutton Brown was made in charge of when he left the Planning Department. In the face of the weak leadership provided by Bill Graham, who was hired in 1963, Sutton Brown was able to maintain his program for the modernization of the even though he was no longer the planning director.

From conversations with planners who worked for the city in the 1950s and 1960s, the picture of Sutton Brown that emerges is of a man whose behaviour and actions became the personification of authoritarian rule. Reminiscences from planners revealed that Sutton Brown was responsible for the creation of a claustrophobic working environment in the Department. Interviews and departmental reviews (CVPD-34) showed that many planners who worked in the department did not have any idea what was going on. This was no accident but rather the deliberate result of the quasi-military chain of command that Brown put in place. Furthermore, it was also the result of adopting a Taylorist division of labour, which advocated by Bland and Spence Sales and implemented by Sutton Brown. As previous quotes have revealed, within the Planning Department a clear and strict demarcation between thinking, doing, policy, and execution was rigorously followed. Because of this situation, many junior planners felt that there was no direction in the Planning Department during the Sutton Brown years; however, if the monological logic represented by Bland and Spence Sales and Sutton Brown is fully understood, we see that this lack of communication, was not an aberration, but rather something that was deliberately built into the design of the department In the postmodern era this segmentation of work, and the absence of any knowledge about the general direction the department would be regarded as dysfunctional.

However, in the modern era, this constrained information sharing was viewed in a completely different light. For in the Cartesian system advance by Sutton Brown only one active directing consciousness was expected.
Younger planners, who came of age during the counter culture, did not like or comprehend this system. Not sharing this sensibility their confusion and ignorance about the larger picture was perfectly understandable, particularly since such a bureaucratic culture openly discounted the opinions of junior planners. This would change during the Spaxman years, when self-expression would be viewed in a more positive light. However, during the Sutton Brown years just the opposite tact was taken, with self expression viewed as a sign of impertinence and insubordination. Whereas Spaxman tried to open up as many channels for communication as possible, during the Sutton Brown years the release of information was carefully monitored, flowing in a hierarchical fashion from the top of the bureaucracy to the bottom.

For many younger planners who were expecting to be treated as professionals rather than as subservient technicians, the corporate culture which Sutton Brown had constructed proved to be hostile and onerous -- particularly in the late 60s, when more liberal attitudes towards authority by the new middle class were beginning to percolate into the new generation of planners that were coming into the Department.

Generational alienation between the values of the traditional middle class and the new middle class would be reflected in high turnover of younger staff, as younger planners left the Department to work in smaller cities where more satisfying and rewarding work could be found (PI-23). In fact, there was so much staff turnover between 1967 to 1972 that this even sparked a media investigation (VS-23; VS-43; VE-44). As well, growing resentment towards Sutton Brown's style of leadership appeared to have had something do with the fact that many local planners felt that they were being patronized as colonials by an arrogant leadership cadre which was British rather than Canadian (PI-24; PI-25).

Thus fear and resentment coloured the operation of the planning bureaucracy during much of the modern period. With watchful eyes focussed on who was using the copying machine, (then a recent innovation), the dissemination of information was as rigorously controlled as it might have been in any Soviet-style bureaucracy. This control even applied to interpersonal interaction between people working in different departments as well as at different division within the Planning Department. For example, one former planner recounted how he and others were often upbraided for communicating with people outside their department without the formal permission of a deputy or department head. Even within the Planning Department itself a rigid caste system based on administrative status evolved, which consticted the free flow of information between upper and lower level echelons of the department. The same restrictions applied with regard to the fraternization of planners with politicians. Here one former planner recounted how Sutton Brown stationed his secretary in front of the alderman's offices to make sure that everyone who went into the offices was duly taken note of (PI-24).

With the reaction against bureaucratic authority rapidly gaining steam it is not hard to see how a Planning Department deeply entrenched in the old order was caught completely off guard by the events which were to follow. While the quasi military nature of bureaucratic rule exercised by Sutton Brown during the 1950’s may have been acceptable in the Cold War when the Department was staffed predominantly by engineers who were socialized to accept a work culture based on deference to authority; in a period of rising anti-militarism, maintenance of such a work culture provoked rebellion rather obedience. Not surprisingly, when Ray Spaxman was asked about the culture of the Department he remarked how his first experience of the Department reminded him of the restrictive and claustrophobic environment he had earlier experienced in British military (PI-21).

In this way the emergence of a generation gap set the stage for internal dissension within the Department. More importantly, outside the department, in the public arena, the decline in deference towards bureaucratic authority had more serious implications for the Planning Department. In an unusual turn of events, which had no precedence in any other Canadian city, the archaic practices of the Department became the subject of on going media scrutiny and criticism (VP-9).

Now viewed as part of the technocracy, the planning bureaucracy became 'the system", something which recast it in a sinister and often times absurd light. This anti-authoritarian sensibility would make all large bureaucracies look bad, but few more so than the Vancouver Planning Department because of its rigid adherence to discounted practices and its quasi-military organization that made the Department particularly open to ridicule during a time of anti-war activism. Thus, at a time when popular movies such as "Hospital" or "M*a*s*h" were lambasted bureaucracies, old line bureaucrats were stymied. Not understanding the momentous cultural changes that were underway, many could not comprehend why their reputations were now suddently tarnished or why so much resistance to their plans was now occurring. Failing to adapt to the circumstances created by an insurgant new middle class who had become the agents of postmodernism, the Planning Department would increasingly be perceived of as an ossified and reactionary bastion until it was completely re-organized with the arrival of Spaxman in 1973 (PI-9).

In the postmodern era it would be the artist rather than the engineer who become the archetypal figure for the new age. In contrast to the Appollian persona of Sutton Brown. Unlike the Gradgrind personality of Sutton Brown, Ray Spaxman was a person that one reporter (VP-28) described as being a cross between "Rock Hudson and Stewart Granger," Using more metaphorical language the contrast between Sutton Brown and Ray Spaxman can be described in terms of the Dionysian and Appollian turn of each man. As the reference to Dionysious, the Greek God of bread and wine suggests, in terms of leadership style and the institutional culture of the Department, the postmodern regime for planning initiated by Ray Spaxman was one marked by the greater play of subjectivity and a more obvious flowering of the artistic temperament. Once again this stood in direct contrast to the engineering mindset which typified the rule of Sutton Brown (PI-21). While Sutton Brown did everything possible to avoid conflict and disorder, Spaxman moved in the opposite direction, embracing disorder and uncertainty rather than avoiding it (PI-7; Spaxman 1991). Spaxman’s leadership style involved an interplay of emotion with reason. There was also an appreciation of the sensuous qualities of space which was almost completely absent during the Sutton Brown (PI-17) years (hence the centrality of urban design and the enhancement of the design capabilities of the Planning Department in the Spaxman era).

Just as Sutton Brown had done, Spaxman would midwife the institutionalization of postmodern planning, putting into institutional form the postmodern spatial matrix that had already been formulated by the new middle class, repeating what Bland and Sales Spence and Sutton Brown had done for a different middle class constituency, whose taste for reform was shaped by the thinking of progressivist movement rather than that of the counter culture. However, unlike Sutton Brown, Spaxman would be able to implement most of the livable city agenda while the modern program for the transformation of the city was largely unrealized. As a result, the three reports prepared under the tutelage of Sutton Brown for the modern transformation of the city: the Downtown Vancouver 1955-1976 (CVTPB-1), the Vancouver Redevelopment Study (CVTPB-2) andA Study on Highway Planning for Metropolitan Vancouver (CVTPB-4) were not implemented.

This does not mean that adoption of postmodern regulation was a painless or straightforward process of transition. The growing misalignment between urban reformers and the Planning Department created severe turbulance for the Planning Department between 1966 and 1972. This would be a tempestuous time for the Planning Department, particularly as the media started to pay a great deal of attention to what was happening to this staid bureaucracy, putting an unwelcomed and unaccustomed spotlight on the Planning Department that would be a unique feature of the transformation of planning culture in Vancouver. Even prominent national columnists such as Allan Fotheringham, became involved in diagnosing what was going wrong with planning in Vancouver, as he openly berated the department (VS-40), asking why competent planners were leaving. So as modernism began to enter into its death throes the interest of the media in the troubles of the Planning Department became a bit of a feeding frenzy as the politics involved with this transition period took on the look of street theatre, with the Planning Department made a reluctant participant in many of the dramas that were to unfold as modern and postmodern sensibilities began to clash with each other.

The pot was further stirred up by the actions of a flamboyant mayor, Tom Campbell, who became a comic symbol of modernism's last gasp, as the national media eagerly reporting the run ins that the mayor had with the urban activists. When the mayor gave the finger to freeway protesters this received national coverage. Similarly casting protestors as, "Maoists, communists, pinkos, left- wingers and hamburgers" (Gutstein 1965,p.165) further inflamed the feelings of reformers against the mayor and the Planning Department.
Thus in just a few years the world for both the mayor and the Planning Department would be turned inside out.

Regulatory doctrines that had been nurtured for several generations were suddenly cast adrift in a sea of unfamiliar and experimental ideas that operated according to a different philosophic frame of reference which devalued the opinion the new middle class public had of the Planning Department.
All of a sudden, the Department found itself occupying the wrong side on popular issues. Uutspoken intellectuals lambasted the Department. And even politicians started to wonder what was on going as the media openly ridiculed the planning department for incompetence and the mishandling of the public interest (VP-9; VP-11; VP-13; VP-21; VS-24; VS-27; VS-39; VS-40; VS-41). Just a few years earlier the Planning Department had been criticized for moving too slowly on the Sutton Brown Plan. However, just as it attempting to speed up the implementation of the plan, the legitimacy of the plan was put into question, placing the Planning Department into a no win situation. With the philosophic, sociological and aesthetic assumptions of modern planning suddenly questioned for the first time the deconstruction of modern planning would become a painful experience for the Planning Department, as practically every major endeavour of the department was now cast in an unflattering light.

This would become particularly evident over the Pacific Centre controversy, which was one of the few elements of the Sutton Brown Plan to be fully realized. Only a few years earlier, politicians and the media had roundly criticized the Department for its failure to initiate downtown renewal. However, between the beginning and the end of Pacific Centre, the rules of the game had been reversed. Instead of praise for completing a long delayed project, the Department was severely criticized. Had the Pacific Centre been completed just a few years earlier, in the mid 1960s instead of the early 1970s this project would have probably have been regarded as one of the crowning achievements of the Planning Department in the modern era. But this was not to be case. With a different spatial matrix now used to assess the merits of a project Pacific Centre became an albatross for the Department rather than an accomplishment for which it could ask the public for approval (VS-31; VS-36).

The other components of the twenty year development plan did not emerge unscathed from the time warp which afflicted Pacific Centre. For example, urban renewal would come under a cloud as the federal government ended its support for urban renewal. The transportation did not do much better either, with the Georgia Viaduct the only fragment of Sutton Brown's massive freeway plan to be completed. Whether it be the freeway plan, urban renewal, or downtown redevelopment, each component of Sutton Brown’s 20-year development plan was now openly challenged and publicly ridiculed.

How complete was the failure of modernism can be gauged by looking at what was proposed and what was achieved. Starting with urban renewal, the 1957 Redevelopment plan called for the clearance of 800 acres, but only 70 were cleared and redeveloped before the cancellation of the program. Even more glaring was the failure to implement the transportation plan of Sutton Brown. Of the 45 miles of freeway that were proposed at a cost of around $400 million dollars, scarcely a mile of freeway standard roadway was completed before it too was cancelled. Hence, after 20 years of struggle and countless studies the only freeway infrastructure that was completed was the Georgia Viaduct.

With less than one percent of the 1959 freeway plan of Sutton Brown completed and only 6 to 7 percent of the urban renewal plan undertaken and approximately a third of the 1956 downtown plan's objectives realized,,the modernist agenda for Vancouver was radically truncated. With no significant Federal or Provincial support the least capital-intensive components of the 20-year plan became the easiest parts of the plan to implement. This may explain why the most progress was made on the downtown segment of the plan, since it required the least amount of capital. However, because of fiscal contraints this implementation logic was completely reversed. Hence the most important element, namely the freeway, ended up becoming the last element of the plan to move into implementation. With the downtown starting to boom bottlenecks were developing, and it was the freeway plan that was expected to sustain the other two components of the Sutton Brown plan, Not only was the freeway plan expected to trigger the further redevelopment of the Downtown, it was also a part of Sutton Brown’s urban renewal scheme. .However, because there was no active support from the Federal Government this was the last element of the broader plan to be implemented. That is why the business community was forced to lobby hard for public support in a referendum that was called on the construction of the Georgia Viaduct, the first component of Sutton Brown’s freeway plan (Pendakur 1972; Gutstein 1975). Still, even with this intervention, only a small part of the larger freeway system ended up receiving funding.

The pressures to fast track development had an impact on the organizational makeup of the Department. Prior to Graham, the allocation of resources reflected the Planning Department’s focus on plan preparation rather than plan implementation. However, even before the shift from plan preparation to implementation concern about the inability of the Department to move ahead on the Sutton Brown Plan was already being voiced by G.F. Fountain in the early 60’s. When Graham arrived on the scene pressure to move ahead was even more acutely felt. Beginning in 1964, the Department underwent restructuring in attempt to speed up implementation of the plan. Further changes were made in 1967, but these additional changes simply codified what had been started in 1964(CVPD-16)... For example the Housing and Urban Renewal Division was created to implement Sutton Brown’s urban renewal plan. Similarly, the Current Planning division was set up to implementation the commercial urban renewal strategy for the downtown. Finally, Long Range Planning was set up to implementing the various other parts of the 20-year development plan not assigned to the Urban Renewal or Current Planning Divisions. According to departmental reviews and the opinions of people who then worked for the department, this was not a very effective organizational arrangement. Work tasks were fragmented and disjointed because of the way that some projects were split up between the various divisions (CVPD-23; PI-18; PI-23; PI-24). In particular, this was the case for theLong Range Planning Division. With a fragmented work plan, long range planning was unable to articulate a new direction for the department just when it was most required.

Sideswiped and buffeted by the unfriendly winds of change the Planning Department experienced considerable internal upheaval soon after the 67 re-organization, even under going a form of organizational melt down. What happened to the Urban Renewal and Housing Division is a good case in point. Being the first division that was specifically created to implement one of the three components of the 20-year development plan, the Urban Renewal and Housing Division was expected to be the powerhouse of the Planning Department. At least this was the intention of Bill Graham, who made an ambitious public claim in 1965 that Vancouver would become the leader for urban renewal in Canada (VS-18b; VS-29).

Putting the urban renewal division into overdrive he anticipated that 300 acres of land would be cleared by 1967 instead of the 200 acres that had originally been contemplated (VS-18a). Accordingly, Graham expected to add over 20 staff positions to the six that were already allocated to the Urban Renewal and Housing Division in 1966 (VS-21). If this plan had been realized the Urban Renewal and Housing Division would have consumed taken up almost half of the manpower of the planning department. But, as we have seen, this was not to happen. When 1969 rolled around only 70 odd acres had been cleared and the division was beginning to be wound down rather than expanded (VS-29,;CVPD-23; VS-34; (CVPD-24a).

Another attempt to re-organize the Department in 1971 can be interpreted as an institutional attempt to come to terms with the failure of the Department to implement the 20-year development plan (CVPD-23; VP-17). With the re-organization of the department in 1971, not only did the Urban Renewal Division disappear, Current Planning was transformed into the Civic Development Division. Later on, this new division became a seed bed for the Department’s first experimentation in postmodern planning, as pathbreaking work in Champlain Heights and False Creek was undertaken. Meanwhile, the Urban Renewal and Housing Division became the Community Planning Division (CVPD-33). As the name change suggests, conservation rather than urban renewal was now emphasized. Left in charge of tying up the loose ends remaining from the urban renewal programs of the previous era the Community Planning Division would take on an even more obvious postmodern colouring, before it was absorbed into the Local Area Planning Division with the 1974 re-organization of the Department.

With the original implementation program in tatters by 1970, in addition to the Community Planning Division, other progressive planning work was carried out by the Civic Development Division (PI-27) or by bodies such as the Special Committee on False Creek, which was created in 1971, but was independent of the Planning Department (PI-9). The institutional flux that resulted from the failure to implement the Sutton Brown Plan would carry on into the early years of Spaxman's tenure -- most noticeably in the Downtown Study Group, which was given the responsiblity for preparing the new zoning bylaw for the downtown, that was adopted in 1975 (CVPD-37; CVPD-38; CVPD-39; CVPD-42; CVPD-43). Only with the reorganization of the department, in 1974, and the dismissal of three deputy planners was a stable organizational structure finally put in place that would remain intact until the 1990’s(VS-59).

The organizational stability which the Planning Department has achieved since that time only highlights the incredible turbulence experienced by the department in the six years between 1967 and 1973 that resulted from the rapid shift from away from modern to postmodern norms. In terms of program and organization, the department was simply not prepared to deal with the massive changes that were taking place. For example, the need to re-organize revealed that Department was not flexible enough to deal suddenly with the dramatic shift from a land-extensive to land-intensive development that began in the mid 1960’s. Nor was planning capable of adapting to the cultural and political changes that took place during this brief but tempestuous time. Held back by the institutional inertia created by the control of the civic bureaucracy by Sutton Brown and the weak leadership of Bill Graham, the department began to list. Disoriented by these shifts the Planning Department was unable to negoitate a balance between old and new practices which would have preserved some of its integrity. Unable to adapt to this new situation quickly enough or even to make adequate sense of what was going on, the Planning Department started to buckle under the resulting pressure and experience the institutional equivalent of a nervous breakdown, as it was reorganized three times in the span of just six years.
In the centre of this maelstrom was Bill Graham. From interviews with former employees and an examination of internal departmental documents a picture of an amiable man emerges who had the misfortune of occupying the wrong position at the wrong time. His weaknesses were apparent early on, when one senior planner expressed some exasperation at the decision to hire him as the director (PI-27). Instead of reducing the cultural gap that was developing between the Planning Department and its middle class critics Graham only seemed to magnify and accentuate them (VP-20). Without the skills to steer the department through the turbulence that came about because of this shift from a modern to postmodernism, and the challenges posed by densification, Bill Graham's deficiencies both as an administrator and as a leader became magnified, as he became an object of ridicule to other planners, politicians and the media.

Circumstances had produced a situation in which it became almost impossible for Graham to do anything right, whether it had to do with development in the West End, the Arbutus Shopping Centre development. His inability to go with the flow was probably further complicated by the fact that he was a fundamentalist Christian, which made him appear even odder to many planners (PI-45); and certainly would have left him more out of step with the rapid secularization that came with the counterculture. Unable to see the new trip wires that were created Graham managed to dutifully stumbled over most of them (Collier 1974, Chapter Two). Unable to read or understand the signs of change, both Graham and the Department started to flounder badly as planners started to abandon ship. This can be seen a confidential memorandum written in 1970 where Graham appears to be losing his nerve as he pleads for understanding and sympathy (CVPD-23).
This inability to read change may explain why Graham was ultimately fired in 1973, just after TEAM came to power late in 1972. For whatever his faults, reformers did not regard Graham as a threat to the new regime they now hoped to create (PI-9). Even though Bill Graham was nominally the planning director from 1963 to 1973, urban reformers had long known that the real power behind the throne was Sutton Brown. As Ron Youngberg noted (PI-27) the Planning Department was the only department in the civic administration where all documents were fully vetted by Sutton Brown. The public only became apprised of what planners had long known about Graham, that he was terrified of Sutton Brown, when Graham attempted to make a public stand against Sutton Brown over a transportation issue in 1971 (VP-20).

Unfortunately, by this time, it was too late for Bill Graham to distance himself from Sutton Brown or redeem himself in the minds of urban reformers. Thus, in 1971, when Graham finally decided to stand up to Sutton Brown it was too late . Even when Graham eventually rebelled against Sutton Brown, circumstances worked against him in a perverse way, since his stand only brought out unfavourable comparisons between himself and Maurice Egan, the Director of Social Planning, who had long ago asserted his independence of Sutton Brown. As one newspaper report noted (VP-20) from the beginning Maurice Egan had declared his independence of Sutton Brown by refusing to have the reports of his department amended or tampered with by the Board of Commissioners, which Sutton Brown sat on and controlled.

For this and other reasons, Graham's public stand against Sutton Brown ended up taking on a comic operatic look, as one newspaper made the confrontation appear like the showdown in the movie "High Noon," only in this case the protagonist in question loses rather than wins the fight (VP-20). While Graham did stand up to Sutton Brown, his plea for council to reconsider the road expansion supported by Sutton Brown went down to defeat, leaving him limping away.

Despite the growing unpopularity of the Planning Department, the attempt to move from plan preparation to implementation meant that significant new resources were allocated to the Department. Even though the Department was having considerable difficulty coping with change, more planning services were required as densification fed into the development boom that was now taking place. In nominal terms the budget for the Department rose from $373,072 in 1965 to $669,273 in 1970, reaching $936,580 by 1972. Similarly, between 1965 and 1972 employment rose as well. From around 35 people in 1965, the number of employees in the Department increased to 55 by 1969. After 1969 growth tapered off but then started to increase again, but this time under the direction of Ray Spaxman, who initiated an aggressive period of institution building in order to refashion the Department by instituting a postmodern agenda for the city which urban reformers had given him a mandate to pursue (CV-1a; VP-29; VP-39).


One A: The livable city agenda: Phase one of the postmodern transformation of the Canadian city


The changes brought about by the adoption of dialogical systems of rule in Vancouver can be reviewed in closer detail by looking at Shaping the Future. If the Bland and Spence-Sales Report provided the blueprint for monological systems of decision making throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, then it was the shaping of this document in the mid-70’s which provided the philosophical blueprint for urban regulation in Vancouver during the postmodern era,

Once again, to fully understand the significance of Shaping the Future we must briefly return to the earlier discussion on modernity and see how Shaping the Future can functioned as an organic expression of the ideology of the livable city, which acted as organic ideology for the new middle class in the city. Although Shaping the Future may be the clearest expression of postmodern ideology in the planning field, similar formulations appeared simultaneously across the country wherever there was a large and active middle class population. While broad shifts in the modernization process, such as the shift from bureaucratic rule to market rule, established the background ideological framework for the creation of Shaping The Future, more specific and localized influences specific to Canada were also at work in the movement away from modern regulation. As remarked in the previous chapter, one factor unique to Canada was role played by the densification process. In this regard it is important to keep in mind that the emergence of the new middle class coincided with the first wave in the densification process which swept across the country in the mid 60’s. As a result corporate developers and the new middle class began to compete with each over the use and control of land in the inner city. During the progressivist period the traditional middle class had closely identified itself with corporate capital, but with the redirection of investment into the inner city by large corporations this alignment was completely reversed by the new middle class. Unlike the United States, where the middle class reaction to bureaucratic rule was focussed more on the action of the state, in Canada the animus shown towards bureaucratic rule was largely directed at large private corporations instead of the state itself.

Indeed, for the new middle class, that came of age in Canada during the late 60’s, the state was viewed as an ally rather than as an enemy in the fight over corporate control Also, with no national urban renewal strategy or massive freeway program, to alienate the emerging postmodern sensibilities of the new middle class, state intervention in the city was not tainted by the failure of urban renewal which the middle class held the state accountable for in the United States. Finally, in Canada there was no anti-war movement to galvanize middle class opposition to the state. For all these reasons the Canadian State was viewed in a much more benign light. Viewed as vehicle for progressive action, and not the reactionary bastion for propagation of modern norms, which was more the case in the United States, the Canadian state became an agent with regard to the propagation of postmodern values in the city.

The challenge for the new middle class during the 1970’s, therefore, became one of harnessing the state to curb the excesses of the large development. In addition to this, the other main objective had to do with taking control of strategic parts of the state so that a new, postmodern, agenda could be put in place. At the local level this involved taking control of the local planning apparatus. For example, in Vancouver this happened in 1973, with the victory of Team. This, in turn, set the stage for the hiring of Ray Spaxman, who became the city’s new planning, who then set about to reorganize the planning department, which Shaping The Future became the vision statement for.

At the federal and provincial level a similar metamorphosis took place. For instanse, new urban ministries were created by the provinces. And at the federal level a Ministry of State for Urban Affairs was established in the early 70’s. Similarly, due largely to the advocacy of the new middle class an entirely new approach to housing and urban renewal was advanced by the Federal Government. So, rather than fighting the state, the middle class tried to co-op state involvement in the postmodern transformation of the city. As in the United States, this new vision was still framed by the rise of the market. That is why we see a dramatic revival of radical libertarian perspectives, which takes us back to the notion of dialogical decision making, as most postmodern reforms attempted to instill dialogical process by down-scaling the decision making process. There was also a socialist critique of modern regulation as well, but as with middle class libertarians this reaction against bureaucratic rule in Canada took chief aim at the actions of large private corporations, and not the state itself (Lorimer 1970; 1972; 1983; Harris 1987; 1988; Caufield 1988).

Thus, during the first phase of the postmodern transformation there was some convergence between the libertarianism of the middle class and the labour movement. Still, despite the overall reassertion of market rule, unlike the United States, where the state started to disengage itself from the city, just the opposite occurred in Canada, as the 1970’s marked a renaissance in state involvement. Because this intervention was framed by the adoption of postmodern norms, this renaissance did not involve the extension of modern forms of bureaucratic rule. With the replacement of monological by dialogical processes community involvement become more important. Rather than the state unilaterally imposing its vision, partnerships were formed with communities. This, in turn, resulted in the production of hybrid communal spaces, spaces that were neither shaped entirely by the market or the bureaucracy. By contrast, in the United States, developing partnerships with communities became the task of the philanthropic sector. Rather than the state involving itself with communitarian endeavors, in the 1970’s more emphasis was placed on establishing partnerships with private corporations.

The fact that the middle class were able to exert more influence on the federal government rather than municipal government exposed as mythology, the commonplace notion that local government is necessarily the most approachable or responsive level of government. Indeed, as critique of urban government by urban reformers showed time and time again, local government primarily operated as a fiefdom for property capital.
Only when the new middle class began to mobilize as a political force in the late 1960’s, and then gain some electoral successes in the 1970’s, was the monopoly of property capital temporarily broken. Until this happened most of the institutional transformation were largely confined to the federal government rather than with municipalities.

That is why the postmodern transformation of the local state begins with the with the publication of the Hellyer Report, by the Federal Government in 1969. As it is the publication of this report which marke the birth of a philosophical discourse on postmodern city. Likewise, because the Hellyer Report also led to the cancellation of Canada’s incipient urban renewal program, it can also be regarded as modernism’s swan song. In addition to the cancellation of urban renewal, the Hellyer Report is also significant because it paved the way many ad hoc experiments in housing that were to follow, such as the Residential Rehabilitation and Assistance Program and The Neighbourhood Improvement programs. As well, The Hellyer Report helped to spark a critical literature on housing and planning, setting the stage for the publication of critical works such as,Programs in Search of Policy (1972), by Michael Dennis and Susan Fish (1972), Eventually the experimentation and innovation provoked by the Hellyer Report would culminate in the amendments that were made to the National Housing Act, in 1973, which can be viewed as significant example of the translation of postmodern norms into official public policy.

While significant progress was being made at the federal level, most particularly in the housing field, within the planning profession itself, however, progress was much slower. Except for the experiments that were taking place in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, under the tutelage of Harry Lash, no significant changes in the planning would take place until the new middle class gained control of city council’s in Toronto and Vancouver during the civic elections of 1972.

With the victory of middle class reformers the planning department in each city would be re-organized. In each case this would involve the firing of the planning director, with numerous other individuals thought to be incompetent or too closely identified with the modern order let go as well. However, in the case of Vancouver, it would not be until Shaping The Future was released in 1974, that the planning department formally adopted the ideology of the livable city. With its publication we see at last see the goals of this urban social movement tranformed into a formal vision statement that became the basis for department policy in the postmodern era, establishing the framework that would guide the formal codification of postmodern norms, such as, for example, the introduction of the city’s first area based discretionary zoning bylaw in 1974 (Table 25A), and one year later, in 1975, a new downtown bylaw which erased the final remnants of the 1956 plan of Sutton Brown.

Finally, Shaping The Future, established the direction for the reorganization of departments within planning, establishing new divisions which would supply the institutional muscle for implementing the livable city agenda over the next twenty years.

Looking at the ideology of the livable city in more detail, six attributes which identify this ideology as being postmodern can be singled out for comment..As already noted, one of the most important characteristics of the ideology of the livable city was the emphasis placed upon citizen's involvement in the decision making process. At the federal level, this would be formally codified into the NIP and RRAP programs when amendments were made to the National Housing Act in 1973. In turn, this had a profound influence on planning practice across the country in the 1970’s. Even where middle class reformers were not powerful enough to take control of city council, and initiate the restructuring of the bureaucracy, federal incentives for participation would force even the most conservative planning departments to embrace more participatory modes of decision making. So even before the publication of Shaping The Future, the path from monological to dialogical systems of control was already underway.

The second characteristic which defines the ideology of the livable city takes us to the second characteristic which sets the philosophic orientation of modern planning apart from postmodern planning, this attribute having to do with how urban space is represented. As the next section will show, this involved a shift from abstract representations of urban space to more organic representations. In this regard it is important to keep in mind the influence of the densification process. Not only were more organic representation of space the result of the counterculture, to a large degree the shift to more organic representations had to do with the middle class reaction to densification.

Social equity and social inclusiveness define the third characteristic of the livable city agenda. The most significant expression of these two goals would be realized in the non-profit housing programs sponsored by the Federal Government. Through these programs a concerted and sustained effort to produce more equitable and complex social landscapes in the city would be undertaken. For example, in the City of Vancouver this resulted in the construction of a ring of social housing around the downtown core, in the Zone of Middle Class Resettlement.

The fourth characteristic has to do with pedestrianization. Experimentation with medium-density housing was the fifth feature of the livable city ideology. Finally, there was a sixth feature that defined the middle class ideology of the livable city and this was the involvement of an activist state in the production of urban space and, as earlier noted, the creation of partnerships with communities.

How these six attributes take form in "Shaping The Future can now be reviewed. Unlike the Utilitarian focus placed on efficiency in the Bland and Spence Sales Report, or the three component parts of Sutton-Brown’s twenty year development plan, in Shaping The Future an entirely different approach is taken. If scarcity and necessity set the backdrop for planning during the Sutton Brown era, in Shaping The Future it is the play of superfluity that sets the tone for what would now happen, as planning moves up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and starts to pay attention to more amorphous needs such as self actualization. Thus in one of the opening paragraphs of Shaping The Future, the report states that planning must also seek to provide its "citizens with access to the widest possible range of amenities and opportunities" (CVPD-36). Planning must therefore do more than provide for the basic necessities of shelter, health and safety. Reflecting the optimism of the time and the replacement of the engineering mindset by the artistic temperament, self actualization and self-expression rather than the simple gratification of needs become more important. For planning must now do more than provide for the basic necessities of shelter, health and safety. As Spaxman would reiterate nearly twenty years after Shaping The Future:

The most successful cities seem to be those that provide an environment which goes beyond efficiency and comfort. They are places which are inspirational; where the pride of the community is exhibited in the form and fabric of the city; where 'Happiness' (a goal which one would be hard pressed to find in modernist discourse) is an important as wealthiness' where artists flourish as well as bankers (Spaxman 1991).
This new sensibility was embedded in the three main themes that are set out In Shaping The Future:with planning for people, planning for change and planning for the environment acting as the new guideposts for postmodern transformation of the city. The embrace of these three themes constituted a complete repudiation of the previous philosophic orientation of the department. For example, by making planning for people a central aim, Shaping The Future dismissed modern planning's obsession with machine space. By the same token, the new emphasis on planning for people also signalled the end of monological decision making, which had defined the Planning Department during the Sutton Brown era. Finally, the importance of planning for people and planning for the environment highlighted the growing importance of organic rather than abstract representations of urban space. Here, most notably, the new emphasis on organic space would even find expression in the re-organization of the Planning Department, when a division called local area planning was created. As we shall also see, the shift from abstract to organic representation of space would also show up in the development of postmodern zoning codes.

Looking in more detail at the three organizing themes of Shaping The Future, beginning with planning for people, we see that people are now the starting point for planning in Vancouver. By making reference to people the report was really pointing to the need to institutionalizing dialogical forms of decision making. The abundant remarks that were made about the necessity to improve the department's ability to communicate with people bears this point out. Unlike the Bland and Spence Sales Report, which resolutely emphasized the need to limit involvement of the lay public and politicians in the research and goal formation phase of the planning process, in Shaping The Future the exact opposite stance is taken. Expert Knowledge is no longer expected to be the only frame of reference for planners. Within this new paradigm expert knowledge would now be constrained by the need for dialogue with politicians and citizens. As the report states:

The Planning department has a responsibility to inform and be informed by the public. Not only must we convey the information gained from the city studies and ensure that the public understands our policies and programs, but we must also be sensitive to the information which comes from citizen groups and individuals (CVPD-36).

Moving on to the next point planning for change is the second theme mentioned in Shaping The Future. In monological systems of planning change is not problematic as the future is presumed to be controllable. However, when this assumption is challenged the whole issue of change became much more problematic. And this is what planning for change attempted to address. Again this was less an issue in the modern era, when monological systems of bureaucratic rule gave planners confidence that they could control the process of change. However, with the chaos that came with the growing influence of the market, things became much more uncertain. Planning also had to deal with the clouded situation created by densification, which forced planners pay more attention to conservation issues. Qualitative rather than quantitative change therefore had to be taken into consideration. This was not such an important issue in the Sutton Brown period, when land-extensive patterns of investment dominated, and nearly 70 percent of the city's residential land was frozen by RS-1 zoning for single family dwellings. During the modern era redevelopment was expected to be confined to the 25 to 30 percent of the city's land mass devoted to mixed land uses.

Indeed, during the Sutton Brown era the biggest challenge for planners would be how to trigger development in the under performing areas slated for redevelopment, not the management of growth. While the subject of change was not entirely ignored by Bland and Spence Sales or even Sutton Brown, it was, nevertheless, a peripheral concern. In a period before the rise of the new middle class, and a time when nearly 75 per cent of the city was sterilized from redevelopment by RS-1 Zoning, when land extensive development on greenfield sites predominated, planners confidently expected they could force the development of the city to fit into the mold set out by zoning, and the guidance supplied by Sutton Brown’s 20 year development plan.

Change, in otherwords, was expected to be predictable, occurring in such a way that would not violate the principle of order and certainty. With the search for certainty and order given so much weight it was not hard for planners to accept the notion that there might be one best solution for the organization of space which could be distilled into a master plan and thenn subsequently used as a framework for re-organizing the built environment. In this fashion planning functioned as a disciplinary technology, with the search for order and certainly driving planners to suppress any feature which deviated from the master plan. Indeed, this is how the 20-year development plan of Sutton Brown functioned, with Sutton Brown’s master plan serving as as a procrustean bed that set out how the built environment was expected to be reshaped.

However, with the rising influence of the market, densification, and the middle class insurgency which arose partly as response to the densification of the city, this ordered framework for change started to unravel. With indeterminacy rather than predictability defining the process of urban transformation, the comfortable assumptions once made about the future direction of the city no longer held. Shaping the Future acknowledged, this by stating that planners would now have to contend with a new reality. In saying this the report implied that a different type of rationality would now have to be used..

As Shaping The Future points out, planners would now be required to shift philosophic gears and move away from Cartesian forms of rationality and adopt Humean forms of rationalism -- where the limitations of abstract reasoning, due recognition of the usefulness of trail and error, and the recognition of contingency and uncertainty were given more weight. Once again, In Shaping The Future Humean approach would be distilled in the reports advocacy of process methodologies. Nowhere would this become more apparent then in the remarks about local area planning made Shaping The Future. As the report remarked: local area planning "necessarily involve an intimate knowledge of community, a continuous dialogue with local citizens, and the determination of goals reflecting the needs of those citizens (CVPD-36)."

The preceding remark on local area planning is not only interesting to think about because of its support for dialogical planning methods, what the previous quote also reveals is the links that exists between dialogical systems of decision making and the use of organic spatial. As the aforementioned quote reveals, the adoption of dialogical planning casts urban space in an entirely new light. Rather abstract regulatory codes being used to direct change, becomes softened and modified by spatial context and history.

Besides local area planning, the move towards dialogical systems of planning, and the adoption of organic spatial constructs becomes most evident in the revisions made to the city’s zoning bylaws in the 1970’s. Instead of arbitrary codes being imposed upon the landscape, guidelines that took their cue from historical precedent and geographical context increasingly came into use. With this development zoning in Vancouver started to resemble English Common Law. This contrasted sharply with modern zoning which like the Napoleonic Code, where in typical Cartesian fashion abstracted zoning schedules were applied without regard to context. Whereas modern zoning tended to decontextualize space, in the Spaxman era the, introduction of discretionary zoning began to recontextualize space. Again, for this new form of zoning to work properly the nature of planning had to change dramatically. Instead of being peripheral to the planning process, constant public feedback now became a central feature of the zoning process.

Finally, changes in the process of goal formation highlight another aspect of knowledge formation in dialogical systems of planning. Here uncertainty and the play of contingencies makes the constant monitoring of public goals an on going requirement for planning. This process began before the arrival of Spaxman, when planning for False Creek and then, later the downtown was undertaken in the early and mid 70’s; but it is really with The Goals for Vancouver program undertaken by the newly revived Vancouver Planning Commission in the late 1970s that a permanent institutional mechanism for public input into goal formation was set up (CV-17). Instead of goals for the city being devised internally by experts, as was the case during the Sutton Brown era, a public process was established to generate goals outside the planning profession. .

To work properly, this new approach required a far more sophisticated steering mechanism to guide planning. News ways of involving the public in the decision making process had to be devised. As well new methods for informing the public had to be developed.
I
n addition to the Vancouver City Planning Commission, soliciting public input and the task of monitoring goals became the responsibility of the Overall Planning Division (CVPD-36; CVPD-61). Like the Local Area Division the Overall Planning Division was established in 1974 in response to the recommendations set out in Shaping The Future.

Here emphasis placed upon dialogical planning can be illustrated by looking at the publication of Quarterly Report, which was published from the the mid 1970s until the mid 80s. Like its counterpart in the Social Planning Department, the Urban Reader, the Quarterly Report was produced several times a year to inform the public about important planning matters. Since public dialogue was unheard of in the Sutton Brown, as more energy was expended upon the suppression of information rather than its dissemination, this represented a radical departure for the Planning Department.

So rather than being viewed as an afterthought or as an insignificant, public ritual public involvement became a major priority for the Overall Division. Again this provides an illustration of how planning was becoming more process oriented rather than fixated on the preparation of an end state master plan. Later on, in the 1990’s, when the Overall Division became the CityPlan Division, the focus on public involvement was maintained albeit with a more corporatist slant. For example, the most expensive planning exercise in the city's history was conducted between 1992 and 1995 when 3.2-million dollars were spent on developing CityPlan, which was adopted by City Council in 1995 (CVPD-141).

Because unilateral decisions are not viewed as legitimate expressions of authority in this system of urban governance, whenever this happens, it is necessary to camouflage this by engaging in a process of public consultation even if there is no real transfer of power or the dialogue does not affect the outcome of a decision. This would become more the case with planning in Vancouver, as a new form of corporatism and the reassertion of a weaker strain of rationalism in the 1990s would conclude the communitarian phase of planning that was institutionalized in Shaping the Future. This would become apparent in the CityPlan process as the conclusions and recommendations in the Plan that was passed in 1995 would mirror a strategy that had already been devised to deal with the densification of the suburban parts of the city in 1989. When this observation was made to the director of the CityPlan Division (PI-13) the response was that this was simply an interesting coincidence. At one level this was true, the public had been consulted. However the consultation process appears to have been structured so that the conclusions that were reached were the ones planners had sought out from the beginning.

Regardless, even in CityPlan innovative exercises involving the co-mingling of popular and expert forms of knowledge were carried out. Although a more analytical and rational system of public involvement has evolved in the 1990s, more anarchical strains of regulation persisted in some programs such as the greenway initiative, the community gardens movement, and Mole Hill.

Within the planning bureaucracy this dialogical method would become institutionalized in the creation of Local Area Planning Division whose only function was to enact this method of decision making. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, it acted as the workhorse of the department, commanding the most personnel and resources. Open-ended planning processes lasting up to four years were inaugurated. However, with the departure of Spaxman and the elimination of federal government funding, the influence of Local Area Planning Division began to recede. When Tom Fletcher was hired as the new planning director the Local Area Planning was reconstituted as the Community Planning Division. Meanwhile the Overall Planning Division was reorganized as the CityPlan Division. While resources devoted to Local Area Planning declined, the resources and influence of the CityPlan Division grew dramatically, as the CityPlan Division rather than Local Area Planning now became the lead department. With this shift the open ended nature of local area planning came to an end as CityPlan, (which was adopted by the city in 1995) set the framework for future initiatives in local area planning (PI-13; CVC0-37).

Lastly, the third main theme addressed in Shaping Our Future was planning for the environment. What is significant about this theme is that it gave formal expression to the politics of place and acknowledged the importance of urban design. These concerns would become manifest in the protection of view corridors and the place making district plans that would be formulated and later adopted for the False Creek area and the downtown in 1974 and 1975 (CVPD-45a). The concern with the environment was also operationalized within the bureaucracy with the creation of a design panel in 1973, which was given the responsibility for reviewing all major projects. Moreover, with new focus on the environment more planners with architectural and design backgrounds were hired.


One B: - The Urban Spectacle: Phase two of the postmodern transformation of the Canadian city


Just as modern planning moved from its oppositional stage of development to one marked by accommodation, so too, can the same be said for the the evolution of postmodern regulation,. As with the broad history of twentieth century modernism illustrates, the differences that separate the beginning and end points of a mode of regulation can, indeed, be vast. Just as twentieth-century modernism ceased to be a vanguard spatial ideology when it became a hegemonic formation, so too, did the same thing happen with regard to postmodern regulation. For twentieth-century modernism this came about in the interwar years. As Egbert (1970) noted, after World War Two twentieth-century modernism became an ideology of the status quo. For postmodernism, this shift took place in the 1980’s,as the tenets of the ideology of the livable city were altered to reflect the changing aspirations of the new middle class, and the growing influence of the economy of the urban spectacle. So just as the subversive elements that marked the formation of modern regulation were filtered out, so too, in the case of Vancouver, a filtering out process occurred with regard to dialogical systems of decision making. While Dialogical systems for decision making were maintained, the oppositional nature of postmodern regulation began to wane as postmodern norms were absorbed into the mainstream. As this happened, dialogical systems were altered to reflect the growing influence of the market and the rise of a new corporatism, which received concrete form with the creation of partnerships between the public and private sectors. Starting in the 1980s, but accelerating in the 1990s, the postmodern dynamic for the transformation of the city began to change in several significant ways. Condensed into just three words, the major changes that were to take place can be described in terms of the privatization, stylization and social polarization of urban space. Although the livable city agenda would not be abandoned these changes would alter the philosophical, sociological and aesthetic dimension of postmodern regulation. While the outward form of the livable city agenda was preserved the political and social orientation changed dramatically. On the economic level, we see the receding influence of bureaucratic rule becomes apparent with increased privatization which came about as a result of the retreat of the state and advance of market relations. This would alter the dialogical system of regulation introduced during the Spaxman period. Decision making processes became corporatist in orientation. Not only did this become evident with the decline of local area planning and the rise of the CityPlan Division, most significantly, perhaps, mirrors the corporatist slant which would become most apparent with the development of North False Creek. Here the provincial government’s sell off of the North False Creek Lands to a foreign developer established a new framework for public/private partnership in planning, moving the planning department further away from the communitarian roots laid out in Shaping The Future. The growing influence of market forces, and the resulting social polarization that resulted from this can be illustrated by contrasting residential development in North and South False Creek. While about a third of the housing units constructed in South False Creek were made up of non-profit units, less than twenty percent of the housing constructed in North False Creek are made up of non-market units.

In part, the shift towards privatization can be linked to the transformation of the city’s economic base, as the Core was remade into a locus for the economy of the urban spectacle, as entertainment functions, and the new media economy became the most dynamic components of the Core. Initially the articulation of the livable city agenda for the Core was based on the expectation that Vancouver would become an executive city, where producer services and decision making functions would predominate. As a consequence, the regulation of the core was set by the need to control the expansion of office development so that the liveability goals of the new middle class would be respected. However, this changed with the emergence of an economy based on the urban spectacle. As a result Vancouver’s Central Business District was reconfigured into Central Entertainment District where knowledge production image making, and entrepot functions became more important. More so than during the livable city era, with the advent of the urban spectacle downtown Vancouver become a place of consumption rather than production, functioning as a meeting and transfer point rather than as a nexus for traditional production or decision making activities.

This economic shift leads us directly to the next point. With privatization, and the increased influence of the market, the marketing of space would become much more important. Compared to the 1970’s image making or the stylization of the built environment increasingly defined the look of the built environment in the 1990’s. Herbert Muschamp, an architectural critic for the New York Times, sums up how this commodification of space became linked to the transformation the Spanish city of Bilbao from an industrial metropolis into a post-industrial one. The point Muschamp makes about Bilbao is just as pertinent to Vancouver. In Bibao, as well as Vancouver the merging of high culture and economics created a new dynamic, producing a new kind of postmodern aesthetic which, in the case of Vancouver, can be directly contrasted with funky aesthetics of the livable city. As Muschamp observes:

A Place where tourism and cultural enterprise are now expected to fill the void left by the exportation of factory production to the third world. The standard remedy is: Send in the artists. Build a museum, a performing arts centre; change the zoning regulations so that industrial buildings can be converted into artists' lofts. The theory is that, in a post-industrial (ie Post-modern) society, factory production will be supplanted by more creative work (the artistic mindset and sensibility) - that instead of blue collar workers, the city will become home to symbolic analysts, to use Robert Reich's phrase. In practice production has given way to consumption: franchise outlets for cookies, ice cream, T-shirts; the invasion of the urban centre by the ethos of the suburban mall. There are worse alternatives. Also better ones (Muschamp 1997)

This commercialization of space would also be helped along by the growing influence of the non-domestic fraction of the new middle class, which had more resources as well as more interest in the creation of environments that were connected to lifestyle marketing. With the merging of artistic modes of living with artistic ways of making a living, many of the more prosaic notions of liveability came to be as seem dowdy and unglamorous. Hence, instead of co-ops, highly stylized loft space would emerge in the second phase the postmodern transformation of Vancouver. Industrial spaces were not erased but instead refashioned into residential and works spaces for the new age work force that began to settle in neighbourhoods such as Yaletown (VS-173a; VS-179). Whereas the spaces created during the livable city era tended to be more informal, with non-commercial and domestic uses defining the look of most developments; during the era of the urban spectacle this would change as more formal spaces were constructed. Instead of the cult of domesticity a landscape shaped the market push for glamorous spaces started to supplant the funkier landscapes that were more typical of the 1970s. Once again, to see how this shift produced two distinct postmodern environments, we only need to look at the North and South Shores of False Creek. For example, if the medium-rise landscape of South False Creek embodied the values of urban domesticity, the the high rise towers of the North Shore symbolized the growing importance of a fast growing non-domestic fraction of the new middle class that became representative of the age of the urban spectacle and the pursuit of conspicuous consumption (Applebe 1997n). (PM-1 to PM-5; figures seven F and G). .

Finally the merging of aesthetics, image making and marketing would become apparent in the corporate appropriation of the symbolic realm, as important public buildings and strategic spaces in the Core began to be treated as billboards, rather than as emblems of community. Here Jameson's remark that postmodern aesthetics is defined by collage would find expression in the market rationale’s for naming public spaces (VS-140; VS-110). In Vancouver the best examples of this would be GM Place, where a new arena was named after an American automobile corporations that had no presence in the city or involvement with the activities that were expected to take place in the arena. The same occurred with the Ford Centre. where another foreign corporation bought the naming rights for this theatre (Applebe 1997A; 1997L).

The third change would become evident in the growing social polarization of the Core. In the 1970’s deliberate attempts had been made to minimize social polarization. However, as already mentioned, this laudable goal was undermined by the sell off land in North False Creek in the 1980’s and the Federal abandonment of housing in the early 1990’s. This situation was further exacerbated by the increasingly bitter struggle over the use and control of space. In the 1970’s the middle class was able co-exist with the large urban proletariat that resided in the Core. However, as the gentrification of the Core began to gather momentum the relationship between new middle class the low income residents started to become increasingly antagonistic, particularly in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. While bitter struggle for space in inner city had become commonplace in several American during the 1970’s and 1980s this was something new for Vancouver (Neil Smith 1996; Abu-Lughod 1994). Finally, this social polarization would be further amplified by the drop off in the production of non-profit housing and the movement of the middle class from rental units into strata title developments. Not only did the take up strata title ownership by the new middle class foster a growing sense of exclusivity. This form of home ownership also made it easier for the new middle class to set its own self-interest above the communitarian values that had once been subscribed to by this class during the livable city era.

Whereas the livable city agenda was triggered by an insurgent middle class, the era of the urban spectacle begins with the provincial government decesion to make Vancouver into international destination point for tourism. With Expo 86 and massive investment in other infrastructure, such as a convention centre, BC Place and Skytrain, as well as the sponsorship of special events, there was a massive consolidation of regional entertainment functions in Vancouver’s Core.

At first there was considerable resistance to this agenda. However this changed with the election of the NPA in 1986: when a liberal and social democratic coalition on city council was replaced by a centre right party that supported (and indeed helped to) fast track developments that resulted from the provincial government's sell-off North False Creek. This, combined with the active intervention of a strong willed mayor, would shift the framework for planning in Vancouver. With the victory of Mayor Gordon Campbell a ten year period of transformation was inaugurated. The communitarian impulses that had animated planning in Vancouver up to this moment were weakened as a new form of corporatism began to take shape. In 1989, at the mid point of this process of reconstruction Ray Spaxman would leave the department and a more conservative administrator, Tom Fletcher, would the director until 1994. Just as Graham essentially followed the game plan set out by Sutton Brown, Fletcher pretty much followed the plan set out by the mayor. Although some organizational changes were made it was only after the departure of Fletcher and the initiation of the Better City Government Program, in 1995, that more radical changes would undertaken which would reflect the more conservative turn of the middle class as well as the increasing influence of market rationales. This, along with the final silencing of opposition on city council, which about because of the complete obliteration of COPE in 1996 civic election would signal the final end of the livable city era in Vancouver, ending a period of political mobilization that began in the mid 60s, when the first opposition candidates were elected to council, which would continue for the next thirty years, until Cope was wiped off the electoral map.

So just as twentieth century modernism lost its populist edge as it entered into a different phase in its development after 1945, so too did postmodernism.

While dialogical systems were retained by the city, as the Better City Program made clear, the influence of the market was forcing change on the previous system. Instead of viewing residents as citizens, citizens were now viewed as consumers instead. With the new partnerships with large corporate bodies became more influential. While participatory planning processes have not been replaced by the discredited technocratic models of the Sutton Brown era, nontheless, the communitarian blueprint for decision making that was spelled out in influential documents such as Shaping The Future was dramatically altered.

Two - Representations of space: Abstract to Organic conceptions

Moving on to the second set of contrasting attributes, the other philosophical difference which sets modern regulation apart from postmodern regulation is the way that space was conceptualized. As already noted, twentieth-century modernism conceptualized urban space as abstract space. However, in the postmodern era this was replaced by more organic representations. While the use of abstract space is closely associated with the engineering mentality and monological systems of bureaucratic rule, organic space is closely linked to dialogical systems of bureaucratic rule. If an engineering mindset governs the use of abstract space, we find that artistic or aesthetic sensibilities play a larger role in the formation of organic representations of space, with the sensuous qualities of space becoming more important as subjective and not just objective features are taken into account. (Barford 1986).

Since abstract space is decontextualized space it has neither a geography or history. In Edward's Relph's (1976) words, these are "placeless' spaces. With Space reduced to geometry, its qualities simply become a mere expression of function. How the abstraction of space created functional rather than organic space is captured quite well in a paper that Sutton Brown wrote about the nature of planning in Vancouver. Here, in true clinical fashion he stated that:

The first function of a planning organization (is) the preparation of a plan for the future improvement and development. . . it would define the future use of land so that private development could be undertaken in the most efficient and orderly manner. Finally, the plan would include certain surgical operations which would cut away existing example of inefficient, obsolete and blighted development so that healthy new growth could take place (Sutton Brown 1954).

As this quote by Sutton Brown reveals, there is a close link between monological rule and the way representations of urban space are constructed. While the disciplinary discourses which established the methodology for the breakup of complex organic societal entities into simpler administrative components had been introduced in the early 19th century, for the city this approach would only become manifest in the regulation of space in the early twentieth century, when the advance of bureaucratic began its rapid ascent (Rosenau 19992; Hollinger 1994).

Not surprisingly, the tendency for modernism to detach the conceptualization of space from everyday experience made spatial constructs hard to comprehend by the lay public. While the simplification of space facilitated monological rule it prevented dialogical systems of planning from taking route. Like a great deal of modern art, these abstracted spaces existed in a hermeneutic field, which were closed off to all but the initiated.

With the advent of postmodernism this no longer holds. Hard spaces are transformed into soft space. Rather than being viewed in simple utilitarian terms subjective attributes become more important. Echoing what many other writers were saying Ray Smith observed that:

A new design movement in America is radically changing our vision-our way of seeing things as well as what we see . . .I call it supermannerism. Partly the term expresses the movement's mannerist aspect- its systematic manipulation of established principles, its alteration of scale, its reordering of surface detail-which is similar to sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mannerism, but augmented. Partly also, the term denotes the movement's broader design vocabulary expanded to include the vernacular, the anonymous, and such elements of our ordinary life or popular culture as comic books, as is inherent in the hyphenation superman-erism . . .The new design is also a revolutionary liberation to encompass and included more social and environmental reform. It includes a longer concept of design validity, a broader concept of our environment to include space and our ecological system and alternative systems of planning, designing, and construction . . .The aim is to provide a better, more vital, and more human environments for people . . .A far cry from the elegant eternity of classical modern design, the formal character of Supermannerism is frenetic and distorted, jazzy and exciting, like contemporary life. Following the modern idiom, it is a new post-modern design with new attitudes, methods, and inspiration, It accepts a new scope or scale of vision, of materials and of architectural process (Smith 1977, pp. xxiii-iv).

The antiseptic and minimalist representations of space that were the common currency of building renderings and planning maps in the modern era were altered as a result of this cultural shift. Space was now viewed in a more complex way. Instead of being defined by functional criterion, the sensuous qualities of space were given more attention. And rather than simplifying space by discouraging mixed land uses, space increasingly became viewed as a collage of uses and functions operating together simultaneously.

In Vancouver the first significant Collage spaces appeared with the redevelopment of Granville Island, becoming a working model for the soft and sensuous spaces championed by postmodern theorist’s such as Colin Rowe (1978) and Johnathan Raban. While this focus on the subjective attributes of space agreed with artistic ways of looking at the outside world, this perspective remained incomprehensible to engineer who would continually put road blocks in the way.

Besides a shift in values, it is important not to forget how the switch over from abstract to organic spatial forms was pushed along by the shift from land-extensive to land-intensive development. When land-extensive development predominated most new investment was made on greenfield sites, little attention tended to be paid to the qualitative attributes of a site. But as investment started to flow into already built-up areas the limitations of prescriptive zoning became apparent. Zoning could no longer be viewed as a technical exercise. Instead, zoning became politicized as planners were forced to consult with people who occupied the space that was being redeveloped.

No better can the link between densification and the evolution of zoning can be drawn out then by looking at the evolution of Bylaw #3575 . Created soon after the founding of the Department this bylaw became the template for all zoning in the city from the mid-50’s to the present. The first noticeable changes to the Bylaw #3575 came about with the rise in apartment construction. Except for freeway development and the controversy over the redevelopment of the downtown, no other subject would generate so much study and controversy for the Planning Department during the modern period. Between 1958 and 1970 six major studies or reports on apartment living were undertaken (ie.CVTPB-3; CVTPB-5; CVTPB-8; CVTPB-9; CVTPB-10; CVPD-19). And until the great freeway debate of 1967, no other subject would generate so much citizen opposition to the Planning Department as the regulation of apartment development.

Here the plan to reduce the area designated for apartment development in the East, while increasing it in the West backfired on the Department when it pushed for adoption of this plan in 1965. This set off the first middle class reaction to modern planning, germinating the first seeds of opposition that would later coalesce into a much broader urban insurgency.

Besides triggering the first large-scale public reaction against the Planning Department, the actions of planners reveal how the Department was unprepared for the challenge posed by the densification process. .For at the very time the greatest apartment boom in the city’s history was about to commence the Planning Department was trying to reduce rather than expand the amount of space devoted to apartment construction. For example, at this time Braham Wiesman, a senior planner, told reporters that there was enough land to supply the demand for new apartments for the next two hundred years (VS-19). So, as late as 1965, planners were still expecting land-extensive development to continue. However, by the 1970’s, as densfication ceased to be localized phenomenon, primarily confined to the West End, perceptions about land use requirement would be completely turned around, Rather than worry about excess land being zoned for apartments, from the mid 1970s onwards this situation would be reversed, as planners were now forced to look for ways of expanding the amount of land allocated to apartment construction.

Once again, how this led to new zoning protocols is best illustrated by looking at zoning in the West End. Because of the boom in apartment construction, that began in the early 50’s, concerns about livability forced planners to pay more attention to design and environmental issues. As a result, numerous amendments were made to the zoning schedule for apartments during the 1950s and 1960s. Far from being an accident, the transformation of the West End into a unique collection of ultra-modern point form high-rises was in fact the product of constant tinkering. Beginning in the mid 50’s, by the late 60’s this continual amendment resulted in the creation of one of the most sophisticated and complex zoning regimes in the country (CVPD-1; CVTB-3). .

Thus, even before the arrival of postmodern zoning (Table 25A), the awakening interest in aesthetics would be foreshadowed in the hybrid form of zoning that evolved in the West End. So not only is zoning in the West End important to look at because we can see how modern zoning had to contend with the challenge of regulating one of the few places in North American where explosive private redevelopment was taking place in the inner city without government assistance (McAfee 1967,1972; Gaylor 1971); it is also important to look at the evolution of zoning in the West End because it sheds considerable light on the development pressures that forced planners to moved away from prescriptive to discretionary zoning. In this way a hybrid form of discretionary zoning had developed in the West End, however, because this hybrid zoning regime continued to be framed by general functional requirements, having to do with setbacks and height, rather than place based considerations, which had more to do with geographical and historical context, this zoning still remained a product of the modern era. Even though planners were able to accommodate the need for more discretionary zoning by incrementally modifying the RM-4 schedule over a span of nearly twenty years, they were not able to incorporate more sophisticated place based concepts into this zoning program. With the growing importance of community, and the middle class now clamouring for place based zoning, the ability to further modify RM-4 zoning had reached its limit. In order to incorporate place based concepts into zoning the existing RM-4 schedule would have to be completely reconfigured, which happened in 1975 when the RM-4 district schedule was replaced a new place based system of district zoning.

Notwithstanding, the move towards discretionary zoning in the West End, and the eventual adoption of place based zoning in the West End, in 1975, the first place based zoning can be traced back to the early 70’s when CRM-2 and CRM-2 and RM-3A districts were established in False Creek. However, because these zones were only put in place on an interim basis it wasn’t until the False Creek Comprehensive Development District was created in 1974 that place based zoning became a permanent feature of Vancouver’s zoning vocabulary (Chapman 1982).

After The False Creek Comprehensive Development District (PI-38; CVPD-45a; CVPD-60) (Table 25A) the West End Comprehensive Development District and the Downtown Comprehensive Development District, were established in 1975. Then in 1979 the Central Waterfront Comprehensive Development District was created (CVPD-55a). To be followed, by the Downtown Eastside/Oppenheimer Comprehensive District (CVPD-62) and the First Shaughnessy District in 1982 (CVPD-62b). Finally, the last place based comprehensive district was created in 1984, when B.C. Place and Expo Comphrensive District was formed.

Since that time, no other large comprehensive development districts have been constructed. While smaller districts such as Coal Harbour and the South East Granville Slopes districts, were later established, during the 1990’s there was a return back to a more traditional zoning format. Nevertheless, the place based contextual zoning introduced with district zoning was preserved in the guidelines that were attached to existing zoning schedules. For example, when a second local area review of the West End was undertaken in the mid 80’s the West End District Zone was replaced by more traditional zoning designations in 1989, when five new zones were spun out of the single district that had been created in 1975(CVPD-158a).
I
n looking at the transformation of zoning it also helpful to look at the growth in regulatory complexity affected the resources needed to administer development in the city. For example, when the Planning Department was first established the zoning function was quite simple. Besides the preservation of property values, modern zoning dealt largely with safety issues and the control of negative externalities (PI-13). Being prescriptive in nature, and with only a few requirements set out, only modest resources were needed to administer the zoning regime which had first been put in place in 1930 when Bylaw 2074 was passed by City council (CV-1). Even when the Planning Department was created, and a more complex master zoning bylaw, # 3575, was created, there was still not a great increase in resources devoted to zoning. For instance, in 1954 the zoning division only employed four people, or 20 percent of the Planning Department's personnel (Sutton Brown,1954). Over the next twenty years the number of people involved with zoning would remain around the same level. However, this would change as densification began to restructure the city, and the adoption of postmodern zoning made zoning much more labour intensive(Table 25 A), (CVPD-45a).

When Zoning Bylaw #3575 was adopted in 1956 there were 17 zoning districts (CVPD-1). With Densification largely confined to the West End most zoning amendments were confined to changes that were made to RM-4 zoning. But, when densification spread outwards from the West End the city could no longer rely on existing zoning bylaws. As redevelopment moved outwards new zones were created in response to the advance of the densification process. For example, when densification moved out of the city's apartment districts into the conversion zone, numerous changes were made to two family zones, known as R-T districts which governed this area CVPD-45a; CVPD-135a). As a result the number of two family zoning districts, grew from 2 in 1973, to 4 in 1976, 5 in 1980, 6 in 1988 increasing to 11 districts by 1994 (CVPD-135a). Since this R-T Zone took in the emerging Zone of Middle Class Resettlement these new zones were the product of place based initiatives zoning and not just densification, with local area planning proviing the dialogical format for the transformation of existing R-T zones from modern to postmodern districts throughout the 1970s and the 1980 --. beginning with Strathcona, Kitsilano, then Grandview Woodlands, and later still, Mount Pleasant,(CVCO-9; CVCO-11, CVPD-78; CVPD-84; CVPD-87).

When densification spilled out of the conversion zone and started to make inroads into the city’s single family areas in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the same profusion of new zoning districts occurred...However, since this happened during second phase of the postmodern transformation of the city the process of amend RS-1 zoning was much more truncated than the local area program conducted in the 1970’s, with polling rather community forums used more to ascertain aspirations of the community. After thirty years of regulatory stability, between 1988 and 1994 the number of different zoning categories used under the RS designation grew from four zones in 1988 to 8 by 1996: growing to 9 districts when a new RS-6 district schedule was approved by city council (CVCO-26).
Densification and place based zoning also resulted in the rapid of Comprehensive District zoning (CD-1 zoning bylaws), also known as contract zoning. In addition to the creation of new zones, because CD-1 zoning had mostly been applied to redeveloped rather than to greenfield sites, the spread diffusion of CD-1 can also be used to measure the expansion of densification.

To appreciate the full extent of the changes made to the regulatory geography of regulation, it is only necessary to compare the zoning map put out by the City of Vancouver in 1973 with the one released in 1997. In twenty years we see that the functional zoning districts that marked out the city have been almost completely erased. Rather than seeing a few primary colours denoting clearly segregated functional zones, the zoning map released in 1997 has the look of a collage. Boundaries that were once clearly demarcated, show signs of blurring. Instead of there being 30 functional zones we find 60 place based zoning districts. With nearly 500 separate CD-1 zones, plus the use of shaded gray zones to delineate the mixing of land in RS-1 where secondary suites were accepted rather than prohibited ; this map of the postmodern city presents an entirely different picture of the city than the one released in 1973. With crossover lines used to represent subjective qualities about space as the need for noise control, the radical nature of the shift from abstract to organic representation of space is fully revealed in make a cursory glance at the city’s zoning map (Table 25 A).

Just as archaeologists digs through different layers of earth to uncover changes in the material culture of a society, so too can the same thing be done with regard to the history of regulation by looking at the changes that were made to Vancouver's zoning map in both the modern and postmodern eras (CVPD-30a).

Lastly, the postmodern transformation of the production and regulation of space raises a number of issues about class and the use of different formats for the production of space in the modern and postmodern era.
Beginning with class, one only has to compare Vancouver with cities like Winnipeg to see the how the blue and white collar makeup of the city can profoundly influence the regulatory culture of each city. Whiles the changes arising out densification are not necessarily rooted in the mobilization of the new middle class, the introduction of place based zoning and the adoption of organic spatial constructs are closely tied to the existence of a strong middle class. With the middle class demand for more sophisticated place based zoning there was a significant increase in the resources devoted to zoning. For instance, even the most elaborate modern zoning district, the RM- 4 zoning for the West End, only took up seven pages. By contrast when a new RM-5 zone for the West End was created in 1989 the number of pages of regulation increased to more than 62 pages (CVPD-158a).

As the costs have regulation have risen, streamlining the zoning and the development permit process became a priority in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, with at least four reviews undertaken (CVPD-54; CVPD-67; CVPD-100; CVPD-129; Hardwick 1988). More recently The Better City Government Task Force (CVCO-34 has tried to rationalize discretionary zoning (PI-42); but it remains to be seen how far this can be taken since discretionary systems by their very nature require more time and resources than prescriptive zoning (PI-38; PI-42). Furthermore, turf wars between architects and developers over the use of discretionary zoning has further complicated the issue. Although the design skills of the Planning Department have been upgraded with the hiring of more planners who have been trained as architects, concerns about the competence of planners to make judgments about design remains a contentious issue (VS-192d; Rossiter 1984; PI-38)).

4.1.2 Final Summary

To summarize what has been said so far: if we look at the evolution of zoning in the City of Vancouver over the past 80 years the impact of different regulatory regimes is clearly imprinted on the City’s zoning codes. In fact the very origins of zoning in Vancouver can be directly linked to the first wave of redevelopment that gripped the city in the 1920’s. To curtail the spread of apartment the city instituted three zoning districts. With the establishment of a planning department more elaborate zoning regulations were put in place. Consequently by 1956 there were 17 zoning districts. Between 1956 and 1973, there was a modest increase in zoning districts. With densification remaining a localized phenomenon during the modern era only 10 new zoning districts were created. By contrast, during the postmodern period, 33 new zoning districts would be created, as the total number of zoning districts grew to 60 by 1994.

The growing complexity of zoning can also be measured by looking at the number of pages taken up by zoning regulations. When Vancouver's first comprehensive set of bylaws was adopted in 1930, Zoning Bylaw 2074 only contained eleven pages (CV-1). This rose to approximately one hundred pages when the current master Zoning Bylaw # 3575 was adopted by city council in 1956. (CVPD-1). While the number of zoning districts only experienced a modest increase in the 50’s and 60’s, in order to adapt existing zoning schedules to meet the challenges posed by the densification process, the regulations contained in the zoning bylaw increased from approximately one-hundred pages in 1956 to to three hundred pages by 1974.

However, with the additional complexities created by the adoption of contextual and area-based zoning during the postmodern period, the number of pages taken up by zoning regulations escalated rapidly, climbing to nearly fourteen hundred pages by the late 1980s (Johnson 1986).

The growth in regulation would become apparent in the Department’s operating budget. For instance, because of the introduction of place based zoning during the livable city era, the number of staff in the zoning division grew from 15 in 1975 (or about 17 percent of all personnel in the Planning Department) to 31 in 1989 (or 26 percent of all personal in the department) (CVPD-41; CVPD-92a). With densification moving into single family areas in the 1990’s, and the resulting demand for area-based discretionary zoning to control redevelopment, even more resources had to be committed. As a result of the number of staff in the zoning division increased from 31 positions in 1989 to 53 by 1996. With these changes the budget of the Land Use and Development Division increased to $3.6 million in 1996, accounting for 37 percent of the Department,s $9.7-million budget. This was nearly two times the amount allocated to the Planning Resources Division and about three times the amount allocated to division- such as CityPlan, Community Planning and the Central Area Division. .

4.2. - Sociological contrasts

At the sociological level, three contrasting variables separate modern regulation apart from postmodern regulation. The first has to do with changing gender relations. The second has to do with the changing status of urban sub-cultures -- most particularly the social status of gay and Bohemian subcultures (e.g., The Economist 1997 a and b), but also other ethnic and racial communities as well. Finally, the third issue has to do with density and deviance.

Three - Changing gender relations

The decomposition of the nuclear family and the re-organization of gender roles is the natural starting point for looking at the sociological dimension of postmodern regulation. After 1945 a massive ideological campaign by the state to use the nuclear family as the basis for the organizing a regime of standardized consumption was undertaken. With lavish resources expended on the maintenance of this vision, the nuclear family became the social motif for the modern era. However, with a rapid decline in fertility after the mid-1960s, this system began to breakdown as a new consumer culture started to take shape as the time, energy and resources that had previously been tied up with child rearing were increasingly diverted to consumer experimentation outside the domestic realm.

As with the political space that modernism constructed, the social spaces that were nurtured by modern regulation complemented and supported the bureaucratic order that was ascendant in both the public and private spheres after the Second World War (Jackson 1985). Indeed, attempts to force the population into the mold of nuclear family helps to explain the strong anti-urban bias anti-urban shown by middle class toward family living in the city. For not only did the city represent political disorder, it was also symbolized social disorder. Home to the unassimilated immigrants who lived in extended families or, worse yet, to groups of people who were not connected to any family formation whatsoever, middle class reforms sought to restore order by moving people from out of the city and into the suburbs.

Far from being accidental development, the elevation of the nuclear family was the result of a massive ideological offensive first launched by large corporations through the advertisement media (Hayden 1984) and then later by the state, when the emergening welfare state,produced a web of regulations to support, promote and maintain the nuclear family. As Miller observed (1991), during the inter war years a new consumer lifestyle was born. one that almost entirely focused upon privatized consumption that was organized around reproduction. Just as with these physical spaces of the city, this assertion of bureaucratic rule over the consumer sphere produced the same simplification, which attempted to eradicate all signs of the 19th-century city.

This was the sociological grounding that would support the production of the most extensive monochromatic landscape ever produced, as thousands of square kilometeres of countryside were reconfigured to support the nuclear family. Not only did the suburb signify the end of the physical order of the 19th-century city, the creation of the postwar suburb also symbolized the elimination of the diverse social spaces associated which defined urban living. For any space that deviated from the child centric norms, which modern regulation enforced, was regarded with immediate suspicion.

As already pointed out, the pressure to co nform to this new system was immense. As a new material culture organized around the automobile and the nuclear family began to flower the existing consumption fell by the wayside as older social solidarity’s were dissolved. As one labour activist from the North End of Winnipeg remarked, it was the car and suburbanization of the city, not the police or changing ideologies, which led to the dissolution of the vital working-class culture that had once existed in Winnipeg during the inter-war years when the North End was considered a socialist hotbed. For the working-class people in particular, the remaking of the social space of the city would involve radical changes on a wide variety of levels as entry to the suburbs not only involved moving into a new physical space, it also involved acceptance of a new type of social existence. As researchers who looked at Crestwood- a new suburb created in Toronto during the 1950s observed:

The ideal Crestwood home operates as a separate unit- it must not share living quarters or dependencies with other families; even the apartment building with its many divisions is not considered the proper material environment for family life. The detached house, which the family owns and inhabits in its entirety, is the only fully approved physical basis for a happy, healthy family. To share this house with kin is considered undesirable and other close relatives are viewed as inimical to smooth family functioning (Rose and Wexler 1988, Chapter 16)

The formation of such a rigid and restrictive social system did not occur over night. To realize the suburban vision of the urban it would take more than twenty years to secure this ideal. Beginning in the 1920’s, this new apparatus would not be fully put in place until the early 1950’s. Here, modern city planning functioned as just one of many institutional to bring about this new social order (Bettinson 1975). As Dolores Hyden has shown, creating the postwar suburban order was one of the most successful examples of social engineering that can be found. Not only were massive institutional supports put in place to sustain the material culture that propped up the nuclear family, as well the state had to implement urban renewal programs to eliminate not only the physical spaces of the city, but also the social spaces which supported alternative ways of living. Not surprisingly strong peer pressure was exerted on women to leave the city the for the suburbs, something that was also tied up with the special emphasis placed upon the removal of women from the labour force when soldiers returned after the end of the war.

The breadth of the material and social changes that resulted from this ideological and institutional mobilization was awesome in scope. To create a suburban society, tenants had to be turned into homeowners. City dwellers had to be turned into suburbanites. Working-class solidarity had to broken apart and absorbed into the new classless world of bureaucratically induced consumption. As a result, social energies that had once been directed towards the maintenance of class identity were gradually dissipated. For in this new world order marked by conformity, the privatizing effect of mass consumption was expected to neutralize the reality of class differences and paste over the uneven access to resources and power that still existed (Laxer 1996).

Other parts of the social and material culture of the city would change as well. Transit systems left over from the Victorian city would be dismantled and transit users turned into automobile owners. Extended families had to be broken apart and compressed into the mold of the nuclear family. Here modern zoning would play its part in fostering this new arrangement, as zoning for single family areas now made it possible to litigate against homeowners having extended families. In short a vast array of institutional supports were created to regulate the social spaces of the modern city. Similarly, an equally massive amount of time and energy was put into the conscious deconstruction of existing social and class identities that did not fit into this new domestic spatial order.

By the early 1960s, the fragility of this synthetic landscape started to become apparent as shifting demographics and changing social mores put the functional relevance of the suburbs into question. To show what happened it is only necessary to refer to the followng statistics show what happened. For example, after the great expulsion of women from the work force after the war, the number of women in the labour force began began to rise again. In part, this was the result of the need to secure additional income to support the cost of living in the suburbs. However movement into the labour force also signified that gender roles were changing as well. For instance, in 1970 thirty-nine percent of all women aged 15 and over would be in the labour force. However, by 1990, this number would rise to forty-nine percent. Even more dramatic was the participation of married women in the labour force. For example, by 1992 over sixty-one percent of all married women worked. Similarly as the birth rate fell from 26.1 the dramatic decline in the birth rate: it fell from 26.1 births per thousand in 1961 to 14.3 births per 1,000 population in 1991. Another nail was placed in the modern coffin

This would become even more obvious as the nuclear family itself began to decompose, and mutate into other types of family formations when more liberal divorce laws and changing social mores resulted in the establishment of a wide variety of non-traditional family groups, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, set the conditions for the creation of a distinctive postmodern social ecology, as middle-class settlement zones made up primarily with childless people arose the inner city.

This decomposition is not only revealed in declining birth rates and increased participation by women in the work force. It would become expressed in rising divorce rates and the rise in common law marriages. Whereas the divorce rate actually fell from 1951 to 1961, between 1961 and 1971 it soared upwards. For example, in 1961 the divorce rate was 36 for every 100,000 people. However, by 1971, this had increased to, to 137.6 then to 278 in 1981, and then up to 294 per 100,000 population in 1990. At the same time, common law marriages began to become significant. Consequently between 1981 and 1991 common law marriage increased from 6 to 12 percent of all couples. Also, the number of single parent families grew dramatically between 1961 and 1991, as the births outside of marriage rose from 43 per 1,000 in 1960 to 201 in 1987. With this, the number of single parent families increased from 11 percent of all families in 1961 to 20 percent by 1991.

Finally, the coup de grace to the family-centred suburb was delivered by the passage of time itself, as the population that lived in the suburbs began to age. With fewer people having children, and the general population beginning to age, the suburbs began to empty of children as the number of people over 65 in Canada grew from 7.6 percent in 1961 to 11.4 percent, in 1990. Consequently, many suburban neighbourhoods that had been important child rearing areas in 1950s and 1960s, ceased to be by the 1980s. For example, in 1986 between 30 and 45 percent of some suburban neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver were made up of people over 65.

As these social and demographic changes were starting to undermine the material and social basis of the modern suburb the first ideological offensive against the suburb was being launched by alienated middle class women who were starting to rebel against this order. One of the most influential of these emerging postmodern ideologues would be Betty Friedan. In The Feminist Mystique she would present a scathing indictment of the social conformity of the suburbs. In a tone of exasperation and despair that would be somewhat reminiscent of the first great poetic outcry against the sterile materialism of the postwar modern order enunciated by Allan Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), Betty Fredian would state that the suburbs were no longer endurable. As she exclaimed:

It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for the groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-'Is this All?' (Friedan 1970,p.11).

The opposition to conformity and bureaucratic rule that can be seen in Friedan would also inform and give direction to many of the urban social movements that emerged in the 1960s, inaugurating a period of cultural inversion, which would become most obvious with the pop culture of the middle class (Palmer 1995) as previously disreputable musical forms associated with blacks and lower class whites were appropriated by middle-class teenagers, creating a period of experimentation with submerged and blacklisted social identities that had been suppressed or marginalized by twentieth-century modernism. Here, the first signs of the turn away from the Appollian order that had shaped the suburban mindset of the middle class that had congealed at the turn of the century (the progressivist era) would unravel, as the new middle class began to embrace a Dionysian order where the rising influence of the market over bureaucratic gave desire, rather than its suppression, a social space to grow in, producing new symbolic representations that would absorb and make visible social elements that were not part of the domestic order, as a middle-class generation turned away from Patty Page and embraced Elvis Presley.

Four - The normalization and commodification of urban sub-cultures

Claude Fischer's 1975 pronouncements about urban sub-cultures in the American Journal of Sociology can be viewed as an important marker for the emergence of postmodern urban sociology.Sub-cultures which has been suppressed or marginalized during the modern era were re-examined, putting into question modern notions of deviance and normality that had been set out in the classic works of modern urban sociology such as The Gold Coast and The Slum, by Zorbaugh (1965) or "Urbanism as a Way of Life," by Louis Wirth (1995).

This reappraisal of ethnic and urban sub cultures and its tie into the rising influence of market rule would become clear to see in the postmodern retail geography that started to emerge in the 1960s. Starting with the transformation of Chinatown (Lai 1988) as far back as the early 60s, ethnic groups once ignored would become a new locus for consumption as they became transformed into tourist attractions. This commercialization of marginal social spaces would also aid the densification process, as capital began to move into previously derelict warehouse areas to take advantage of the new consumer markets that were forming in places like Gastown in Vancouver, and Yorkville in Toronto. Bohemia now began to be penetrated by the market, changing the role and status of the artist in the postmodern order. An appreciation of the economic role of culture grew as agencies like the Social Planning Department of Vancouver undertook a study of the arts community to show its economic worth (CVSP-5a). Just as with Chinatown and other ethnic enclaves, the appropriation of these communities by the market would increase the size and visibility of bohemia in the city. I
n places like Gastown and Yaletown, as well as along previously derelict streets such as West Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano, or Commercial Drive in Grandview Woodlands, the revival of the street would become expressive of the popularization of bohemian mores.

Simultaneously, the other distinctive postmodern social formation to emerge was the gay community. More than with any other subculture the social distance traversed by the shift from modernism to postmodernism would become obvious in the normalization and commercialization of a culture whose entire existence depended upon the expression of desire. For example, as late as the early 1980s this subculture would be actively suppressed by the Drapeau regime in Montreal. However by the 1990s, the situation had been entirely reversed, as the mayor of Montreal would be actively lobbying the gay community for support to hold the gay games(Montreal Gazette 1997B; 1997j).

In Vancouver this process of normalization and commodification can be shown by looking at the depiction of gay community in The Vancouver Book ( Davis 1976,p.300). Even though this book mapped out the new postmodern consumer landscape, as earlier noted, this book came out in the era of the livable city, when domestic ideologies were still one of the defining features of the postmodern regulation of the city. This is revealed in the picture constructed of the gay community as a clearly modernist is taken since community was still viewed as a minor aspect of the postmodern city and portrayed largely in medical terms. This would surface in the use of the word "homosexual" rather than "gay" in the 1976 edition and in the absence of any commentary about this subculture but only the listing of medical and self-help services and groups, particularly the Sex Therapy Unit. What is revealed is that even in progressive circles this social formation was still not apprehended as a significant consumer subculture, but only as a medical and psychiatric phenomenon rather than as a postmodern sociological formation. However, when its sequel -- The Greater Vancouver Book (Davis 1997, p.771) came out more than twenty years later, the picture taken of the community would be quite different. Instead of just one-sixth of a page, a whole page would be given to this subculture. While no author is listed in the 1976 write-up because gay existence was not then perceived as a community that had a history that needed to be told, in the 1997 edition there is an author, and an account of the history of this community would be given.

Not surprisingly, the change that can be witnessed in perception of the gay community in The Vancouver Book and the example of Montreal would correspond and be linked to the rise of multi-culturalism and, as with the gay community, its commodification. as exemplified by the profusion of festivals, such as Folklorama in Winnipeg, Caribana in Toronto, the marketing of minority cultures would become central to the urban spectacle as tourism became more important -- as can be seen in the cultivation of special retail districts devoted to the display of ethnic merchandise and cuisine.

As the Montreal and Vancouver examples suggest, the rise into prominence of the gay community would be one of the defining attributes of the evolution of postmodern social space that would set the livable city era apart from the age of the urban spectacle. It is only in the era of the urban spectacle that the gay community becomes visible and flourishes as an important economic and acceptable social formation in the inner city (VS-199). Like the larger trajectory of postmodernism, the opposition period of the gay liberation movement occurred in the 1970s, when a distinct communitarian and non-market ethos dominated the mobilization of this and other sub cultures in Canada. And, like so many other facets of postmodern culture, it was only in the 1980s, in the era of the urban spectacle, during a period when freer reign was given to the expression of desire, when Appollian tendencies would give way to Dionysian ones, that this sub culture would become normalized to become an integral part of the postmodern social mosaic and, with this normalization, establish itself as an important consumer force.

With the commodification of these ethnic and urban subcultures, the first seeds of the urban spectacle would be sown in Vancouver. If convention centres and sports complexes can be seen as the hardware of this new infrastructure, these ethnic and urban subcultures can be viewed as the software which provided the content to lure in the spectators. In the rise of Chinatown, bohemia and the gay consumer market as important, a new type of marketing arose which differed sharply from consumer patterns associated with the modern (or Fordist) era. Instead of standardization and the principle of conformity reigning, the principle of difference and the commodification of exotica became important triggers for consumption. This would start with pop culture and the counterculture during the 1960s and the 1970s, but only came into full bloom in the 1980s and 1990s during the era of the urban spectacle.

Five - Urban density

The third aspect of the social regulation of the city which would set the modern period apart from the postmodern one has to do with density. Unlike the United States the abrupt expansion of high-rise apartment construction across the country resulted in the formation of a unique discourse on urban density in Canada. Initially vigorous opposition to high-density development was displayed by the new middle class but as time passed by and non-domestic fractions of this class became more influential, the postmodern discourse on density that had been formulated during the era of the livable city would itself, be deconstructed, neutralizing much of earlier denounciation of high-rise living, With this recent development, the link between urban pathology and urban density was sundered. If modern planners and social reformers had regarded density and urban pathology as being synonymous with one another, the opposite would now be the case. In the 1990s low-density development would increasingly be viewed as a mark of urban pathology. Conversely, density and the presence of congestion would be now taken as a sign of health.

In the planning field this reversal is best illustrated by the professions embrace of densification. Until the 1970s the dispersion of the city and the reduction in densities was generally regarded as a symbol of progress. However, by the middle of the 1970s this would change. Contradictory impulses would simultaneously appear. Because of the reaction of the new middle class to the proliferation of high-rises, large parts of the inner city were downzoned. Meanwhile, the construction of medium-rise neighbourhoods in the city such as South False Creek and St. Lawrence Towne revealed that progressive planners now longer viewed inner city living as being anathema to family living. While high-rise environments were discouraged, the emphasis put on the domestication of the inner-city lead to a great deal of experimentation in medium-rise structures that were thought to be more suitable for families. Moreover, at the regional level, in Vancouver and Toronto as well as in smaller centres such as Edmonton and Regina, densification strategies were being formulated.

However, it would not be until the early 1980s that the question of high-rise living would be revisited by the profession. In this regard it is probably no accident that when this re-examination occurred it took place at a time when the non-domestic fractions of the new middle class were coming more into their own, and corporate influences were expanding once more. Especially in Vancouver, the pressure exerted on the Planning Department to fast track high-rise development, but also the growing profile of non-domestic fractions of the new middle class such as the gay community in the West End, produced the necessary momentum for a revaluation of the question of density. This reassessment would not only cut the link that modern planning and sociological discourse had made between urban pathology and urban density but also the postmodern one that had grown around the opposition between medium- and high-rise environments during the livable city era.

Subsequently, in the early 1980s a process of re-evaluation was begun. By the middle of the 1980s new models for high-rise living had been adopted, which established the planning framework for the next upsurge in high-rise construction that was to take place in Vancouver in the 1990s that was to make the high-rise neighbourhoods that were constructed in the downtown peninsula the fastest and largest growing residential neighhourhoods in the entire region. So successful has this model been, it is now being exported to Toronto, where the first large-scale high-rise communities since the late 1960s are now being proposed on the city's abandoned railway lands. However, unlike St. Jamestown, this development will be organized along urban rather than suburban lines.

4.3. - Aesthetic contrasts:

The previous discussion about urban density provides a natural entry point into a discussion about postmodern aesthetics, since urban density is one area where the sociological and aesthetic dimensions of postmodern regulation overlap. Nevertheless, in moving to an examination of the aesthetic dimension the focus does change in several important ways. Like philosophic representations of space, the aesthetic dimension of postmodern regulation are primarily concerned with the manipulation of physical space, but unlike the philosophic constructs, which are used to set procedures and standards for the formal regulation of urban space by the local state, the aesthetic constructs used to regulate space are derived from consumer preferences rather than state edicts. As a result, the perceptions of the individual, and the consumer demand for certain types of physical space become more important than the examination of the disciplinary practices of professions. For this reason, the influence of the market rather than the state in formatting of space becomes the focus of inquiry. Rather than deal with the regulation of urban space in terms of formal rules and procedures or by the assessment of what is normal or abnormal, as is the case when looking at social space, when considering aesthetic the question of social distinction becomes more important. How space is organized to convey group status and to impart the beliefs of the individuals who occupy a particular physical space becomes the main issue. So not only do aesthetic representations of space provide some insight into the construction of social status, they also shed some light on the transcendent symbols that are present in the organization and design of physical space that goes beyond consumer preferences, to address the utopian ideals that a class of people may express in their occupation of space (Gibson 1972).

In this regard, three distinctive contrasts can be discussed: the status reversal that developed between the city and the suburb; the opposition between machine-space and pedestrian-space, futurism and historicism and the street and highway and, finally, the transformation of producer spaces into consumer spaces.

Six - The city and the suburb

Perhaps the most glaring contrasts between modern and postmodern aesthetics surfaces in the status reversal of the city and the suburb and, to a lesser extent suburbia and exurbia. With the turn to postmodernism the dialectic between the suburb and the city which guided the construction of social distinction for the middle class during the modern period is reversed. During the counterculture when a new spatial sensibility developed which would reverse the longstanding allegiance of the middle class to the suburbs. From the late 60s onwards revulsion towards the suburbs would become a common motif in pop music of the new middle class, as prominent middle class musicians like Marianne Faithful would make this the theme for entire albums such as in her case "Broken English." Furthermore, more cerebral pop luminaries such as David Bowie would further this devaluation of suburbia by saying:

In suburbia you're given the impression that nothing culturally belongs to you, that you are in this wasteland. I think most people who have an iota of curiosity about them develop a passion to escape, to get away from our desperation and exhaustion with the blandness of where we grew up and try and find who one is and find some kind of roots (Palmer 1995).


Seven- Machine-space versus Pedestrian-space/ Futurism versus Historicism/ the Street versus the Highway

Metaphorically, the machine, in the modern era, embodied the future rather than the past. It also set the parmeters for a new kind of urban space that created new consumer spaces, and different ways for interacting in space that subordinated the street to the highway. Corbusier (1947) was not wrong when he proclaimed the death of the street. Twentieth-century modernism rendered the street an anachronism, as a vision of the future city was to be organized around a new scale where the machine, not human beings would define the scale of the city.

That is why the contrast between machine space and pedestrian space also involved the battle between futurism and historicism as well as the street and highway. These contrasts also bring the discussion back to a previous discussion about the artistic and engineer sensibility and that informs the struggle that is still being waged around these three opposing conceptions of space within and without the bureaucracy in Vancouver.
Because of modernism's obsession with technology and the glorification of the machine that has come with this obsession, urban spaces tended to be organized on a scale that was anti-human since machines - most particularly the automobile - rather than the pedestrians - became the basis for organizing urban space. In the case of the City of Vancouver this imbalance is graphically illustrated in the 20-year development plan of Sutton Brown, where approximately 500 million of the 600 million dollars projected to be spent on the modernization of the city was to be absorbed by the construction of a freeway system.

In the Vancouver region, until it was superseded by Transport 2020 (GVRD 1993c), the "Kelly Report "that was released by the Greater Vancouver Regional District in the early 1970s provided the blueprint for a postmodern transportation strategy that replaced the Sutton Brown strategy. With its call for improved bus service and rapid transit, it started the movement of the region away from its near complete dependence upon the automobile. Fortunately (unlike Sutton Brown's plan) most of the recommendations in this report would eventually be implemented.

However, before a rapid transit line was opened in 1986, the most dramatic initiatives to curtail the inroads of the machine and reformat urban space in favour of the pedestrian would take place within the City of Vancouver. This started with the West End, where traffic diverters and mini parks within road intersections were first put in place during the 1970s. Around the same time, changes were made to several commercial zoning districts such as West Broadway (CVPD-30; VP-37) and Robson Street (CVPD-47) so that pedestrian movement would be encouraged while the organization of retail space around the car would be discouraged.
Except for the Granville Street Mall and False Creek, during the 1970s the attempt to re-orient planning from its previous orientation to the machine back to the pedestrian orientation was largely ameliorative and reactive. Ironically enough, the most expensive and ambitious attempt to reverse the decline of the pedestrian in the city in the 1970s would turn out to be the least successful as The Granville Street Transit Mall was unable to counteract the suburbanization of the downtown that occurred with the construction of Pacific Centre and the opening of one of the region's largest shopping malls. During the late 1980s the street deteriorated so much that the city began to consider tearing up the mall and bringing back the automobile (Vancouver Courier 1996).

A second phase in the Planning Department's effort to reformat machine space into more pedestrian oriented space would begin in the 1980s, with the province's decision to construct Skytrain. The construction of Skytrain made it necessary to weave land use and transportation strategies together in a self-conscious fashion for the first time (CVPD-74, Introduction, chapter one).

What is also significant about this phase is that pedestrianization was now taking place in the suburban as well as the core areas of the city. The other significant change that happened was that this reformatting of space now went beyond mechanical transportation, such as public transit, as transportation by bike was revived once more. Although the city did not have the financial capacity to initiate a transit strategy on its own, it did begin to lobby more actively for better transit. More importantly, perhaps, it has begun to pursue different transportation options when it adopted a new Transportation Plan in 1996 (CV-26) where the modernist agenda was completely reversed, with walking made the number one priority and the use of the automobile the lowest priority. Since the plan was adopted it has become the focal point for struggles the administrative and political arena. Also the rising profile of groups such as the Bicycle Advisory Committee and the upgrading of the transportation committee provide positive signs that this formal proclamation about a shift in priorities may eventually become a concrete rather than rhetorical position taken by the city (CV-30).

In this regard, it was probably not until a comprehensive bicycle plan was adopted, in 1988, (CV-20), that the city finally began to move on its own to develop a more independent and broad ranging strategy for the provision an alternative transportation infrastructure. With the focus put on non transit strategies, the city had the fiscal means and the jurisdictional authority. Here again the Vancouver Comprehensive Bicycle Plan, adopted in 1988, becomes significant, because with this plan bicycle transportation becomes recognized as a legitimate form of transportation for the first time. Furthermore, this new emphasis put on non motorized transportation has also been buttressed by the transportation strategy adopted by the Greater Vancouver Regional District (1993b; 1993c), known as Creating Our Future that calls for a doubling in the number of bicycle commuters.

Recognition of the bicycle as a legitimate form of transportation is also important because of the impact that this decision may eventually have on the approach that the Engineering Department takes towards transportation planning. This attention to bicycle transport may provide an entry point for the gestation of postmodern sensibility towards the regulation of space by engineers. If this does happen an ideological watershed for the engineering department will have been passed with regard to a shift from a modern to postmodern conceptualization of urban space, as engineers would have to address numerous qualitative aspects about urban form that are tied up with the use of the bicycle and traffic calming.

As these examples show, since the 1980s the civic bureaucracy has moved considerably beyond the program for reformatting urban space that was adopted in the 1970s when the primary focus was put on the advocacy for better transit and the amelioration of the negative effects of the automobile. In the 1970s the City of Vancouver largely played a reactive role with regard to the development and implementation of a transit strategy fashioned by the Greater Vancouver Regional District and the province.

In addition to the city's new transportation plan, since the 1980s other initiatives such as the Task Force On Atmospheric Change (CV-6; CV-7), broke new ground in developing an ecological rationale rather than an economic or aesthetic justification for the reorientation of transportation planning when it was released in 1989. This, in turn, was reinforced by the Urban Landscape Task Force, which was released in 1992. (CV-8; CV-27), that eventually lead to the adoption of a Greenways Plan (CVPD-11) by City Council in 1995.
Because of these new initiatives engineering may now find itself in the same position that the Planning Department was in during the 1960s when Social Planning had to assume many of its tasks because of its resistance to postmodern spatial norms. For as the chair of the Bicycle Advisory Committee, John Whistler, remarked (PI-40), if he had to depend upon engineering or planing to properly implement the design of a bikeway, he felt that the Planning Department would do a better job. This assessment is quite similar to what many people were saying about the Planning Department with regard to local area planning in the late 60s and early 70s (VS-30), when the Social Planning was entrusted with initiated the city's first experiments with postmodern processes in planning because it was felt to be more competent attuned to what was required (Lauber 1975). A generation later, but this time with planning and engineering instead of social planning, history seems to be repeating itself in the 1990's, as the recent dispute between the Planning Department (and its green allies within the Engineering Department itself) struggles with the Engineering Department as a whole over bikeways and left bays (CVCO-46, Smith 1997; VS-165).

That is why it is significant that the Planning Department has been brought in as a co-author in the creation of the Transportation Plan released for discussion in the Fall of 1996 (CV-26) (and later adopted). Furthermore it is significant that the engineering end of the transportation plan was lead by Peter Judd, an electrical engineer - not a transportation engineer - who also happens to ride a bike. As Ann McAfee remarked (PI-13): if a transportation engineer had been chosen he would have most likely followed the existing groove that most engineers in the transportation field still follow, which is one that favours the machine over the pedestrian.

While the shift from machine space to pedestrian space sets the general context for the other two contrasts, it is also important not to forget that the move from the highway to the street and the shift from futurism to historicism is also connected to a number of symbolic class struggles between fractions of the new middle class and corporate capital that are still anchored in a modernist value system that had to do with consumer norms, the representation of status and power.

If modern consumption was rooted organized around the highway and freeway where shopping malls were built to serve a mass market with standardized goods that symbolized acceptance of corporate capital, the street did precisely the opposite. Its revival symbolized the renaissance of small capital and the cultivation of niche rather than mass markets. The re-emergence of the street can also be interpreted as one of the surface manifestations of a deeper structural shift from bureaucratic to market rule.

In turn, the first attempts to revive the street would be linked to the reaction against futurism and the embrace of historicism - which favoured the rehabilitation of the street, rather than its destruction.

Interestingly enough, these new retail spaces would flourish best in the zones of discard which modern city planning had mostly consigned to destruction through demolition or redevelopment. Across the country, in previously declining or derelict streets there was a pervasive renaissance in street life. Streets like Commercial Drive in Vancouver (Serafin 1994; VS-74; Hill 1997c); Somerset in Ottawa (York 1991), Queen Street West in Toronto (McInnes,1991); Osborne and Corydon Street, in Winnipeg; Spring Garden Road in Halifax (Cox 1991), Whyte Avenue in Edmonton (Maclean 1995; VS-85a) and Kensington and 7th Street in Calgary (Motherwell 1991) became symbols of this urban revival rather than decay. Not only did the revival of the street signify the growing importance of public rather than private displays of consumption, the revival of the street also became symbolic of the arrival of the new middle class as new agents of transformation in the city.

As with the contrast between the city and the suburb a complex class dynamic can be observed in evolution of the street during the first and second phases of the postmodern transformation of the city. During the modern period the street was viewed as residual space that was mostly left for the use of marginal groups in the city. This would change during the first phase of the postmodern transformation of the city as the new middle class mingled with the ethnic and working class populations that still organized their social life and consumption around the street.

With the class polarization and stylization of the urban spectacle the struggle between the new middle class and other classes over the use of the street has become more antagonistic in Vancouver (Barber 1997b). Unlike the 1970s, when the struggle over the street primarily revolved around a struggle between corporate capital and the new middle class, in the 1990s it has been increasingly centred on an ever growing urban underclass and a disenfranchised urban proletariat (VS-89aa; VS-89c; VS--89d; VS-90; VS-94; VS-188; VS-193; Hill 1997).
As a result the street has become a major battle ground between capital, the new middle class and the urban proletariat. During the modern era this was not a major problem since the street was not part of the middle class experience and capital was abandoning the street for the shopping mall. During the first phase of the postmodern transformation very little antagonism existed between the middle class and the urban proletariat because incomes and opportunities in the city were not so polarized, with differences further leavened by the ideology of inclusiveness that informed the ideology of the livable city. However with the rise of tourism, the emergence of stylized consumption associated with the urban spectacle (Picard 1991) and the invasion of areas previously off-limits to the middle class because of strata title developments, an intense struggle over the use and occupation of the street has developed which shows no signs of abating, as large development retail corporations are now vying for control of the street as well (VS-94; VS-95; VS-96; VS-164; VS-166; VS-169; VS-188).

In the 1990s control over the street by the middle class has been further complicated by the interest capital now shows in the street as well. While there has been some accommodation between corporate capital and the new middle class, conflict can still emerge when large capital attempts to introduce standardized or mass consumption formats which are opposed by the new middle class. Just as the new middle has mobilized itself against the proletarianization of the street by moving prostitutes out of sight and discouraging panhandlers, in a similar fashion it has mobilized against the corporatization of the street by large capital when it thought the image of the street had been compromised (Beaudin 1996; Fiorito 1995).
One of the best examples of this was the middle class reaction against Starbuck's in the Annex area of Toronto and along Vancouver's Commercial Drive (Hill 1997c). In the case of Toronto the opposition was so great that Starbucks even gave up its lease (i.e., Stein 1996). Meanwhile, in Montreal a similar response developed in the Plateau area, when the middle class mobilized against the location of a Macdonalds restaurant and gas bar along Park Avenue.


Eight - The transformation of producer spaces into consumer spaces


Finally, the fourth feature which sets the aesthetics of the postmodern city apart from those of the modern city has to do with the transformation of working landscapes into consumer landscapes (e.g. VS-295). In this instance changing consumer preferences rather than the question of physical scale becomes central. Here two things stand out. As indicated in the previous discussion, the contrast between the street and the highway not only had to with urban scale and the organization of urban space around the needs of the pedestrian rather than the automobile, it also involved the evolution of a different model for consumption, one that was organized around craft production and the consumption of artisan works. Differentiation and singularity associated with the artistic sensibility rather than the standardization associated with the machine space ethos of the engineer and the automobile becomes the new status markers for the new middle class.

The incubation of this artisan space would become important for the new middle class because it provided this class with an autonomous consumer sphere around which it could construct a material culture that was representative of a new world view; one that was expressive of artisanal modes of consumption and production -- where informality, and the absence of a strict separation between work and consumption were key principles for the use and organization of space. For here the process of consumption and production become intertwined into some form of self actualization and, just as importantly, the achievement of individual autonomy. In the sphere of production this would take form in the person of the entrepreneur. Like the artist, the entrepreneur is involved in the act of creation and self-expression. In the sphere of consumption this sensibility emerges when the consumer turns the act of consumption into an artistic moment, using his or her store of cultural capital to engage in self actualization through the act of consumption by turning the act of consumption into an aesthetic act.

In the postmodern era the artist and the entrepreneur, not the engineer or the organizational man, would become the new icons of the postmodern order. Either as consumers or producers, all acts are turned into acts of creation that bestow social status while serving as a means for self actualization. Since the entrepreneurial and artistic dimensions of this mindset often interpenetrate one another in the fast-growing information and entertainment economies this may explain why it is so intensively expressed here (Bourdieu 1984; Inglehart 1990).

This is quite different from the modern period, when the artist opposed the market (Greenberg 1972). In the postmodern era quite the opposite happens. Whether as a cultural worker, wrapped up in the traditional guise of the artist, or as an entrepreneur, outside the direct influence of the aesthetic sphere, but still part of the artistic mindset, both express the influence of the market. When this happens, not surprisingly bohemian modes of living and bohemian designs become more popular with the new middle class and this affects the production of space, resulting in, among other things, the popularization of loft spaces, the preservations of older buildings and interiors and the general creation of more informal spaces.

Consumption once based more upon needs now becomes more attuned to the satisfaction of desires, further intertwining the extension of the market with the construction of individual identity as both become part of the project of self actualization, something that stands in decided opposition to the more puritanical order of consumption associated with the domestic order which predominated during the modern period (Shields 1992; Ricard 1994; Fortune 1994, pp.114-126; Grover 1994). For even though growing affluence defined the modern era, necessity still played a larger role in shaping the experience of the middle class, since consumption was more clearly organized around meeting the domestic needs of the family or conforming to the standards set out by a dominant bureaucratic order rather than focussed upon explore or fulfilling the desires of the individual. Again it is no accident that this change in consumption and change in aesthetic sensibility also coincided with the dramatic fall in the birth rate. If the middle class that came of age in the 1960s had had its energies and resources siphoned off into child-rearing as much as its immediate predecessors, this new sensibility would have had far less impact on the evolution of the city. Here, as can be seen, there is a great deal of overlap between the sociological and aesthetic development of postmodernism.

During the postmodern age this is further amplified by the economy as tourism and the leisure industry become more important. From this it is not hard to see how the further intensification of these trends became involved with the shift from the ideal of the livable city to that of the urban spectacle. In the initial postmodern reaction to the modern order there was a powerful communitarian stream that emerged before being submerged which was closely tied into a domestic order where emphasis was put on the satisfaction of needs and desires through non-market forums or by the alternative market that existed as a sort of consumer underground. Spatially this would find its most complete realization in the agenda of the livable city. Yet, during the second phase of the postmodern transformation of the city, this communitarianism was largely washed away by the more powerful current of commercialism and the increased consumer orientation to the urban spectacle that was oriented in turn to the tourist's gaze (Urry 1990).

Especially, during the 1980s and 1990s, this would be reflected in the construction of a new infrastructure in the inner city that would be devoted to entertainment and the hosting of mass spectacles. Festival markets would appear and specialized precincts would emerge to serve the spectacle such as Toronto's Harbourfront (Reid 1986), Eau Claire and Prince's Island (Calgary Herald 1997o), and The Forks in Winnipeg. It would also increasingly affect orientation of planning in the inner city as the various initiatives undertaken in the downtown peninsula of Vancouver depict, as the creation of special precincts along Granville Street (CVCO-16), the Downtown South (CVCO-14; CVCO-15)) and the Library precinct demonstrates (CVPD-121; Lees 1997).
This would alter the status of certain spaces that had been ignored or discarded during the modern period, and shift new middle-class settlement patterns. For when art was opposed to the market, the artist and the space he occupied repelled rather than attracted capital. However, when this was reversed and the artistic sensibility attracted rather than repelled the market (i.e., CVSP-5a) the presence of the artist no longer becomes a benign presence in low-income landscapes but a potential agent and catalyst for gentrification. This becomes quite obvious if one sees how the popularization of industrial spaces by artists has led to their use by the rising class of middle class entrepreneurs.

Principally in the era of the urban spectacle, one of the most salient features of urban change would be the transformation of industrial spaces into spectacular places of consumption and living. This is truly a unique development that had no precedents. For unlike the revival the street where the 19th-century city or the core's of present day European cities provided a precedent this was not the case the postmodern turn away from futurism and the way the embrace of a new historicism became manifest in the material and symbolical transformation of industrial and warehouse spaces that first began in New York City during the 1960s. Here residential lofts were developed by and for artists (Zukin 1982; Simpson 1981; Smith 1996) creating a new house type that would be taken up in Vancouver in the late 1980's (CVCO-21; CVCO-33a). In New York City as well as Vancouver, this would speed up the gentrification (VS-89c; VS-90; VS-95; VS-96).

If New York Loft provided the model for the transformation of industrial spaces into residential spaces, then around the same time San Francisco provided the model that would later be followed when industrial space was transformed into retail and office space. If lofts were given birth to in New York, then San Francisco gave birth the concept of the festival market with a woolen and chocolate factory that was transformed into Ghiradelli Square in the mid 1960s. In both cities this happened during the counterculture in cities which had large middle class populations in the inner city. Toronto and Vancouver would act as the equivalent to New York City and San Francisco, becoming as the cultural hearth for postmodernism in Canada. In turn both cities would be influenced by what the new middle class was doing in these two cities, following in the same steps, as the minimalist vision of futurism provided by modernism was laid aside in favour of the collage granted by the revival of an historicist sensibility which would create a new social movement of its own, as the preservationist movement came into its own in the late 1960s.

What is interesting to note about Vancouver ,and Toronto, and in Montreal, as well, is how widespread the conversion of industrial land into commercial and residential spaces has become. This conversion has become so intense in Vancouver that the city has been forced to take action to preserve some remnants of this landscape to meet the back office requirement of the downtown (Chu,1991; CVPD-126; CVPD-137; VS-111).

Moreover, in Vancouver, the transformation of industrial land has now even spread to the suburbs, with large tracts of industrial land in several suburbs where large tracts of industrial land have been turned into commercial and residential land uses (VS-102). Indeed industrial land has become one of the major conduits for the spread of the densification process into the suburbs in Vancouver urban region.

Thus when each of these three aesthetic characteristics are compared to their modern antecedents the wide ranging nature of the changes that have taken place in the settlement pattern of the middle class and in their mode of living can be gauged. Although the need to fashion new status markers for this emerging class fraction is one reason why this aesthetic shift took place, as mentioned earlier, many of the changes that have been recounted are rooted in specific material conditions peculiar to this class -- such as the specialization of this class in the information and entertainment economy and in its propensity to have fewer children. Similarly, the adoption of new tenure forms facilitated the expansion of artistic modes of living, providing a postmodern alternative to the domestic order advanced in the program of the livable city.

That is why the gay consumer market has become an important symbol and bellwether with regard to the social and aesthetic transformation of the postmodern city. More than any other subculture, the gay community would epitomize the artistic mindset that took hold in the period of the urban spectacle when the social and commercial status of this once suppressed and criminalized sexual subculture was simultaneously normalized at the same time as it was commodified to become one of the most dynamic space in the postmodern consumer landscape.

Since the 1980s other demographic changes have further expanded this mode of consumption beyond its bohemian or the gay influencing an expanding middle-class singles population. Moreover, as the general population ages, a growing cohort of mature adult who have passed through the child rearing phase is becoming more significant, since this group has the time and money to engage in leisure pursuits, unlike its predecessors in the modern period. Further beyond this group, there is an ever expanding and increasingly affluent seniors market (Schachter 1995) that will make up a larger part of the market for entertainment based consumption, providing additional fuel to feed the further growth of the economy of the urban spectacle (Lipovenko 1996).

In spite of its authoritarian and technocratic bent over its entire evolution from an oppositional to hegemonic cultural formation, 20th-century modernism was able to create ideal representations of urban space that were meaningful to a much broader spectrum of classes. Despite the anti-urban aesthetic of modernism it could produce representations of the city that were meaning full to capital, the middle class and the urban working class. For instance, after World War Two the International style became symbolic of the hegemony of corporate capital. (Gowans 1992). At the same time 20th-century modernism also became a symbol of the Welfare State, producing spatial symbols that confirmed if not glorified the status of the worker. Similarly this aesthetic order also became a symbol of the alliance between the middle class and the corporate capitalism and its allegiance to bureaucratic rule that became embodied in the middle class stereotype of the organizational man in the 1950s.

By this means it was possible for 20th-century modernism to create an array of symbols that were meaningful and significant to workers in the city, the middle class and capital. This was possible because all were participants, albeit not equal ones, in the productivist order that was championed by modernism where labour was not something was not something residual or hidden in the symbolic order. Moreover, despite the affluence of the modern era most people that came of age during the modern period were well aware of scarcity and necessity because of their experience of the depression and the rationing that accompanied the militarization of society during the modern period affected all classes.

While postmodern aesthetics originally challenged corporate capital, over time capital was absorbed by capital. Not only had capital adapted to the postmodern order, the corporatist involvement in the production of second generation postmodern landscapes show that postmodernism is now becoming a generalized mode of regulation for the entire city, as the aesthetic forms of postmodernism have been seized by capital and used to further its own ends. This has not been the case for the urban proletariat, that has been socialized in a bureaucratic order, but does not have the economic or cultural resources to deal with the uncertainty that results from the instability and flux of the new work culture. The inability of this class to seize the moment can be seen in rising unemployment levels and homelessness that have become chronic in the postmodern city during the age of the spectacle (Philip 1997g).

Even though the postmodern aesthetic code of the new middle class has largely projected a world view that favours small rather than large capital, the entrepreneur over organizational man, the personalization rather than depersonalization of the relation between buyer and seller - these qualities antithetical to the engineering mindset that governed corporate culture during the modern period have been taken up by leading edge corporations to exploit new markets and regain the allegiance of the new middle class.

With increased participation by corporate capital second generation postmodern landscapes have been created that are not exactly the same as those advocated by Jane Jacobs With the new urbanism, postmodern regulation has ceased to be just a popular ideology of the new middle class or a program or the re-organization of space in the inner city. Postmodern aesthetics have instead become an integral element of generalized mode of regulation for the entire city. As it has become absorbed into mass culture, its forms have become important marketing devices to sell new communities.


4.6..1. - The transformation of the aesthetic dimension of postmodern regulation into a generalized mode of regulation for the city -the journey from popular cultural to mass culture.

For this reason there is a considerable ideological gap between the petty bourgeois critique of modernism that Jane Jacobs offers in The Death and Life Of Great American Cities and many people who are now advocates of the new urbanism.

The anarchistic sensibility that colours The Death and Life of Great American Cities has not prevented this book from being incorporated into bureaucratic regulation. A decade after its publication, the victory of urban reformers in Toronto and Vancouver brought this text into the mainstream, as the planning bureaucracies of each of these cities were restructed. As a ressult, this somewhat subversive text into the planning primer for the postmodern city.

In the 1980s this anti-corporatist world view would begin to break down, as a second generation postmodern discourse on the city arose. As this happened, the function of postmodern ideology changed. It ceased to be an oppositional ideology and started to become part of a new orthodoxy. As this happened, postmodern norms became more closely attuned to the requirements and practices of the corporate sector. In Canada, at least, this shift from the livable city ideology to that of the urban spectacle would take on a more generalized form with the rise of neo-traditionalism (Krier 1988) and the new urbanism (Katz 1994; Utne 1994; Barnett 1995)

With these two new genres the geographic range for the application of postmodern aesthetics broadened considerably. Also the social groups who adopted this ideology began to expand as postmodernism became a hegemonic force. With this development, postmodern aesthetics function less as a populist ideology for the new middle class and more as a cluster of free floating signifiers that operate within the ambit of mass culture which results in the subordination of these forms to capital. In so far that this is happening the context for the application of postmodern norms first promulgated by Jane Jacobs changed considerably.

Because of these changes postmodern aesthetics have become more influential in the reshaping of the suburbs and exurbia. As this has happened the tone of postmodern discourse has also changed. While the polemics of many first generation postmodern thinkers took a defensive posture in order to prevent the machine space aesthetic of modernism from making further inroads into the inner city, a more aggressive stance has been taken by second generation ideologues such as Leon Krier (1988) Calthorpe (1993) and Plater Zybert (Mohney and Easterling 1991), as Jane Jacobs' ideas have been absorbed into a new planning orthodoxy.

When Jacobs first published The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, the inner city was being aggressively suburbanized, but now the opposite is happening, as many suburbs are now being urbanized. As these middle class representations of urban life have been appropriated by developers, their symbolic resonance has diminished as they have begun to function more as one-dimensional signs which point to meanings rather than as symbols that convey the full range of associations and assumptions about space which originally informed and motivated the construction of these postmodern spaces by the new middle class.

Here the dialectic that exists between popular culture and mass culture becomes important to understand, with the movement of the postmodern aesthetics out of its geographic hearth in the inner city (Hall 1982; Hebdige 1980). Although this process of cultural conversion and redefinition of space has not been as extreme as in the field popular music or fashion (because the built environment is not so easily shaped by mass culture), nonetheless, there is a parallel between pop culture and what is happening to the second generation of postmodern landscapes that are being produced. This can be drawn out by looking at the emergence of the new urbanism in both Canada and the United States.

Indeed, as Frank Clayton (1992), a well known housing analyst, remarked, these landscapes (in this case the community of Seaside) have "more in common with fanciful tourist attractions like Disneyworld than a permanent place to live and work." Indeed, the representation of urban reality that is often conveyed in these second generation postmodern landscapes, function more as free floating signifiers of a commercial utopia unattached to a specific geography or history. Rather than being defined by the original oppositional ideology of the new middle class, these second generation postmodern landscapes are framed more by the marketing requirements of corporate capital that the realization of the urbanist vision of the city held out by first generation postmodern theorists. While the aesthetic shell of the postmodern city remains as the raw material for the production of these second stage postmodern landscapes many of the positive qualities associated with the first generation landscapes of the livable city have been washed out.

As with other cultural representations, landscapes that once symbolized subversion to the existing bureaucratic order now increasingly function as symbols of a new conformity. The revival of the street and the recycling of industrial landscapes can no longer be considered as radical acts. As with modernism some symbolic meanings have even been reversed, as symbolic forms that were once associated with non-conformity and rebellion against the existing suburban order may simply be displacing this order into a new form that is not much different from the ideal of the nuclear family in the modern suburb, specially since neo-tradtional planning appears to revolve around a contrived domestic ideal that is more suburban than urban.

Examples of this happening can be already be seen in the way that the principles of the new urbanism are being used to construct new edge cities, such as Celebration, that Disney Corporation is currently building in Florida. (LeBlanc 1996; Phillips 1997; Al-Hindi 1997). So not only are the postmodern aesthetics being appropriated, their symbolic content is being subverted. The different permutations of this appropriation can be measured along a continuum that runs from the creation of the simulacra landscapes, at one end of the spectrum, to a middle ground, where developers and planners do, in fact, manage to engage in authentic place making, producing landscapes that are not completely contrived or artificial; to the other end of the spectrum, where unabashed mass market approach -- this usually happening when the lower end of the market is targeted and so the production of kitsch landscapes (Greenberg 1972). This is when postmodern representations of space come closest to functioning as simple signs rather than as symbols that resonate with the world view projected forward by middle class urbanites. When this occurs the representation of space neither produces the simulacra effect nor becomes an authentic place making activity.

Usually the simulacra effect is achieved when postmodern codes are employed to draw in a more affluent, but conservative clientele. Although it is possible for meaningful place making activity to occur in this context -- it often seems to occur more by accident than a result of artful design. Kitsch environments most often result when postmodern aesthetics are pitched to a less affluent market, where the consumer does not have the cultural competencies to discern what is ironic or what stands as a mockery of the postmodern sensibility, since the consumer has neither the income or cultural competence to make these judgments about the cultural distinction that are imprinted into these landscapes.

In Canada there are no obvious examples of the simulacra environments that can be pointed to. However, in the United States, there is of course Disney Corporation's Celebration, which, in the true tradition of the urban spectacle, has hired internationally renowned architects to produce stunning environments. And then there is Seaside designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Keeping in step with the powerful postmodern tendency to render the world of production invisible, not surprisingly the ambience sought after in Seaside is that of a resort (Mohney 1991; Tzonis et al. 1995). However, besides the resort motif, another popular archetype for second generation postmodern landscapes is the 19th-century North American townscape. And it is this archetype that looks as if it will become the most influential.

So far in Greater Vancouver, no simulacra landscapes have been created. However there are some authentic experiments in place making and the production of kitsch environment that can be pointed to in the suburbs. For example, in the City of White Rock (1995), an affluent middle class community located to the South of Vancouver at one end of a commuter and retirement axis for professionals in the urban region, and to the East, in the working class Cities of Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam, two examples of second-generation postmodern landscapes can be pointed to which stand as examples of kitsch landscapes and genuine place making.
At the other end of the continuum there are examples of Kitsch environments that have also been produced in Vancouver. As said before, this usually happens when development is pitched towards a less affluent population and when there is an inactive or weak new middle class which is not around to pressure planners and politicians to produce higher quality and supposedly more authentic environments.

Maillardville, in the suburb of Coquitlam would be an example of Kitsch, while downtown Port Coquitlam can be cited as an example of successful place-making. As the Port Coquitlam example shows, Kitsch environments do not necessarily happen just when modest income groups are targeted. Nevertheless, as the White Rock example also illustrates, it is much more likely to occur when the market that is being pitched to is lower middle class or working class in origin. The production of Kitsch environments is also more likely to happen when the conversion of working-class or industrial spaces lacks amenity value, as was the case of Maillardville, where it was not so easy to suppress or render the working-class environments that once predominated here entirely invisible.

Whereas White Rock could pick up and go with a resort theme this was not possible in Maillardville, which originated as a company town to house Francophone workers who were recruited to work in Fraser Mills, a lumber mill complex that was situated nearby, along the Fraser River (Villeneuve 1972). So there are important nuances which have to with class and chance that need to be taken into account when looking at how postmodern formats are applied and altered in various contexts as this aesthetic has diffused outwards from the inner city and into the suburbs and beyond in tandem with the diffusion of the densification process.

4.3.2 - Densification and postmodern aesthetics

Finally, more so with the philosophical or sociological dimensions of postmodernism regulation, the link between densification and postmodernism appear strongest at the aesthetic level. While this indicates that postmodern aesthetics are becoming the dominant expression of postmodern regulation, as earlier mentioned, it also signifies that they function less as middle-class spatial symbols the more generalized they become.
Accordingly, the three aesthetic attributes that have been described, each have played a role in the densification of the city. For example, the inversion of the status relation between the suburb and the city is responsible for gentrification and explains why suburbs are now trying to turn themselves into cities to attract investment. Without this change new neighbourhoods such as the Beaches, which is expected to cost $300-million in order to build on a former race track site in Toronto would not likely have ever been considered (Black 1997; Zehr 1997a).

Consequently there is an important cultural component to the progression of the densification process which must always be kept in mind. Looking at the three aesthetic attributes in this regard, on the most general level, the attraction of capital into the inner city and its concentration can related to the cultural devaluation of suburban life and the more favourable take on city life which postmodernism has come to signify for the middle class. Without this shift it is unlikely that developments such as the new Beaches community in Toronto, or the redevelopment of the Greater False Creek Basin would have taken place or that distinctive zones of middle-class resettlement would have appeared in the inner city.

Not only has this spatial status inversion affected the inner city. It has also altered how densification in the suburbs has been promoted and marketed. This can be seen in Canada's largest and fastest growing suburbs. Probably the most ambitious and exuberant example of this role reversal would be the attempt by the Toronto suburb of North York to recast itself as a city. In North York, ambitious plans have been drawn up to transform Yonge Street a second downtown spine for metro Toronto (Reid Fall 1993; City of North York June, 1992).

Similarly, in Surrey, (Vancouver's largest suburb) an attempt to remodel this suburb into a city is also underway. Surrey has even gone as far as hiring a consultant to rework image of this suburb to make it appear more like a city to lure investment (Munro January,12,1993). As with North York, planners and politicians hope to make Surrey the urban region's second downtown (Waal 1995; Risdon 1994).

Lastly, this reappraisal of the city and the suburb has also expressed itself in the densification of greenfield sites on the fringe of the built-up areas of several cities in Canada that is most easy to see in the construction of neo-traditional communities, with Toronto now called the neo-traditional capital of North America. In total, within Cananda, so far between 10 to 20-billion dollars have been allocated over the next 20 years for the construction of these communities, so they will be far from insignificant. In the not-so-distant future they will contain tens of thousands of homes, and house hundreds of thousands of people. Principally in Toronto, how they evolve will have a great deal to do with the shape and intensity that the densification process will take in the exurban parts of the region during the next building cycle.

Although this neo-traditional format may be is situated a considerable distance away from original middle model of urbanity that was developed in the 1970s, the proliferation of these neighbourhoods does signify the increasing hegemony of postmodern regulation. With billions of dollars by some of Canada's largest development corporations are now being invested into neo-traditional communities postmodern norms are no longer the sole domain of the new middle class. With eight neo-traditional communities now under construction (according to one writer) Canada is now reputed to have more neo-traditional communities underway per capita than any other country in the world (Warson 1997; 1997a; Chidley 1997).

What is also interesting to note is how these development incorporate the historicist and pedestrian space orientations of postmodernism. So not only is the historicist bend of postmodernism responsible for the conservation of existing environments, that is most obvious with regard to gentrification, it is also responsible for the construction of new environments which take their cue from the past rather than the future. Another notable feature about these neo-traditional communities is the attempt to revive the street.

Thus, densification has also become intertwined with other attributes that define the aesthetic dimension of postmodern regulation. Unlike modern period - when densification most often involved urban renewal- in the postmodern period historicism often sets the conditions for densification. In this regard, the use area-based discretionary zoning not unique to the suburban neighbourhood located in the City of Vancouver (CVCO-66), but has also become a feature in other cities as well. For example, in Edmonton the Planning Department is now undertaking a study of all of its mature suburbs, and already atleast six neighbourhoods have been adopted historistic zoning protocols (Edmonton Journal 1997c; 1997k).

For this reason densification in the postmodern city has often been accompanied by a vocal and sometimes powerful preservation movement. Not surprisingly, this has lead to the establishment of historic districts. This in turn, has acted as a catalyst for investment. Besides the incorporation of an historistic sensibility into zoning districts for single family districts, in the City of Vancouver, it has been area such as Gastown and Yaletown which have become magnets for capital investment, something which was not the case during the modern period. This relation between this historistic sensibilty and the densification of the city can also be withnessed in the revival of the street. Although this has stalled in Toronto, in Vancouver the redevelopment of arterial streets has taken off in the 1990s, becoming a significant vector for densification.

This can even be observed in cities where the densification process is weak or very localized, such as Winnipeg, where a phenomenal amount of capital has been attracted to Corydon Avenue. But no doubt Toronto and Vancouver provide the best examples of this. While deliberate attempts to revive the street have not yet generated the level of investment that the recycling of industrial land into residential and commercial land uses so far, in Vancouver and Toronto this may soon start to change.

At presentVancouver has been more successful than Toronto in using the unused capacity of its streets for new development. This is rather surprising since the success the City of Vancouver has experienced in recycling underused arterials has occurred in a city which has had a much weaker tradition of active street life. While changes were made to some of the city's commercial zoning bylaws to encourage the construction of residential units over ground level retail space in the early 1970s (CVPD-30; CVPD-47), only with the housing crises of the late 80's and the search for more ways to increase the housing capacity of the city has the underused development potential of the street begun to be used in Vancouver with streets like Broadway, Commercial, and West Fourth Avenue rapidly becoming important residential precincts on their own.

Last of all, the link between the densification and postmodern aesthetics can be seen in the opportunities created by the recycling of producer spaces into spaces for consumption and reproduction. In Vancouver this has created the most important conduit for densification. In the inner city as well as the suburbs, industrial lands have provided the path of least resistance to redevelopment. Because of this, there has been a dramatic transformation in the industrial and working class landscapes of suburban Vancouver, something that has further fragmented and dispersed working class settlement spaces in the region, especially in the cities of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminister.

Although this reconversion is also linked to the status reversal of the city and the suburb, of the three aesthetic attributes examined so far, this has been the most important in Greater Vancouver in terms of investment. More than the other aesthetic attributes, this conversion of industrial land has absorbed the most residential capital in the region during the 1990s. The most dramatic example of this would no doubt be the transformation of the Greater False Creek Basin into a Zone of Middle Class Resettlement. But just as important would be the conversion of industrial land along the Skytrain line in Burnaby and New Westminister. Other than the downtown peninsula these are the corridors where the most intense densification in the region is now taking place.

The same kind of erasure of producer spaces can also be observed in plans to redevelop the ship yards in the city of North Vancouver, and the redevelopment that is planned for an area which once was a fishing processing complex in the community of Steveston, located in the suburb of Richmond, (south of Vancouver). As one local historian noted recently: "It's only in the last three years that people have suddenly decided that this is Gastown or Granville Island, before then, it was just a sleepy little village" (Strachan 1994).
Having more to work with, Steveston has had greater success in incorporating the elements of urban spectacle into its redevelopment than Maillardville, with the fishing port becoming a popular local tourist haunt. For this reason there are more similarities between the postmodern landscape created in Steveston and the spaces that can be found in the Greater False Creek Basin such as Granville Island, than in Maillardville.
Further out, the same process can be observed in the exurban fringes of the Vancouver region. This can be seen in the city of Langley and Squamish, but is no doubt most apparent in resort communities such as Whistler. Unlike False Creek, here gentrification is taking place in an exurban rather than inner city setting.

Paradoxically, middle class opposition to high rises in the West End would also play a role. Cast as the concrete jungle, the West End (VS-45) would serve as a catalyst for exploration with medium rise environments. To a large degree the development of South False Creek was framed by the desire of middle-class reformers to create an environment that would stand out as being the direct opposite of the West End (VS-34a). One result would be the creation of the first area based rather than functionally based discretionary zoning, that was used in the West End. Hence, not only did South False Creek become the real birth place of postmodern zoning in Vancouver, it also became the laboratory for experimentation with medium density housing that was to used to completely transform the entire Zone of Middle Class Resettlement into an area of medium density co-operatives and condominiums, (CVPD-52; Winsor 1986).

For planning the adoption of niche production would result in the consumption of more resources. And, as pointed out earlier, the other main reason for increased intensity of planning regulation had to do with the densification process and the redevelopment that was triggered by this change in investment patterns. When redevelopment began to become more important than the development of greenfield sites, new ways of governing and regulating space were required which also resulted in more sophisticated and intensive forms of planning regulation.

What is also curious to note is how the adoption of postmodern zoning corresponds to shifts that were taking place in the work place. Just as Fordist systems of mass production were beginning to be replaced by Post-Fordist systems that embodied the economies scope rather than of scale, where niche production became more important, so too in the planning field, a similar movement was occurring with the installation of Vancouver’s first postmodern zoning schedule, in 1974 (i.e., CVPD-79),

Notes:


In the art world the break down of the separation that high-modernism attempted to maintain between the market and high culture is best shown in the work of Andy Warhol. With Pop Art, Warhol succeeded in breading the canons of modern art in several important ways. Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 7.
See obituary from the United Press in the Vancouver Sun, March 28th,1996 where the postmodern characteristics of the organizational culture of Hewlett-Packard is referred to. Also look at Peter Drucker who can be viewed as a postmodern guru in terms of governance in the corporate sector (Maithlewaite 1996). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 4.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 5.
For a while urban reformers took formal control of the local state in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal. This also happened in second tier cities such as Edmonton and Ottawa during the 1980s and 1990s. Although the city council's of Ottawa and Edmonton were not controlled by middle class reformers reform mayors were elected. In Ottawa this happened in the early 1980s when Marion Dewar was elected to office (See Caroline Andrew, "Ottawa-Hull," in City Politics in Canada edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sanction which was published in 1983 and John Taylor 1986). In Edmonton this happened in the mid 80s when a proto reform candidate, Lawrence Decore, was elected to the Mayor's Office and in the late 80s when Jan Reimer was elected to the Mayors office for two terms, before she was defeated in 1995. At the same time a powerful minority faction of urban reformers often followed these mayors, buttressing them- even if they did not have a majority on council. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 84.
Soon after Bartholomew was hired interim zoning was established for the City of Vancouver in 1927 (CVPD-61). This was followed by a permanent zoning code in 1930. Similarly a comprehensive plan was produced in 1928. While never formally adopted, the Bartholomew plan served as a policy template for all later planning initiatives during the modern period until the 1970s. After the war Bartholomew's consulting firm was brought back to update the 1928 plan and 1930 zoning bylaw (CV-1). In the follow up reports that were produced it is interesting to note how most of the beaux arts references were dropped as the representation of space as abstract space became more prominent. Also notable, is the increased emphasis placed upon the automobile in the reports that were produced in the late 1940's (CV-14; CV-15; CV-16). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 82.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 76.
Indeed when Ray Spaxman, the Planning Department's Director from 1973 to 1989, was asked about the corporate culture of the Planning Department he stated that it reminded him of the British Military (PI-21).
Hence in the preface to Marlborough Marathon, Granatstein starts off by writing" This small volume can claim to be nothing more than one man's record of a single fight against a developer and for survival."
Looking at the Port Huron Statement, Maurice Isserman (1987) remarks that it is the first important crystallization of the new populism that would be embraced by the leaders of the new middle class who were just beginning to enter young adulthood when The Port Huron statement was published by the Students For A Democratic Society in 1962. Here the first important formal statement that outlined the general features of an anarchist sensibility about governance, which also put more stress on subjectivity, appeared that would later translate into a generalized demand for methods of decision making which were more dialogical across both Canada and the United States.
Here, for the first time, the notion of advocacy planning was formally introduced into the planning lexicon, marking the intellectual beginning of postmodern discourse at the philosophic level in the planning field. This discourse would soon bloom into a number of key works, which has continued into the present: For example After the Planners, by Robert Goodman (1971), Economic and Social Development: a process of social learning, by Edgar Dunn (1971), The Reflective Practioner by Donald Schon (1983) and Planning In The Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action by John Friedmann (1987) and Planning in the Face of Power (1989) by John Forester highlight the continuing relevance of this discourse, but not necessarily the actual practice of this type of planning, as illustrated by the recent publication of Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies by Patsy Healey (1997).
This can be seen in the proliferation of books on this subject such as: Creating Community Anywhere by Carolyn Shaffer and Kristen Amundsen (1993); The Spirit Of Community by Amitai Etzioni (1993) and The Rebirth of Urban Democracy by the Brookings Institute (Berry, Portney and Thomson, 1993). Each of these books shows an interest in exploring non bureaucratic methods for urban governance. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 158.
In Contrast to the engineer, if we examine the historic origins of the artist quite a different set of class affiliations emerges. Unlike the engineer, whose origins are within the working class rather than the middle class and whose sensibility is guided by the notion of scarcity and necessity rather than that of superfluity and freedom, it is not hard to see why the artistic mode of existence produces a smaller space in the popular imagination and a larger one with the middle class and the aristocracy (Hauser 1952).
Despite the paternalism and the authoritarian nature of the engineering world view, something which might have to do with its emergence as a full fledged profession at a time when bureaucratization and militarism were ascendant influences and the occupation structure for the profession was located in the state or in large corporation, during the modern era the engineer was also able to stand in as a cultural icon for the working class, becoming a positive role model for both the working class as well as the middle class. See Salley Hacker (1989) for commentary on the close tie between engineers and corporate capital.
As an outside reviewer of the Department noted "The Planning Department was originally staffed by personnel transferred from the City Engineer's and Building Departments, and from the Town Planning Commission. Close relationships have been continuously maintained since, especially with respect to zoning and subdivision control, development permits, and highway and traffic design," (CV-2).
Upon reading this draft Ron Youngberg's commented that it was the presence of the Technical Planning Board as much as the iron hand of Sutton Brown that had to do with the ineffectiveness of Bill Graham. It might also be speculated that Graham was one of the first signs of the shift away from the engineering mind set in the department since he was trained as an architecture, although a somewhat quirky one, since he was also fundamentalist Christian.
Still as Youngberg noted, the Board of Administration sat every Friday afternoon and made decisions. "It was the only the Planning Department that was subject to scrutiny by its peers. Although the Director of Planning was also the chairman of the Technical Planning Board and could enter a minority report, it was not usual. The Commissioners: Sutton Brown and Lorne Ryan also sat as members and you know who in the room steered the discussions." (PI-27).
For instance, after Sutton Brown left as the director of planning he was replaced by Fountain, another engineer. Only when Bill Graham, who was trained as an architect, was hired as the third director, in 1963, was a non engineer put in charge of the Department. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 67.
For as Frederick Winslow Taylor would have understood, in a monological system of bureaucratic rule only those at the very top of the hierarchy were expected to have knowledge of the overall plan. This absence of understanding about the direction that the Department was going among many of the planners who worked in the lower echelons of the organization can therefore not be interpreted as a symptom of lack in direction or leadership. Precisely the converse could have been the case. Although Graham may have been weak the discourse that Sutton Brown had created was not and his presence was still felt in what went on in the Planning Department. Thus an examination of the discourse and practices of the Planning Department between the mid 50s and the early 70s does not reveal disorder so much as the operation of one unremitting logic for planning that was never strayed too far from that logic being the 20-year development plan of Sutton Brown that was set out in the three reports which were released by the Department..
Rather than being viewed as nurturing entity the bureaucracy started to be viewed with horror and hostility by many middle class intellectuals. With the decline in the influence of the military and engineering mind set planners were no longer so willing to put up with the rigid chain of command and this lead to a steady departure of planners from the Department from 1967 through to 1973 (VS-23; VS-27; VS-39; VS-40).
What recently happened to the institutional culture of a bomb factory shows just how strong the connection is between militarism and authoritarian monological rule. When a military logic was replaced by a market logic everything changed at this bomb factory in Oak Ridge Tennessee. No where would his become more evident than in security arrangements and the flow of information. As Mr. Beck, the director for the Oak Ridge facility remarked: " While secrecy might be an intrinsic element in a bomb factory extensive security checks produced massive inconveniences in the new environment of business, give us your toughest problems, You're sitting in a facility which in 1992 was a secret facility.. . . I couldn't have gotten you in here in a month of Sundays, let alone in 10 minutes (Struass 1996a)."
Indeed this would come out in a Department review commissioned by Ray Spaxman when he was hired.
Ann McAfee remarked that although Ray Spaxman often look at space from the eyes of the person on the street, it was not from the vantage point of the resident in the building. This comment would support the point that has been made about the artistic sensibility and further sharpen the contrast that existed with the utilitarian perspective of Sutton Brown.
Compared to modernism, postmodernism therefore had a hedonist edge which conservative social critics such as Daniel Bell (1976) took due note of, as conditions of affluence rather than scarcity allowed this class to expend energy on the search for self realization (Inglehart 1990) rather than the struggle for survival or the exploration of desire rather than the simple satisfaction of needs (Leiss 1988).
Unlike the modern period Goal formation became a central pre-occupation of middle class populist's. Hence the middle class rather than the planners were the first group to formulate many of the tenets of postmodernism. Also Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 76.
As Jim Wilson (PI-45) noted, Sutton Brown's inability to work with or understand the power dynamics which were operating in the Lower Mainland may have been one reason why his plans for the region were not eagerly embraced by other politicians or other planning bureaucracies in the region. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 77.
This would be reflected in the 1967 re-organization of the Planning Department (CVPD-16). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 78.
Hence Spaxman went before council and asked for a 40 percent increase in staff levels. Furthermore, many regarded "Shaping the Future" as a plan to usurp the authority of other departments (VP-32).
As a reviewer of Yergin's and Stnislaw's (two economists) book The Commanding Heights (1988), notes, Canada is not mentioned is the survey the author undertake of the conservative revolution
Again, this also had something to do with the presence of a social democratic party. While both the left and the Right were vigorously attacking the state in the United States, the animus towards bureaucratic rule in Canada was displaced to large private corporations as much as it was to the State. Thus urban reformers excoriated large corporate developers such as Trizec and Marathon Reality more than they did the state. While the state did not remain untouched by criticism it was viewed as a vehicle for progressive social action, as reformers called for innovative government programs, not their elimination. This also took place at the national level, with the leader of the New Democratic Party directly attacking Corporate Welfare Bums not the Welfare State itself (See Laxer 1996).
Changes to the national housing Act also made it possible for municipal government to become more actively involved in the production of housing. By setting up non profit housing corporations they could become active participants and not just passive regulatory agents in the production of housing. In this case, the most successful example of municipal involvement would be the establishment of Cityhome, by the City of Toronto, in 1973. It arose as a response to the protest of middle class activists, of which Jane Jacobs was one participant, who were agitating against the demolition of a row of Victorian housing. This lead the reform Mayor, David Crombie, to sponsor the city's purchase of the houses. In turn, this triggered a series of experiments with medium density and infill housing projects that were to become the hallmark of the first period of the postmodern era in Canada. In Toronto the main institutional vehicle for these experiments would become Cityhome. It would become responsible for the construction of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood and after twenty years in operation control over 7,000 units of housing in the inner city (See John Barber. Influence of Cityhome created unique boom, in Globe and Mail February 4, 1994). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 93.
For the city this initial disenchantment with both the state and the market logics for the organization of space fueled the search for a third way path that avoided the perceived pitfall of both. To this end the informal economy emerged as an alternative, as community based initiatives were experimented with as one way of developing non market rationales for the organization and production of space while avoiding the alienating consequences of bureaucratic rule which public involvement usually involved (Boyte and Russman 1986).
These are some reasons that can be advanced for explaining why the reaction against modern bureaucratic rule did not translate into open hostility towards the state and the paralysis of state intervention in the urban domain. While the new middle class in American were demonizing the state during the 1970s, it was still being embraced by the new middle class in Canada because they were able to change the look of bureaucratic rule by having it reformulated along dialogical rather than monological lines. As a consequence the bureaucracies of the local state continued to advance, rather than retreat during the 1970s and 1980s, as Canada's three largest cities became heavily involved in implementing the agenda of the livable city. By contrast, over the same period to time, if the two largest cities in the United States are compared, opposing circumstances were shaping what was happening. Here circumstances were forcing the retreat rather than the further advance of the local state, with the liberal regime of New York City reigned in by the near default of the city (Fitch 1993) and local government in the Los Angeles region crippled by the constraints placed upon its ability to act by measures like Proposition 13 (Stocker 1991). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 120.
Not only did the Hellyer report become the swan song for the modernist regulation of urban space in Canada, it also had practical consequences for the future evolution of the postmodern city. Not only did the re-examination of the city that lead to the production of the report lead to the cancellation of urban renewal projects that were suburbanizing the inner city, The Hellyer Report had a significant impact upon aesthetics and urban governance with its call for more experimentation with infill housing and participatory forms of planning, recommendations that soon bore fruit with the initiation of neighbourhood improvement programs and funding for pathbreaking exercises in local planning, such as one initiated in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver (CVPD-26). Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 121.
These amendments to the National Housing Act would provide the institutional framework and the bureaucratic muscle that was required to support the construction of the livable city over the next twenty years, providing the funding and the guidelines that would lead to the production of new kinds of community designed spaces and planning processes. These amendments would also put new programs in place for the conservation of existing housing stock. As the Milton Park example would show, this would establish another means for the translation of the communitarian ideology of the livable city into actual bricks and mortar.
The notion of organic ideology comes from Gramsci who referred to organic ideologies as those ideologies that arise spontaneously from out of a class (See Jorge Larrain, "ideology," p. 222 in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore.
With an artistic versus an engineering sensibility in operation an entirely new and for some unfamiliar and puzzling dimension to planning in Vancouver would emerge, as Ray Spaxman would often take up these soft themes when addressing the public. In this way the shift from objective to subjective values would indeed show that a new context for planning was in gestation, one that contained a heady mixture of rebellion, alienation that the affluence of the time allowed which would make "Shaping The Future" a quintessential expression of the world view of the new middle class and something that stood in direct contrast to the utilitarian and materialist vision of the city that had been articulated by Sutton Brown in his 20 year development plan.
When reading this paragraph Ann McAfee commented that under Campbell, that is when Fletcher was director, an attempt was made to bring the public into direction setting. However, several people who were interviewed about CityPlan have commented that they felt that CityPlan was very much a product of pre-formulated values, so there is considerable disagreement over whether or not the public actually set the direction for CityPlan (PI-13).
When commenting on this section Ann McAfee (PI-13) made an interesting observation about densification. Using a much narrower and more specific empirical definition of the densification process, she remarked what has been included within the single definition of the densification process in this study really makes up several distinct processes such as redevelopment in addition to gentrification. For her redevelopment was felt to be a more apt reference to densification proper, something that would result in an observable increase in population density. Thus, to her what happened in the conversion zone, with gentrification, in the West End and in the industrial lands are quite different. While accepting the empirical specificity of this point, since the definition of densification used in this research is one base on the movement of capital rather than population, each of these three distinct aspects of urban transformation may be different in terms of demographic dynamics but in terms of the movement of capital they are just different empirical manifestations of what is perceived to be a single pattern of urban change defined by the concentration of capital.
According to one planner this did not mean that Spaxman was anti-development but probably had more to do with the power struggle between the Director of Planning and the Mayor. Ironically enough while Spaxman lost control over the view corridor study while he was planning director in the last years of his tenure, in the post-Campbell period he was given the contract to do the downtown skyline study- and one reason for this award, according to one source that contacted, was his willingness to consider higher buildings as a means to make the core more attractive
Sutton Brown was not the only game in town. There was also the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board and later the Greater Vancouver Regional District that had quite a different corporate culture. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 130.
On a more abstract philosophical plane, as discourse, "Shaping The Future" invites a broader discussion about the role of reason and the apprehension of reality that has become a hallmark feature of the postmodern age. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt 4, Note 131.
In reading this section Ron Youngberg voiced a number of concerns which are as follows: "Having lived through the change in the Department since November 1958, I appear somewhat defensive when such glowing credit is given to the Social Planning Department. It is true that they stirred some of the shift towards change and in that process helped turn things around. It has always been my experience that Social Planning have over emphasized their accomplishments and have done things that were self serving, Change was taking place already. Council make up changed. Staff were challenging the director. People like Harcourt and Mazarri were playing community advocate roles. The social planners did their bit, The initiated the first local area planning program but abandoned it and their staff as it was the Planning Department that had to pick up the pieces to make it work. It was the Social Planning Department that viciously attacked Shaping The Future and later local area planning and tried to get rid of it. They were not a friend of Ray Spaxman either and one member of social planning worked behind the scenes to get rid of Ray. Britannia was not an invention of Social Planning, The Superintendent of the School Board brought the idea home from a conference. Social Planning did some organizational work and then the work was turned over to consultants to organized. It was a successful project and Social Planning deserves credit but it was the hard work by others that make it happen (PI-27)."
Ironically enough, this new style of planning required that the planners act more as a professional who was expected to exercise some independent judgment, creating a situation which stood in direct contrast to the Sutton Brown era, when most planners were treated as technicians, who simply applied rules. Paradoxically, the greater involvement of the public enhanced rather than decreased the professional status of planners. This did not go un-noticed by other professionals, who were involved with the production of space, such as architects, who have increasingly complained about the encroachment of planners into their professional domain or developers who have recoiled at this perceived intrusion of planners in to the operation of the market. Even though planning for uncertainty requires more public input which forced the planner to interact more with the public, at the same time, as has just been noted, it also prompted planners in Vancouver to develop more elaborate and diverse skills which gave them more autonomy to act as professional rather than as technicians.
The time and energy that was put into the articulation of goals for the city of Vancouver was probably without parallel in Canada. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 134.
Ann McAfee noted that housing policy and implementation as well as work on an industrial strategy were also mandated to the Overall Division (PI-13).
Where this will ultimately take local planning is a moot question. While Larry Beasley and Ann McAfee appear to view this new format for local area planning in a positive light Ron Youngberg, the former Associate Director of Local Area Planning between 1974 and 1991, had strong reservations about this truncated system (PI-1; PI-13; PI-27).
As mentioned earlier, although dialogical processes would remain in place, as with many other facets of postmodern regulation, they would begin to be revised to reflect the resurgence of the market and the growing power of corporate interests in the 1980s. This would also become visible in The Better City Government Program. What is interesting to note about this plan for the re-organization of city government is how closely the proposed changes mirror the thinking about corporate reorganization in the private sector (CVC0-23). What this indicates is that there has been a gradual integration of postmodern regulation into the corporate mainstream, and the final dissolution of the oppositional stream of postmodern regulation. But more than anything else what would be revealed in this plan is the pervasiveness of a market logic for the provision of services that has become typical of the thinking about the provision of government services during the second phase of the postmodern development of the city, setting the parameters for the redesign of the bureaucracy itself and not just the standards for deciding which programs might be cancelled or initiated.
Whereas the previous comprehensive local area exercises usually culminated with changes to existing zoning regulations; in this new system of local area planning guidelines and policy directions instead of specific zoning amendments would be the culmination of the process (CVCO-37)
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 162.
Here a good example would be the sell off of Crown assets and in the case of Vancouver the most significant sell off would be the Expo lands. Privatization also surfaces in other forms such as the career trajectories of several planners who were involved in establishing and implementing the postmodern agenda for Vancouver and Toronto. In Toronto this can be seen in the transfer of highly motivated and skilled practitioners of the livable city program to the private sector, when former public officials like Michael Dennis and Ron Soskolne, who worked for the city moved on to work for private development corporations or created ones themselves. In Vancouver the same trend can be seen in the movement of planners like Chuck Brooks (originally from Winnipeg). Also private consulting firms such as Coriolis was founded by a planner who worked for the city (Milner 1997).
Again this comes with the new concern about image and marketing that arises with the increasing influence of market rule - something most evident in the mega projects now being constructed in Vancouver, where much more formally laid out landscapes and the metallic, almost ornamental, structures are now being built and the decided absence of brick which was a more commonly used material in commercial architecture in the Core in the 1970s (See Berelowitz 1989; VS-120; CVPD-103; CVPD-151; CVPD-159; CVC0-35).
This, of course, is best illustrated by very high levels of unemployment and unstable unemployment which affect the production of space and who occupies it- something which can also be seen in the Gini coefficient where a reading of One represents absolute inequality and 0 equals absolute equality. Because of government transfers the coefficient has generally remained around .3 except for a brief sharp upward thrust in 1976. However if we look at earned income two quantum leaps took place in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Statistics Canada this first between 1982 and 1984 when the coefficient went from .37 to .41 and between 1990 and 1995 when the coefficient moved up from .40 to .43 (Statistics Canada - 13-210-XPB used by Little 1997i).
Because of these changes many of the progressive (i.e., social equity) and communitarian impulses that informed the livable city agenda have been revised to reflect the realities that came with these new characteristics.
In addition North False Creek, the most visible changes were made to local area planning. At the national level this would become evident in the expansion of public-private partnerships. For a positive account of about this trend see Dickie 1997. For a negative account see The Globe and Mail, 1997zoo; 1997zn.
In the Core, in particular, this really began with the opening of the downtown SFU campus in 1990. This trend can also be seen with the expansion of the Emily Carr School of Art, the new BCIT facility, a satellite facility for the UBC faculty of Architecture, a film school, Vancouver Community College and numerous language schools and the recent movement of the knowledge and information producing sectors of the Vancouver Sun to 200 Granville street (VS-266).
As Vancouver is reputed by some to be the third largest centre of production for movies and television production in North America.
This growth can be seen in the construction of new berths for cruise ships, Deltaport, the effects of the open sky policy (1995), the expansion of the international airport and by the fact that port handles the countries largest amount of cargo - 72 million tonnes (Vivian Smith 1997,p.42).
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 151.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 150.
See CVC0-14; CVCO-16; CVCO-60; CVCO-63; CV-29; CVPD-124; CVPD-149.
The partial transformation of postmodern forms and sensibilities into niche and mass marketing ventures is one of the best signs of its accommodation with capital and the dilution of its previous function as an oppositional ideology. More than this however this marketing has increasingly central to the facilitation of densification process. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 141.
A good example of this would be the Convention Centre in Edmonton, which is now called the Shaw Centre, named after a corporation that recently moved from Edmonton to Calgary. In Toronto a good example of this is the renaming of the OKeefe Centre into the Hummingbird Centre.
As a result, in Vancouver important spaces such the city's hockey arena are now named after corporations that have nothing to do with the function of the space or the history of the city. GM place is a good example of this, as it is what the city's new hockey arena is now called. Then there is the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts that was named after the highest bidder for this facility. Likewise this will be seen in the new Dance centre soon to be constructed on Granville Street that will be called The Scotiabank Centre for Dance (CVCO-63).
In the 1990's the struggle over space between the new middle class and the urban proletariat has become as bitter as the struggles that once took place between the middle class against corporate capital in the late 1960s (Phillips 1997a; Handleman 1995; Shutz 1995; Tanner 1995;VS-91; VS-94; VS-96; PI-22; PI-35) and 1970s. In this new phase of its development postmodernism had largely ceased to be an oppositional ideology of the new middle class. With a rising urban underclass and more competition for space one result of this is that fear rather social solidarity is playing a larger role in the design of space in the Core. Again, during the age of the urban spectacle this puts the postmodern development of the city in closer touch with what is happening in the United States.
This dilution becomes apparent in the increasingly unwillingness of council to support or evade the Planning Department's enactment of principles and processes agreed to in the original Concord pact for the redevelopment of North False Creek. As a result the commitment to social housing has been watered down. For example, this has happened with the Quayside portion of the development (Applebe 1997F). The same tendency appears with Council's over ride of the Departments recommendation about constructing a street rather than retailing format for Quayside (CVPD-150; CVPD-160). More recently it can be seen in council's refusal to conduct a preliminary review process the for Marinaside Neighbourhood despite the reservations expressed by the Director of Central Area Planning, Larry Beaseley, who has expressed some concern about safety issue that relate to the design and the small size of the townhouses, which will only be 850 square feet and have two bedrooms, creating housing spaces that does not provide a viable alternative to families, which has been part of city policy. (Applebe 1997h).
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 152.
And then, of course, there is the reality of fiscal restraint, which is also one of the prime motivations for the Program For Better Government, which emphasizes the weaker position of government at the current moment. As the report on better government to council states: the basic assumption that informs the proposed re-organization is that "the city will be required to do more with less, as service expectations increase and financial constraints tighten," (CVC0-23, p.3).
The other intriguing aspect about the changes that might follow that will be interesting to follow is what the role of City Manager will be in this new re-organization. It is possible to speculate that the city may revert back to a system of administration more reminiscent of the powerful bureaucratic system that was in operation during the Sutton Brown period. Despite the claim about more open ended and customer based service that is being used to justify the current re-organization of local government, it remains to be seen whether the powerful new office now run by Ted Droettbrom might not end up becoming a new focal centre for a new top down system of bureaucratic control in a way that may be similar to the operation of the Board of Administration during the Sutton Brown years. While there is some discussion about devolution and deregulation, one is reminded that the same justifications were used to justify re-organization of government in Britain during the Thatcher years and what eventually came of all this was the massive centralization of decision making and the establishment of a more authoritarian system for making decisions (Hambleton 1989).
The relative decline of local area planning and the corporatist bias that seems to be growing in local government may be taken a sign of the rising influence of the corporatism in the second postmodern phase. As the controversies over displaying corporate logos in the public domain already reveal (VS-109; VS-110), there is a very real danger that the move by local government to accommodate the market in order to save money or to raise revenue may unbalance the equilibrium between public and private interest. As private interests are increasingly interwoven into the public realm there is a greater potential for agencies like the Planning Department to become to closely aligned to developers, as was the perception of the Planning Department in the middle and late 60s, when the Planning Department was forced to become actively involved in courting private development because insufficient government funding was available to initiate urban renewal in the downtown core (Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972; Gutstein 1975). As government agencies are forced to align themselves with private interests or to engage in partnerships to make up for short falls in revenue or the expectation of more services the risk of government agencies losing their legitimacy as protectors of the public interest may be increased if a major disagreement over the nature of development arises as it did in the 1960s. While this scenario is by new means certain the possibility of such a situation developing again would not be entirely out of keeping with the more limited parameters for independent action by agencies such as the Planning Department or the Vancouver Parks Board that have resulted from the relative retreat of the state and the rising dominance of the market.
What ever the interpretation that may be placed on current circumstances, a few things remain clear. One issue, of course, is the rising influence of market forces and the increased recognition by all parties of the limits to government action that has been engendered by the current fiscal crisis. As the report on better government to Council stated: the basic assumption that informs the proposed re-organization is that "the city will be required to do more with less, as service expectations increase and financial constraints tighten," (CVC0-23, p.3). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 139.
Another thing that remains unmistakably clear is the corporatist bias that has crept into thinking about the reorganization of the Department since the departure of Spaxman. Signs of this were apparent in review of the department conducted by Tom Fletcher in 1990 (CVPD-96; CVPD-98; CVPD-99; CVPD-102; CVPD-101). However since the Program for Better Government was begun in 1994 this influence has grown much stronger, as the role of the citizen seems to be gradually being recast from that of citizen to consumer and from an active participant in the decision making process to that of a passive client receiving services.
See Gerecke and Reid in "Planning, Power and Ethics," in Plan Canada November 1991.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 178.
For as Arnold Hauser observed." apart from film, progressive (modern) art is almost a closed book today for the uninitiated; it is intrinsically unpopular, because its means of communication have become transformed in the course of a long and self-contained development into a kind of secret code (1973, p.951)." If one traces the evolution of planning and examines the attitudes that developed towards urban space something quite similar can be seen. This became most visible in the engineering mind set that governed way that planner's represented space in the modern era. With this perspective all subjective experiences of space were erased. Like an abstract painting, the experience of space was so altered that it no longer represented or necessarily even had any direct connection to the figurative space that made sense to the lay person who occupied real space. For the modernist, the regulation of space was the domain of the expert. Like other dominant representations of modernism, space was perceived in the abstract. It was represented as a passive container or simple extension that was located in a vacuum, which could be manipulated in a friction less way according to the functional requirements of the expert. Space was therefore abstract rather than figurative or organic space. This abstract code which modern regulation gave to them, provided the intellectual authority to organize space according to the internal code that was therefore guided the monological forms of knowledge that modernism favoured.
What Smith is referring to at the end of this quote is the emergence of new discourse about space and a new way of representing space that, in its postwar embodiment, can first be traced back to the work that Kevin Lynch began, in the late 1950s and 1960s, when he started to look at how people use and perceive urban space. By doing this Lynch paved the way for a phenomenological approach to the understanding of urban space that would germinate into a much larger discourse about space that others would take up and development. Eventually if would find expression in the work of Robert Venturi (1977) who launched the first formal polemic against modern representations of space, with the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in 1966.
If Venturi's texts can be cited as the formal beginning of an intellectual discourse which expressed the influence of market rule on postmodern representations of organic space, which would become common during the era of the urban spectacle, then Ian McHarg's Design With Nature (1969) can be viewed as the beginning of a secondarily, but oppositional discourse on organic space, within the postmodern matrix. The main contrast here would be the point of departure of each spatial theorist. Whereas McHarg came from an ecological perspective, Venture came from that of popular culture. Being the Wharhol of the design profession, the consumer market rather than nature provided the context for ordering the landscape. As a result, there are no limits in Venture works since everything is open to the market and the full range of the effects of collage designs that can result. However, with McHarg, there is a limit and this is the one presented by nature itself. Also see SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 167.
As densification intensified in the West End the RM-4 zoning schedule was altered. Beginning with the original 1956 zoning schedule, one important innovation within the original bylaw was the introduction of Floor Space Ratios (FSR) (CVPD-61). This lowered allowable densities in the West End while making it possible to construct higher buildings. Instead of the previous six story height limit, 80 foot buildings were now allowed outright, with additional increases in height of up to 300 feet possible to grant on a conditional basis (CVPD-61). Zoning in the West End was modified in a major way in 1958 when all apartment blocks became conditional uses and were therefore subject to assessment by the Technical Planning Board and the Design Panel (Kalman, 1974; CVTPB-3; CVPD-7). Because of the continuing unease about urban density and congestion in the West End planners were considering lowering densities from three to two FSR in the late 1950'(CVPD-61). However, the resistance of property owners prevented this recommendation from being taken seriously until the early 1970s and even then the maximum floor space ratio was only reduced to an FSR of three rather than two (CVPD-68a). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 188a.
Most of postmodern values which have been mentioned are inscribed in this new type of discretionary zoning that was first permanently established in 1974. Again it is not hard to see how organic rather than functional or abstract notions of space influenced the formulation of the Downtown District Comprehensive Development District that was passed by city council in 1975. Composed of policies, guidelines and character areas, the intention of this new kind of zoning bylaw is stated as follows:
"To improve the general environment of the Downtown District as an attractive place in which to live, work, shop, and visit; to ensure that all buildings and developments meet the highest standards of design and amenity for the benefit of all users of the Downtown; to provided for flexibility and creativity in the preparation of development proposals. to encourage more people to live within the Downtown District; to support the objectives of the GVRD Livable Region Program to decentralize some office employment to other parts of Greater Vancouver by discouraging office developments considered inappropriate in the Downtown District; to improve transportation Downtown by encouraging greater transit usage, discouraging automobile usage for journeys to work, and by maintaining automobile access for non-work trips including shopping, business, and entertainment (CVPD-45).'
As stated earlier, of the seven comprehensive districts that were created this was the only district that directly bears the mark of the second phase in the postmodern evolution of the city. By contrast, the others were firmly anchored in the vision of the livable city.
However, even before the institution of postmodern forms of regulation the densification process was exerting pressure for the generation of more complex zoning systems that could deal with design as well as safety issues (PI-13). The legal framework for taking on this task already existed in latent form within Zoning and Development Bylaw # 3575, which was passed in 1956, that was to guide and set the parameters for modern zoning but also a number of discretionary powers that would later evolve and mutate into the postmodern zoning regime that governs the City of Vancouver today (CVPD-1). This bylaw took its cue from British rather than American zoning practices. Consequently it was more powerful and sophisticated than most of its American counterparts. For the reason it was able to serve as a legal framework that could modified according to the outward diffusion of the densification process and then later altered to meet the demands of postmodern regulation. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 186.
This even happened to non residential zones, as densification and postmodern conceptualizations of space lead to the creation of new industrial districts. Hence, like every other zoning category affected by densification, the number of industrial zones increased in number, growing from 4 in 1980 to 9 in 1994 (CVPD-59a; CVPD-135a).
For instance, the first CD-1 zoning regime was created in 1956 to accommodate the development of Oakridge Shopping Centre. Except, as densification began to gather steam the number of CD-1 districts exploded. Rather than being used to develop comprehensive suburban sites this zoning was used to densify already built up areas of the city.
A strong correlation between the growth of CD-1 zoning districts and the progression of the densification process is therefore possible to trace by looking at where they appeared and the number of districts that were created. For example, before there was a shift in investment patterns, when the city was dominated by land extensive development patterns, only 12 CD-1 districts were set up between 1956 and 1960. However, as investment began to shift from a land extensive to land intensive mode of development the number of CD-1 districts started to rise dramatically. Instead of just 12 districts, between 1960 and 1965 to 60 CD-1 districts were created. Consequently, by 1965 there were 72 such districts in the city. This number would rise to 90 by 1974. As the densification process intensified during the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, the cumulative number of CD-1 zones experienced a quantum leap, when the number reached 200 by 1987, before exploding with the extremely intense densification that rolled over Vancouver when the second densification wave swept over the city in the late 1980s , when around 55 CD-1 districts were created between 1988 and 1989 alone. This expansion has continued into the 1990's s when nearly 130 CD-1 districts were created between 1990 and 1995. Consequently, by the Summer of 1995 there were nearly 400 CD-1 districts in the city (CVPD-158a).
Because on line divisions, such as Land Use and Development, are more dominated by technicians who administer the zoning that the professionals in the policy division formulate, interviews with planners from all the division in the Department revealed that there was on going tension between the policy and administration organs of the Planning Department that was being exacerbated by the broadening of discretionary planning. With the policy divisions more inclined to create more complex and discretionary formats for regulation in order to meet the public demand for more subtle and intricate ways of controlling land use as redevelopment pressures increased with the diffusion of the densification process into the suburban parts of the city, the Land Use and Development Division appears to have been increasingly resisting the further extension of this zoning because of the difficulty in administering it, as well as the time and cost involved. Also, it is the Land Use and Zoning Division and not the other policy divisions that usually had to bear the public wrath that arose out of the everyday fine tuning and administration of this zoning (PI-2; PI-7; PI-13; PI-33; PI-42).
Statistics taken from City of Vancouver web site January 22nd, 1997 - budgets for the other divisions were CityPlans 12% of budget at $1.076, Planning Resources at $2.1-million or 22% of the budget, Community Planning at $1.3-million or 13.5% of the department's budget and Central Area at $!.3-million - as well 146.5 positions were officially recorded in the department (www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/cityclerk/info_desl_/planning).
In Vancouver this can be seen in new programs such as the Safer City Task force. For the first time gender relations were given a formal space in local planning discourse, as the creation of safe environments, particularly for women, becomes a concern that was now incorporated into the way that space was programmed by planners in Vancouver. The concern with safe spaces also sheds light on the sociological dimension of the postmodern transformation of space. For, as Elizabeth Wilson had shown, modernism was essentially a patriarchal spatial ideology that limited the freedom of women to use space in the city. However, with initiatives like the Safer City Task Force, for the first time an attempt was made to frame the regulation and formatting of urban space around the needs of women(CVCO-34a). In this regard, the City of Vancouver is following a lead set by the City of Toronto (1988) and what feminist planners have accomplished there (Weir,1989). Also see SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 188.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 204.
For example in one of the studies connected with CityPLan, conducted by the Social Planning Department, called the Ready or Not program, aging was dealt with and one conclusion arrived at was that from internal demographic generators alone significant densification could be expected. Also see SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 205a.
Alternative conference July 1988, York University.
This coercion worked on different levels but had as its goal the movement of women out of the labour force and out of the city, for that matter, and into the suburbs. In an interview with Rennie Jenson (PI-10), a long time activist in the West End, in 1994, several remarks were made about the social pressures which were placed on her to leave the West End and move to the suburbs to raise her family. She also commented on how difficult it was for women to keep working after the war, confirming by personal experience, in the case of Vancouver, what researcher such as Dolores Hyden found to be the case in the United States after the war (Also refer to Johnson 1995; Ursel 1996; Baker 1995; Greed 1994; Rose 1993 Che-Alford 1994).
Note even as late as 1941 only 4.5 percent of women were gainfully employed in the work force. See Maureen Baker, Canadian Family Policies, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995, p.52.
Baker (1995) pp.52-3.
The rate in 1951 was 27.2 in 1951; 16.8 in 1971 and 15.3 in 1981. See Baker (1995) p.46
declining from 37. 6 per 100,000 population to 36, in 1961 Baker (1995) p.58
Baker (1995) p. 58
Baker (1995) p.50 and Pina La Novara, "Changes in Family Living," in Canadian Social Trends, Summer, 1993.
Baker (1995) pp. 62-3.
Projections for Greater Vancouver show that the number of seniors will grow to 14 percent by 2011. See Baker (1995) p.51 and Population Dynamics in Canada, Focus On Canada, P. l16 as well as projections for seniors supplied by David Baxter entitled Population And Housing in Metropolitan Vancouver Changing Patterns Of Demographics And Demand, 1989, where the number of seniors is projected to climb from 192,573 to 267,919 by 2011 (p.71).
See Figure one in Deryck Holdsworth and Glenda Laws, "Landscapes of Old Age In Coastal British Columbia," Canadian Geographer, Vol. 38, No. 2, 1994.
Also, with this aging population and the growth of non traditional families the pressure to reformat the suburbs can only be expected to increase as postmodern social formations associated with non family and non traditional families become increasingly salient features of the social spaces of the city, further undermining the grand vision of a social world organized around the nuclear family. In Greater Vancouver this should become most obvious in the third settlement zone (Greed 1994; Strange 1995).
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 205.
For Zorbaugh and Wirth, the position taken towards ethnic and urban sub cultures was one of condescension. In their descriptions of these social formations it is possible to see their disquiet about non middle class social formations that existed outside the domestic order of the suburbs that they were champions for. The emphasis placed on the suppression and assimilation of social differences was expressed in the typology of the social geography of the modern city that other Chicago School theorists constructed: one that became most visibly expressed in the implicit opposition between the suburb and the city that was articulated by these theorists - with all that was perceived to be abnormal described as being an urban traits, while everything that was put forward as being normal was cast into a geographic mold that stated that this was a suburban characteristic. Also refer to SNC, Chpt. 4, Note 206.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 222a.
While a residential ghetto took shape with the mass migration of gay men into the West End during mid 70s it wasn't until the early 1980s that a retail strip specializing in serving this sexual sub-culture arose along a three block stretch of Davie Street between Burrard and Bute Streets. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 208.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 224.
Moreso than in the United States, these corporations became the scourge of urban reformers while the State was perceived more as an ally, with much of the urban reform literature of the 1970's focussed on the employment of state power to curb the monopoly position which private corporations were believed to have, while in the United States, it was the state as much as it was the large private corporation that was put under critical scrutiny. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 225.
Thus, between 1961 and 1971 apartment units rose from 23 percent of all new housing starts to 46 percent in 1966. In 1969 they peaked, accounting for 51 percent of all housing units constructed, as the production of new apartment units rose from 26,825 units a year in 1961 to 98,932 in 1969, dramatically altering the composition of Canada's housing stock (Skaburskis 1993). This began in Canada largest cities before trickling down to smaller cities. While apartment development had started to become a noticeable feature in Toronto in the late 1950s this would not happen in medium sized cities until the mid 60s and small centres until the early 70s.
The first wave of densification clearly had the most impact on Toronto, as Coleman's comparisons illustrated (Table 1, p. 50). For example in 1965 apartment units only accounted for 8.2 percent of all new housing units in urban centres with under 5,000 and 23.5 percent in places that had more than 5,000 but less than 100,000. For metropolitan areas this rose to 44.7 percent of new starts compared to almost 61 percent for Toronto. See Alice Coleman, The Planning Challenge of the Ottawa Area, Geographical Paper No. 42, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Ottawa, 1969.
The first wave of densification can therefore be tracked by the rapid ascent of apartment units. Thus while the percentage of new apartment units moved from 29 to 50 percent of all housing starts for the country as whole between 1960 and 1965, in non metropolitan areas the percentage only rose to 8.5 of all starts for places under 5,000, 23. 5 percent for places which had a population between 5,000 and around 100,000. However even by 1960 the densification of Toronto was already well advanced with 60 percent of all new units under construction made up of apartments. This rose to 72 percent by 1965. Meanwhile, in mid sized cities the densification process started out from a lower base. For example in 1960 only about 30 percent of all new units consisted of apartments. This soon changed, as the level of apartment construction in medium sized cities started to catch up with cities like Toronto by the mid 60s as the level of apartment construction moved up to around 60 percent of all housing starts (Coleman 1969,p.50).
Similarly in Greater Vancouver, for instance, the number of apartment households nearly tripled between 1961 and 1971. As the number of apartment units added each year rose from 36,380 to 100,990, with some inner suburbs like Burnaby experiencing a four fold increase in new apartment construction, as the percentage of apartment households in the region increased from 15 percent of the entire housing inventory in 1961 to 29 percent in 1971. Also see SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 211.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 227.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, NOte 228.
As congestion started to be seen in a more positive light, with eyes on the street touted as the new way for creating safer urban environments all facets of the regulation of the city were changing (Whitzman 1988). Here, Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, can be identified as one of the other inaugural texts which helped to launch the postmodern discourse on density that took hold in the 1970s.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 215.
Just as with the philosophic and sociological dimensions of the postmodern regulation of the city, the postmodern aesthetic did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Here as well, the characteristic that defines this aesthetic regulation can be found distilled in formal intellectual discourse, a discourse, which like the others, provided a further point of departure for the aesthetic evolution of the city. While the early work of Kevin Lynch can be seen an augury of this perspective on space, it isn't until the publication The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, that characteristics which set postmodern apart from modern perspectives becomes distilled into a formal critique of how modernism organizes space. While a critique of modern aesthetics is certainly implied in the phenomenological perspective taken on urban space in the Image of the City by Lynch, it is only with Jacobs that an alternative postmodern code for the organization of the city is clearly enunciated. As Jane Jacobs states:

This book is an attack on city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, as attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding. (Jacobs 1961,p.3)

Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 216.
When a modernist perspective dominated consumer perspectives social distinction and respectability was secured by the traditional Caucasian middle class when they settled in the suburbs. During the postmodern period this would change as settlement in the inner city became the mark of distinction for the new middle class. Conversely, living in the suburbs increasingly came to be viewed as a sign of social inadequacy. This, of course, is the opposite of the modern period when, except for a small social stratum at the top of the social hierarchy, settlement in the inner city was regarded as sign of low social status. Except for a few elite neighbourhoods, like Rosedale, in Toronto, respectability was only maintained by having it framed as something which was part of a transitional period in life cycle of the middle class life cycle: when they were either attending university or during the brief periods when they were allowed to be free before marriage and the raising of a family. Other than this the maintenance of respectability usually entailed moving to the suburbs rather than remaining in the city if social status was to be maintained.
Peer group pressure to live in the inner city therefore changes. Instead of the suburbs being seen as a sign of success, as would still be the case for the working class, for many members of the new middle class living in the inner city or exurbia became obligatory (PI-10; Swiggum,1996; VS-131)
A good recent example of this is contained in a short article written in the Ottawa Journal by Linda Hoad July 9,1997 entitled "Le Breton plan must keep downtown livable." The basic point this activist makes is that engineering standards for the suburbs can not be applied to this inner city if it is to be livable. She takes due note of the recent amendments to the official plan for Le Breton, remarking that six lane roads have been reduced to four and configured to be useful to people using bikes. She also comments that the regional body almost succumbed to the engineers and their tunnelled visioned mentality which was focussed solely on moving cars. As the example of the engineers illustrates space was also most reduced to an abstraction and simply conceived in terms of a barrier, which produced friction. Rather than being concerned with place making, space was a field of resistance that needed to be pulverized into its simplest components so as to allow the barrier to movement to be overcome
The freeway plan for the 20-year development plan was laid out in a transportation plan. Called A Study on Highway Planning, this study was completed in 1959 (CVTPB-4). Even though this was the last of the triad of studies that made up the 20-year development plan to modernize the city, this was the program that ultimately became the lynch pin around which the other two plans revolved. For without the freeway the strategy to create an intensive node of development in the downtown and the redevelopment of the lands in the zone of transition around the downtown would have had to be rethought.
The contradictory objectives that were established with the plan to construct a freeway system that promoted land-extensive development while also attempting to concentrate development and redevelopment in the downtown comes through when the reports states that: "While freeways are designed primarily to meet a traffic demand caused by a general pattern of land development, they also have very great secondary effects on land development itself, which are as far reaching as the primary reason for their construction. They will cause an immediate acceleration in the process of decentralization. This will result from the fact that a much larger land area will be brought within commuting range than exists today . . With the recommended network . . . a total of 200 square miles would be with in 30 minutes driving time of the Central Business District, by comparison with only 110 miles today (CVTPB-4)" Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 220.
This changes with the turn to postmodern aesthetics. No doubt one of the most obvious contrasts would be the construction of new spaces such as the Woonerf, which the Dutch have created, in the case of Vancouver, greenways, which is a North American version of the Woonerf. Also new methods for regulating the automobile and the pedestrianization of urban space, which did not exist in the 1950s, such as traffic calming, have appeared (Tolley 1990). Compared to the futurist obsession with speed and the organization of space towards a machine scale that facilitated this, the traffic calming measures that are observable in spaces like the Woonerf reveal a contrasting opposite approach to the organization of space. For unlike modernism, where the experience of space is largely mediated by technology, with the introduction of postmodern aesthetics, machine space if forced to give way to a new humanism which makes the pedestrian rather than the car the basis for organizing and experiencing space, creating a pretext and logic for downscaling , which created the conditions for the creation of more human scales and finely textured environments that were also more organic.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 222.
Yet, another notable effort to organize urban space around the pedestrian occurred with the redevelopment of South Shore of False Creek and Granville Island. Of interest here was the use of Christopher Alexander's pattern language. This was significant because of all the postmodern theorists of space probably no one else is so closely associated with the formulation of an organic theory of space and in Vancouver it is possible to see how these ideas were actually translated into real spaces when the South Shore of False Creek was redeveloped (Rodgers 1976).
Unlike the Sutton Brown period, when the Planning Department was the major sponsor of for the freeway strategy, with transit, in the Spaxman period, planners played a secondary role. Although they participated in the formulation and implementation of this plan their status was that of junior partners. What was also different from the Sutton Brown period, was that the province and the Greater Vancouver Regional District were the key players rather than the City of Vancouver, the exact reverse situation for the freeway plan. So even while a more proactive approach to transportation began to take shape in the later part of the 1980s, the Planning Department still operated mostly in a reactive fashion to events because of this political alignment. The only significant difference was that unlike the 1970s, mitigation of the negative externalities created by the car were the main focus of the Department, in the 1980s the Planning Department began to deal at greater length with the impact of new transit lines and on this issue some fierce battles over transit alignments would be fought over between the city and the province (CVPD-74, Introduction, Chapter One).
And in fact this happened to one block.
Here, not surprisingly, the Local Area Planning Division was called upon to act as a trouble shooter in this process (CVPD-74, Chapter One). In the 1980s it was therefore given the responsibility for developing local plans for affected areas within a ten minute walk from each of the proposed transit stations. More than just mitigating the negative externalities created by the rapid transit line was involved in this work. Securing more density was also made part of the mandate of the local area planning process (PI-27; CVPD-74,p.6). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 226.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 227.
Furthermore, there are active plans to continue and extend the transit option initiated by the Kelly Report. At the present moment Vancouver remains the only major city in the country where large scale plans to augment the existing transit infrastructure are still being actively pursued. For example in Transport 2021 Report released by the Greater Vancouver Regional District (1983b) the projection set for the plan is that the current rapid transit system will expand to 99 kilometers. More significant is the capital works program of B.C. Transit, where expenditures of $2-billion, or 200 million a year, are projected to be spent in the next ten years, with the greater part of this sum to be spent in the Vancouver area (CVC)-36; B.C. Transit 1995). However, this process may now change as the province announced that is was devolving transportation to the regional district in the Fall of 1997 (See VS-384).
If many citizens still harbour suspicions about the Engineering Department's commitment to the organization of urban space around the needs of pedestrian rather than the automobile. Also, because of the organization culture of Engineering, other concerns raised have to do with the capacity of the Engineering Department to handle the implementation of postmodern programs for the reorganization of space, like traffic calming, greenways, design initiatives involving bicycles. At the philosophic level modern protocols still appear to colour the decision making process. Consequently, monological rather than dialogical approaches to problem solving still appear to predominate as does the aesthetic bias to machine space.
For example in the report on the Bicycle Advisory Committee (CV-30) for the period 1994 and 1996 the following accomplishments were cited: the Bikeways programs (with the creation of the Off Broadway Bikeway in 1994; the Ontario Bikeway in 1995 and the Cypress Bikeway in 1996) as well as the adoption of Bicycle Parking Standards in 1994
Up to the recent present, the provision for transit has been the responsibility of BC. Transit, a provincial crown corporation
Again, the other interesting things to note about this shift is the impact that this may have had on the Engineering Department- since it is the last regulatory bastion of modernism within the local state. Albeit, with some resistance, these new policy directions appear to be forcing the Engineering Department to deal with space in a different way.
Belatedly, City Council directives may finally be bringing about the partial greening of the Engineering Department. In such areas like the Street Activities Programs, which is administered by the Projects Department of the Engineering Departments, engineers being forced to become involved with the promotion of pedestrian spaces rather than the needs of the automobile. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 263.
The Landscape and Atmospheric Task Forces have provided a program and pretext for the exploration of different options that had since become available for traffic calming, which the Engineering Department has begun to experiment with, reinvigorating and extending the design and land use component of transportation planning, that were first started(CVCO-29) when the West End Traffic Plan of the 1970s and 1980s (VS-62; VS-75; CVPD-68a) were put into effect
Furthermore, with the recent active promotion of non transit elements, as part of an alternative transportation system, which included bicycles, for room has been given to the city to become more actively involved in the redesign of its transportation system. By focussing upon these non motorized facets of transit the City has the fiscal and regulatory means to chart an active and independent course for itself with regard to transportation policy. This first began in 1982 when the Planning Department put a proposal forward for a linear parkway alongside the proposed transit route which was relayed to B.C. Transit and later implemented by the province (CVPD-75, Chapter One). Other signs of greater involvement came with redesigning space around the new Skytrain line
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 234.
To this end three important projects were undertaken in the core area. The most important project was probably the creation of traffic diverters and barriers into the West End (CVPD-68a). The second major endeavour undertaken in order to reformat urban space took place in the downtown where Granville Street was turned into a transit mall (Lauber 1975). The third project took place in South False Creek where deliberate plans were made to circumscribe the access of the automobile to this redevelopment site (CVPD-29).
Not only is the rift apparent within the bureaucracy it also emerges within the ruling NPA itself with the anti-car faction losing on the issue of left bays by a vote 6-4 against when Councillor Alan Herbert's motion to deal with left turn bay at the corner of Cornwall and Burrard. His other supporters were Price, Chiavario and Sullivan. Again like all plans what this reveals is that not only is it a struggle to have plans passed; it is just as much a struggle, if not more so, to have them executed according to plan.
Addendum: Another example of the work of the pro-transit and anti car lobby on Council is a recent proposal by Councillor. Herbert to have money diverted from the proposed Bentall 5 project towards a tram way going around False Creek into the downtown as the developer only wants to build 739 spaces while the Planning Department is requesting 932. Herbert states with the half million the city could gain from this reduction, a downpayment on this transit plan could be made (See Appelbe 1997d).
How the Transportation Plan is implemented remains to be determined, but it is significant that two strong advocates of alternative transportation were elected with the ruling NPA slate in the 1996 election and that the Transportation and Traffic Committee was made a committee of all members, signifying greater political interest in implementing parts of the transportation plan have been strengthened (Gudrun1997).
Interestingly enough the postmodern credentials of both these candidates (Price and Hebert) are further enhanced by their status as gay men with one being a noted activist and organizer.
The interiorization of the urban street or its malling was the way modern regulation hoped to deal with retailing (Holtson 1989). As already pointed out, this involved more than the physical organization of space. More than this, the interiorization of the street gave control of retail space completely over bureaucratic rule by either the state or the large development or management corporation, subordinating if not eliminating physical space occupied and controlled by small capital and the petite bourgeoisie. Like the street, during the modern era the petite bourgeoisie was often regarded as obsolete relic of a previous age rather than as dynamic agents who were capable of sparking new capital investment in the city. That is why the opposition between street and the highway becomes such an important signature for the beginning of the postmodern transformation of the city. Confounding planners the robust return to life of the street directly challenged the confident modernist proclamation advanced by Corbusier (Conrads 1970) that "the street is dead."
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 239.
In the West End of Vancouver this can be illustrated by looking at what has happened to all the mass marketing retail units in the area. Either they have had to reformat their physical design and approach to retailing; and by doing so emphasize the socialization aspect of shopping or they have gone out of business. In their place tourist or specialized retail and service establishments have appeared, making the retail geography of theWest End one defined by niche markets rather than the mass market. One of the best recent examples of this change is Delaney's coffee House, which took over the lease held by A&W that wasn't doing so well (See Hulsman 1997). In such a high density area this franchise should have flourished like its counterparts in the much lower density suburbs but precisely because of the development of new postmodern consumer culture it failed. Ironically, enough, since then it has become a popular place for gay men to socialize.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 241.
But for reasons having to do with necessity rather than changing consumer tastes other social groups lower down in the social scale have also moved to the street. And this has complicated the reconquest of the street by the new middle class and capital. While the street had become an important social space for the new middle class, at the same time, it was becoming the refuge of last resort for those who no longer had access to inexpensive housing because of the urban redevelopment and gentrification sparked by the movement of the middle class back into previously marginalized areas of the Core. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 273.
While the revival of the street can be interpreted as a symbol of the middle class independence from large capital this anti-corporatist bias does not mean that the middle class was opposed to the market. In fact the revival of the street shows that the opposite was the case. To a certain extent, the clash between the street and the highway was just one facet of a more extensive struggle that was being waged between bureaucratic and entrepreneurial capital, small capital versus larger capital, that would appear in the struggle over the configuration of space.
So the struggle between the street and the highway has as much to do with class and emergence of two conflicting consumer cultures as it does with the question of physical scale. For the petite bourgeoisie the street is its natural domain in the city. To preserve the street was therefore tantamount to preserving a space for itself in the city, a place outside the confines of administered capitalism symbolized by its subordination in the shopping mall or in other venues for which symbolized its subordination to mass culture such as highway oriented strip development where it held more autonomy than in the shopping mall, but was still constrained.
However with the generalized spread of this aesthetic and the rise of market rule the previous antimony between large and small capital represented in the dichotomy between the street and the highway has softened. As this petite bourgeoisie format for organizing consumer space has become more popular large capital has attempted to exploit this format. Here the developments sponsored by the Rouse corporation in the United States would be the most notable examples (Goss 1996): as large development corporations are trying to mimic the random play and chaos created by the laissez faire market conditions of the great boulevard streets and markets of the 19th-century city in order to create new entertainment based retail venues for the city, something that has become much more common during the era of the urban spectacle (ie.Pacelle 1996; G/M 1997cm).
This change in consumption and the use of space even shows up the domestic geography of Hollywood sitcoms that were situated in large cities. Unlike the sitcoms that ran through the 1950s into the 1970s, such as I Love Lucy or the Honeymooners, where the living room or the kitchen acted as an important backdrop for each episode in the daily lives of the characters, this changes in the 1980s. With sitcoms such as Cheers, most of the action takes place outside the work place and is set public spaces like a bar rather than in a living room or kitchen. Also the profile of the street rises as an important social space for the urban middle class to meet as artistic modes of consumption find more acceptance and came into greater vogue.
Most often this has happened in gentrifying areas of the city. However these struggles can break out on greenfield sites such as with Vancouver's mega projects, as the recent struggle between the Planning Department and Concord Pacific over whether to concentrate retail development in a development known as Quayside illustrates (VS-101). In this instance Concord Pacific was successful in having city council override the recommendations of the Planning Department, allowing the developer to concentrate retail space in a mall rather than along a street front (VS-101; CVPD-163).
Similarly a strong reaction developed when Macdonalds opened an outlet on Commercial Drive. Another interesting aspect of many of these streets is the formation of co-operative retail outlets during the 1970s. On Commercial Drive, according to Mary Frances Hill, La Quena, would be one example. Also many of the Italian restaurants have been complemented by Central American restaurants which the Drive has become the central social space for this community (Hill 1997c).
See Monique Beaudin and Alexander Norris, "Panel rejects plan to expand Park Ave. gas bar," in the Montreal Gazette, September 6,1996.
The same thing has happened in smaller cities, as can be seen in the controversy over Ottawa's Byward Market (Hum 1995; Prentice,1995).
Again in Vancouver, the battle for the street between the new middle class and corporate capital was one reason why a second review of local area planning was conducted in West End in 1985. (Rowland 1985). As one city councillor remarked (PI-17), it was the outcry that resulted from the demolition of several independent businesses along Denman Street by a large corporation so that a fast food restaurant could be constructed, which sparked a second local area planning exercise in the West End. This, in turn, resulted in the creation of a new zoning bylaw to control the corporatization of retail streets in the West End (CVPD-69), according to Gordon Price, a city councillor, during an interview held in 1994 (PI-17).
Actually the first seeds of this turn around were planted as early as 1965, when the first spokesmen for a plan to transform False Creel appeared on City Council and in academia. Here two people stand out: Walter Hardwick (PI-9)- then an academic at UBC and Bob Williams (PI-25) - former planner and City Council member. During the mid 60s both introduced the idea of doing something with the False Creek lands, releasing the first salvoes in a decade long struggle with the proponents of industry to transform this space. While modernists favoured the retention of this industrial land the emerging ideologues of the new middle class were beginning to articulate an alternative, postmodern vision, for this land, starting the process of reconceptualization this space as a place of consumption and possible residential settlement which would result in the creation of South False Creek a decade later and begin the process of transformation which would see an even larger area transformed into a Zone of Middle Class Resettlement. Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 248.
Indeed, albeit with some revisions perhaps, this mind set still appears to remain intact among the middle class fraction that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. In a recent survey of Canadians born between the mid 60s and the late 70s - an era of high under and unemployment - results quite different from the American stereotype of the Generation X generation were found. This group numbers 7 million or 26% of the population and earns on average income of $29,000. They buy more CD's, clothing, health and exercise equipment, beer, cola, fast food than baby boomers. They range in age from 18 to 36. Education is important and of all the fields they most desire to be in it is one which allows them to be an entrepreneur. Unlike the Hollywood, typecasting, except for their greater business orientation, they are much like their parents. In spite of uncertainty and harder times there is a general optimism according to a poll of 598 people in this category by Angus Reid, They therefore carry on many of the postmodern values of their parents but with some of the modifications seen in the second phase of its evolution, that is according to the values that have become more prominent during the age of the urban spectacle (VS-203).
Again, here one only has to look at Pop Art and Andy Wharhol to see how this has become so.
Also look at - VS-89b; VS-89bb; VS-107; VS-155; VS-158; VS-158a, VS-164; VS-166; VS-167; CVPD-134; CVPD-149.
Furthermore, If the prediction of a report written by Harris Hudema Consulting group for the Downtown Business Association is correct this pressure will intensify as a shortfall of 2.8-million square feet in commercial is predicted over the next 24 years. Since a 20 year inventory appears to be regarded as a norm a drop down to a 10 year inventory is predicted to cause land prices to skyrocket. The Report estimates that there is only a supply base of 11.6-million square feet by 2021- yet there is expected to be a demand for 10-million square feet for new office space and 4.4-million square feet for retail and hotel - leaving a 2.8-million square foot shortfall (See Derek McNaughton,"Crunch Coming," in Business in Vancouver, June 2,1997.
Thus, developments like Granville Market (Gourely 1988), The Forks in Winnipeg (Roberts 1991; Gerecke and Reid 1992) or Harbourfront in Toronto (Reid 1986) are developments that are entirely unique to the postmodern era, creating a new kind of hybrid urban space which only first appears in a recognizable form in the mid 1960s.
In this way Ghiradelli Square was a forerunner of what was to follow. It symbolized the shift away from futurism to the historicism and the growing importance of tourism and the economy of the urban spectacle associated with this.
For Vancouver and Toronto the attempt to preserve the physical shell of industrial buildings while transforming their function surfaces in new zoning bylaws adopted in each city. In Vancouver this started over 25 years ago when historic zones were put in place for Gastown and Chinatown in 1971 (CVPD-45a) and later for Yaletown, in the late 70s (CVPD-47). In Toronto, the same tendency has emerged, as can be seen by the recent adoption of new zoning bylaws for two warehouse districts situated on either side the downtown around Parliament and King Streets and King And Spadina Avenue. In these districts new kinds of zoning codes have been brought in to encourage the redevelopment and reuse of derelict or under used industrial space. In both cities these are the place where the economy of the urban spectacle that is taking hold. For example look at the plan for Yaletown (CVPD-48; VS-179) in the case of Vancouver. With regard to Toronto see King-Spadina Official Plan Part Two- City of Toronto Planning and Development Department, January 1996 and King -Parliament Official Plan, City of Toronto, Planning and Development, January 1996
In Vancouver this would first become evident in the preservation of Gastown, The Warehouse District in Winnipeg and the rehabilitation of Yorkville in Toronto (Jennings 1997). A second stage for this would appear later, with the development of festival markets, which Granville Market, in Vancouver, provided the first model in Canada. It was to be followed by similar developments in Saint John, Halifax, The Forks, in Winnipeg, Montreal and a recent development in Calgary.
Planners in Toronto were concerned about preserving some of this industrial base in the 1980's. As a result zoning was put in place to preserve industrial uses in the core. However with the great recession of 1989 this policy was re-evaluated and the zoning has since been changed to nurture the economy of the urban spectacle.
In Toronto, as in Vancouver, inroads into the industrial sector have provoked some concern (Barber 1996) but this issue has become more central in Vancouver because the densification process has become so extensive and intense.
for example in places such as Steveston in Richmond (VS-135); the waterfront area of New Westminister (1996) and the City of North Vancouver (1992). Even away from the shoreline, for instance, in Burnaby, most of the densification is now occurring on former industrial land.
Although this has started to happen in the inner city of Toronto, unlike Vancouver it has not yet spread into the vast zone of abandoned industrial lands that were built in the 1950s. which ring the core, in the inner suburbs.
This factor has to do with the changing occupational profile for the middle class that resulted from the shift from Fordism to Postfordism. Particularly in the new sectors of the information and entertainment economies the shift to non bureaucratic formats for the organization of work and the production and consumption of goods and services have probably had a profound impact on the creation the background context that supported the artisan values associated with these new physical spaces that were created to house these activities, making them more relevant to this class than would have other wise have been the case had this shift not taken place. (Scott,1996; Phillips,1986; Bourdieu, 1984). Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 258.
As late as 1969 Time magazine could only reluctantly note that with "the national climate of openness about sex of all kinds and the spirit of protest" was allowing" male and female inverts" to organize and become visible " and then remark about the homosexual subculture as one which was only prominent in the arts but elsewhere was "a semi-public worked that was "shallow and unstable" (Time 1969).
However by the early 1980s there was a radical change in perspective that can be gauged by looking at the contrasting coverage given the gay consumer market in The Economist Business Brief in 1982, where the gay market is singled out as a very promising market that offered great riches to those who were willing to exploit it. By the 1990s this recognition would even penetrate into local business publications such as Business in Vancouver where the gay market was beginning to be recognized as an important niche market for business to exploit (Wong 1995). With this development, not only has this sub culture become one of the cornerstones of the of the social transformation of the city, the normalization of this sub culture has also brought its intense commodification as well (Lukenbill 1995), which has made the gay market the vanguard for new modes of consumption that would become representative of the new consumer culture of the new middle class. To see this difference it is only necessary to compare the 1969 description of gay consumer culture with that set that out by Kurt Anderson in an article in Time Magazine during 1984 when he remarked that:

In such a city, thick with gays and yuppies (San Francisco), the similarity between those two demographic subsets is striking. An unexpected notion occurs. Yuppies are, in a sense, heterosexual gays. Among middle class people, after all, gay formed the original two income household and were the original gentrifiers, the original body cultists and dapper healthclub devotees, the trendy homemakers, the refined childless world traveller. Yuppies merely appended the term lifestyle and put a conventional sexual spin on things (Anderson 1984)
In a statscan study published in Perspectives on Labour and Income, data from the Labour Force Survey shows that a drop in retirement age in all areas of the country and in all industries between 1976 and 1996, except among the self employed. For example workers who were with a company for 20 years tended to retire 3 years earlier than was the case twenty years ago (See Globe and Mail, "Canadian retiring earlier, p.A7, June 12,1997)
The growing influence of these three consumer groups (Gay, non family, and seniors) should generate a great deal of demand for personalized consumer services and entertainment because of their discretionary income and the leisure time they have to expend. Thus, the seniors population and non familial subcultures should play a growing role in consolidating the new aesthetic regime that first came into existence with the arrival of postmodern consumer patterns during the counter culture (Schachter 1995). To the extent that this proves to be the case, then these groups can also be expected to play a role in making the city a more attractive place to live in than the suburbs, in advancing retailing along the street rather than in the shopping mall as well as giving further impetus to the continued transformation of industrial sites into places of spectacular consumption (Foote 1995). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 261.
Once again the antimony represented by the archetype of the engineer and the artist is relevant to this understanding. Modernism's glorification of the engineer, which was one of the new professions that came into existence during the modern period had strong roots in the working class culture. In fact it served as a ladder of upward mobility for many working class men. And certainly the utilitarian world view projected by engineers seemed to have more in common with the situation faced by the working class than the post materialist sensibility commonly associated with artistic sensibility that has guided a great deal of the consumer culture of the new middle class and urban space that have been generated out of this sensibility. Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 262.
Often as not, the adoption of postmodern codes has as much to do with defensive strategies to hold on to urban space. For example, in both Toronto and Vancouver housing advocates have related how it has been necessary to dress up non profit housing as gentrified dwelling units in order to camouflage the presence of the lower status of the people occupying social housing.
Since Jane Jacobs a second generation of postmodern ideologues has emerged. First there are writers such as Roberta Gratz who are actively involved in promoting the ideas of Jacobs (Gratz 1989; PI-41). Then there are academic who are further developing her insights or using them as a point of departure in the evolving aesthetic discourse that has developed about urban design in both Canada and the United States. As a result there is still a growing and dynamic literature on the street. This can be seen in publications by American such as Allan Jacobs (1993) and William Whyte (1990). In Canada the work of Hok-Lin Leung (1992) and Edmund Fowler (1992) would also be examples of this train of thought.
As stated earlier, while aspects of the utopian vision of middle class life are contained in the second generation postmodern aesthetic that has diffused outwards from the inner city and into the suburbs, its function as an ideological marker for the new middle class has been watered down with this journey from the inner city to the suburbs. With the incorporation of this aesthetic into a larger repertory of signs which capital, and not just the new middle class, now uses to market denser urban landscapes, many popular representation of middle class life in the city have been absorbed into mass culture and taken up by other social groups who are not part of this class but aspire to the status conveyed by embracing some of the physical symbols used by the new middle class. As with most symbols of popular culture, when they are absorbed into mass culture, the symbolism becomes truncated as alien and polyglot associations not originally present in the original representation become incorporated into the hybrid cultural forms that are produced with the displacement of symbolic forms.
Here architecture is no different from music. Nor is urban space immune from the same process. All of this can be illustrated by looking at what happened to popular music forms. The most noteworthy recent case in point of this cultural the purchase by the Bank of Montreal of the right to use the song, The Times They Are A Changing, an arch disestablishmentarian song, Bob Dylan, to sell financial services to the new middle class (Strauss 1996). As with oppositional postmodern landscapes, pop melodies that were once thought to be subversive, have been successfully loosened from their original context and then used by capital to sell a wide variety of commodities, or neutralized so much that they can now even be used as elevator music or as musak in grocery stores.
Here movies like the Handmaiden's Tale that was based upon Margaret Atwood's novel about the reactionary reinstitution of the nuclear family in a deformed form, comes to mind. When looking at the some of the values and aspirations that are beginning to congeal around the new urbanism a parallel between the dysutopian vision of the future sketched out by Margaret Atwood and some of the thinking which stands behind the popularization of some aspects of the new urbanism does not appear to be too far fetched. As with modernism, postmodernism has revealed its utopian and dysutopian face to the city.
Here it is useful to consult with Clement Greenberg's description of Kitsch. Being one of the chief defenders of high modernism, in a 1939 essay on the subject, his description of Kitsch is quite unflattering. To Greenberg, within industrial society, if art is created by the vanguard then Kitsch is something created by the rearguard. It is not something that belongs to art but is something firmly anchored in mass culture. Greenberg felt that this German word adequately described the erstz popular, commercial art consumed by the "proletariat and petty bourgeois," which high culture needed to keep its distance from. As Greenberg states " Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivated this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money - not even their time (Greenberg 1972, p.153)."
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 269.
With the input of a planner who cut his teeth in the Zone of Middle Class Resettlement in the City of Vancouver in the livable city era, development controls were put in place in the City of White Rock which have lead to the creation of a landscape that successfully evokes the milieu of a seaside resort which is not just an illusion but in truly represents a real part of the geography and history of this community (VS-105a). Then there is the redevelopment of downtown Port Coquitlam (1983). Here luck and favourable circumstances created a situation that resulted in a successful experimentation in place making when the city hired a director of planning who was committed to good urban design in the early 1990s - just as the development boom in this city was beginning (PI-30; Taylor,1996). With the support of the mayor and Council the director was able to implement a successful postmodern strategy for the reshaping of downtown Port Coquitlam. In the space of five years the struggling retail sector has been turned around. Usable public spaces have been created. And an urban ambiance has been created which encourages people to treat the downtown as an urban living room. If these favourable developments continue downtown Port Coquitlam may well emerge as the sleeper in the contest to create an authentic urban centres in the suburbs Greater Vancouver. Not designated as a major regional town centre, and with a working class rather than middle class population base, it may well become the first successful town centre. In this case an environment that was the product of accident and coincidence may succeed where the more grandiose attempts to create urban town centres such as Burnaby (Ito,1995; PI-33) Coquitlam (1995) Richmond (1991,1992) and Surrey (1991,1996) may fail, as they are still floundering about in terms of creating livable urban spaces that do not feel contrived or that actually function as urban rather than suburban centres.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 286.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 272.
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 273.
289 Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 289.
The suburban embrace of urbanity not only shows how postmodern aesthetic codes are being used to concentrate capital but also how these representations of the city are being used to alter the social image of suburban spaces. Once again we find that working class symbols are being erased or made invisible in the physical makeover of these suburbs. To see examples of this it is only necessary to look the attempt North York and Surrey have made to cast aside their previous image as low brow commuter suburbs so that professionals will be attracted to the new downtowns they hope to create (Quan January 8,1991).
Moreover, not only are postmodern principles for the re-organization of urban space being applied to the recycling of inner city and older suburban spaces. Most noticeably they have become packaged into a recipe that is now increasingly put to use across the country, but nowhere else, perhaps, as in Toronto (Watson 1997), where this urban region is now reputed by some to be the centre for the new urbanism in North America, with plans for about 20,000 units in the development pipeline at this moment (Watson 1997; 199a). Consequently this form of development may soon house between 60 and 70-thousand people in the Toronto area over the next decade. What is noteworthy about all of this is that postmodern principles are now becoming an integral part of the development of greenfield sites where neo-traditional communities are being constructed on the edge of the built up area of the city, such as in Markham. Here, in neo-traditional developments higher densities are being allowed. For example in Toronto, within convention sub-divisions, usually between eight to ten units per acre are allowed in this area. In current neo-traditional developments 12 units per acre are being allowed and up to 25 units on 13.5 ft. to 22.5 ft. lots through one development called Berczy Village (Warson 1997a). Also refer to SNC, Vol. 2 Chpt. 4, Note 291.
Recently this has even happened in Edmonton where the community of Westmount containing 220 homes, has instituted zoning now common in RS-1 areas of Vancouver.
For example, in the early 1990 The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto released a study entitled Metro Main Streets which examined the feasibility of using existing streets to absorb some of the 300,000 housing units that were being contemplated in a densification strategy for the region. At the same time the City of Toronto incorporated the recycling of streetscapes into its new official plan (but so far little redevelopment has taken place) (City of Toronto September, 1992, p.13.1; Procter 1992; Zeidler 1993).
Formal recognition was made of this potential when a report on a Housing Opportunities strategy was released by the City of Vancouver Planning Department in 1990 (CVPD-95). To increase the housing capacity of the city, one of the four programs listed was a residential street's program. However, even before this report came out, action was being taken when amendments were made to commercial zoning regulations in 1989. These amendments allowed residential development to be more easily incorporated into existing main streets. The expectation was that this measure would add 5,000 more housing units to the city's housing capacity (CVPD-95) Similarly, complementary policies to encourage the densification of the street were reaffirmed when City Council adopted CityPlan in 1995 (CVPD-122; CVPD-141). At first developers were slow to respond to these zoning amendments but this seems to be quickly changing. Unlike Toronto, the booming real estate market of Vancouver has made it easier for developers to grasp the potential for redevelopment along the street, something which has particularly become evident along West Broadway and Fourth Avenue where an entirely new streetscape has been refashioned since the late 1980s. However in Toronto the only significant development to take up the densification of the street is a development called the Beaches which has just begun (The Toronto Star 1997zb).
On a smaller scale this has even become apparent in places like Port Moody. See the new plan for the redevelopment of the City of Port Moody (1996).
Refer to SNC, Vol. 2, Chpt. 4, Note 296.
Currently a proposal is being put forward by Canada Packers to transform 43 acres of industrial land into a residential development with up to 800 units. At first high-rises were proposed but they were adamantly opposed, now a mix of medium and single detached units are proposed plus some commercial space. In one meeting around 200 people showed up, but some council members and the public were leery of the design which basically reserved the river for the residents of apartment units with no linear parkway or pathway along the river proposed for the use of the general public. Since the rezoning of the property would increase its value by $50-million some questioned why some of this windfall could not be put into the preservation of more of the buildings (David Da Silva 1997c).
This established a bias towards medium rise structures that would persist throughout the rest of the 1970s and affect thinking about what was the appropriate scale for residential construction in the core area until the early 1980s, when the Central Area Division began to re-evaluate its position on high rise residential development (CVPD-65; CVPD-80; CVPD-87, PI-1).
Organic conceptualizations of space were initiated in the Social Planning Department rather than the Planning Department. For the first time space was treated as something more than abstract and functional space. With the Halsey and Mayhew Reports (1967) and the arrival of local area planning the layered conceptualization of space that Ian McHarg (1969) developed with his transparencies in Design With Nature would be operationalized into the regulation of space in Vancouver.
Here the process of legitimizing denser development turned urban governance into a form of mass therapy, with the method for achieving consent often mimicking the process of dialogue that ensues between a patient and analyst who are in therapy. When planners attempted to impose densification in mid 1960s this strategy failed miserably because they assumed that this interaction was not necessary; however with the advent of local area planning in the 1970s this changed (VP-3; VS-18; VS-19; CVTPB-10). New methods were needed to accommodate densification and this was what local area planning was to provide, as dialogical rather than monological methods for obtaining consent were honed. For the Planning Department significant victories were obtained by coaxing and massaging the public. By engaging in continual process of dialogue that has familiarized and normalized the idea of denser development, popular resistance to densification was dissipated although never eliminated.