“Efficiency & Joy” in Downtown Vancouver

This is not your father’s Downtown Vancouver Association – assuming your father was an aging businessman who lived in a North Shore suburb and for whom Downtown Vancouver was only a place to work.  And to park.

Founded in 1946, the DVA “dedicated itself to promoting the economic, social and cultural development of Downtown Vancouver.”  Superseded by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, it lost its focus.  Under a new generation of leadership it has tried to reinvent itself to reflect the reality of what is now more broadly known as the Metrocore, covering not just the Downtown Peninsula but also the business and residential districts on the south as well as north sides of False Creek.

This morning at BCIT, it presented the results of the ‘Round-up’ – a conversational quilt conducted over the last half year in a dozen or so workshops, having already identified transportation as key to the future of the core – and the DVA’s relevancy.

Knowing that when the question and funding proposition for the upcoming transportation referendum is announced (likely in mid-December), there will be a ‘fast-brain’ response when citizens across the region consider Who pays for What.  The intent of the Round-up was to ‘slow the brain down,’ and through dialogue connect the importance of transportation to housing, public spaces, neighborhoods, culture, health and the economy – and how that might translate into a vital and vibrant metrocore.

A place, in two key words, that was “efficient and joyful.”

That’s the distillation of all the ideas and propositions – but here, for you policy wonks, are some of the phrases I jotted down:

• Public transit is actually an investment in all modes of travel.
• And all modes must be normalized to create a seamless shift so that car ownership is unnecessary for many.
• Transportation is social policy.
• Transit is a brand – an association with the city.
• There is good congestion and bad congestion.  The accessible city may be a congested place – but it is the body heat of congestion, not of unnecessary delay.
• Goods movement needs the right balance for delivery.
• Good systems are the connective tissue of a successful place.

Those are not phrases that would have emerged from the DVA of decades past, when transportation policy was mainly about how vehicles could get easily in and out of the downtown, and find cheap parking when there.

This transformation of the DVA is the result of a decades-long policy shift and the inarguable benefits that have accrued to this city because it rejected the dominance of the moving vehicle over the creation of great public spaces and livable, dense neighbourhoods.  The old paradigms, based largely on a single-use, suburban perspective, became irrelevant – and the DVA was in danger of the same irrelevance by association.

It seems to have found a new voice, the words to speak and a purpose to mobilize a new membership: to help win a referendum that is essential to a centre that is part of a bigger region – a metrocore.  And that place, in the words with the biggest font and the most appeal, is efficient and joyful.