Chautauquas or Confrontations?

City Conversation #29 - 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' in the context of urban planning in Vancouver

Feb 17, 2022

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”—Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—An Inquiry into Values, 1974.

“The Chautauquas…[were] an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply to dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.”—Pirsig, Robert M., ibid.

A short while back, a City Conversations reader remarked that something I’d written reminded them of Robert M. Pirsig’s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read Zen when it was first published in the mid 70s, lost my copy, was flattered at the analogy so put in a request at the local library. Zen finally came through the other day, by luck just after I’d finished a satisfying murder mystery. With my other reading option limited to a deep dive into the 2021 Census, Zen was a welcome alternative. As often happens with me, stepping outside my usual reading comfort zone injected new thoughts into my subconscious, which have come around to fertilize my thinking about the subjects that are essential to the future of this and many other cities.

“‘What’s new?’is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?,’ a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ‘best’ was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”—Pirsig, Robert M., ibid.

Pirsig’s ‘What is best?’ is a recurring City Conversations question, a suitable query for our troubled, confrontational times as it was in Pirsig’s post-Vietnam USA. Clearly, I have an opinion about my city, Vancouver—mine, an increasingly quixotic railing against the idea that rapid, continuous, incessant building will somehow make life more affordable for those seeking their place to call home.

Authorities at the city, regional, provincial and federal levels in Canada are all proclaiming build, build, build! as if it was a moral imperative that will make housing affordable, even without any supporting evidence. It appears the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep (Pirsig). Instead it runs with ever higher buildings over the banks of what was once a livable city. In declaiming the overarching need for urgent urbanization, government is pitting the house-rich against the home-poor, the old-but-cheap rental against the ’20% or less that’s affordable is okay.’ It is creating confrontation instead of conversation, exacerbated by COVID’s permission to control the Q&A, to mute words and choke off the passion that comes with the in-person voice. This in-COVID narrative supports a pre-ordained conclusion that has already procreated an almost 20-year but as yet unseen supply of largely unaffordable housing in the city. An additional 20-year supply is currently in play, meaning it has been tabled, its discussion has been curated to eliminate all counter argument, and it all seems destined to be approved prior to our next civic elections in October 2022.

Why the rush? Almost none of the already-approved 20-year supply has yet been built, largely due to city hall’s byzantine approval processes—citizens will be astounded and some will be appalled when the already-approved rises above the ground. It’s as if city politicians and management are frustrated at their own managerial incompetence, want to make up for it by pushing through two generations of high density, high-rise development before most of us can understand what that means.

And what does it mean? A few examples:

Elevated garden terraces at Commercial and Broadway, at Oakridge and elsewhere that will only be accessible to the wealthy folks who buy their privacy above the street, leaving long-term residents with an impoverished streetscape in the shadows;
Jericho Beach permanently shaded by a 15-storey and higher wealthy housing wall along 4th Avenue;
Fairview Slopes and even False Creek permanently shadowed by tall buildings as much as nine blocks south on Broadway;
Thousands displaced from affordable rentals throughout the city in favour of much smaller, much more expensive homes the evicted will never be able to afford.

Apologists would prefer to focus our attention on what are touted as groundbreaking initiatives, such as:

The creation of 10,000 housing units, mostly small and for sale at high prices, to be achieved by magically placing six units plus parking on lots designed for, at most, two or three;
The creation of less than 5,000 rental apartments over 10 years by rezoning much of the city, a ‘cutting butter with a chainsaw’ approach that ignores the uniqueness of each of the city’s neighbourhoods;
The creation of almost 500 supportive housing units for those with mental health and addiction issues, with half of these listed in city work plans but currently hidden from the city’s only public-facing presence, https://shapeyourcity.ca/ —you can’t shape it if you can’t see it!

Details of these “initiatives” are scant, but independent analysis indicates that, based on land values alone, the large majority of them will be located in the eastern parts of the city, whose residents have been consulted about none of them.

Can we at least talk about this? Can we have neighbourhood meetings as we used to, that are not curated to admit Zoom folks from outside the city, province and country while excluding a proposed project’s neighbours? Can we talk with the acclaimed planning and urban design experts who have spent their professional careers in Vancouver, and still call it home, rather than being lectured to by folks from the US and from eastern Canada, duly introduced as renowned experts, who grace us with their opinions but may have never ever graced us with their presence.

The time is running out for learned conversation, for Chautauquas amongst ourselves instead of confrontations between generations, neighbourhoods and governments. Without civil discourse and discussion, without fact-based consideration of our shared future, we will have no future—at least not here in Vancouver.

The old channels cannot contain [the stream of national consciousness] and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks.

Today’s question: Do you think government can solve our housing affordability challenges? Why or why not? I read and respond to all comments made below.

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Chautauquas or Confrontations?

City Conversation #29 - 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' in the context of urban planning in Vancouver

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