I concluded my last article with Eugene McCann (geography professor at the Simon Fraser University) reproaching Vancouver’s authorities for, sometimes, "selling their project". Here is the second article about Eugene’s paper called "Policy boosterism, policy mobilities and the extrospective city", in which he develops the notion of "boosterism" and explains why Vancouver should lead its Greenest City project in another way. I also interviewed Amanda Mitchell, Greenest City Planning Analyst for the City of Vancouver, on some of these reproaches.

"Greenest City" seems to be a slogan, it’s "sometimes used more as an advertising than as a real project of city" explains Eugene. He estimates that "Green City" would be more like a term for a policy. "Why does it have to be a competition ?" Maybe because, as told me Amanda, many companies seem to come in Vancouver because they "love what Vancouver is doing". Still, Eugene thinks that cooperation would be better than partnerships. He considers that the city really tries to sell something because that’s what like companies. "So it always comes to be "we are the number one" and I’m not sure of the difference it makes in terms of the policy".

But Amanda and Vancouver’s authorities have a different point of view. Vancouver Greenest City is a purposly very ambitious project. "To inspire big change you need a big vision", sustains Amanda. They don’t want to do things just "moderately better than [they]’ve been doing". Amanda completes, smiling, saying that they want to act as if they "aimed the stars, the sun or the moon"...

The C.K. Choi building, for the Institute of Asian Research in UBC (University of British Columbia), was built in 1996. At first, the architects wanted to build it completely made of recycled materials, a completely green building. But UBC’s authorities said "no, impossible". Finally, after many discussions, they said "ok, let’s build a building which will be a little green". And it was 99% made of recycled materials, with a waste water recovery system, composting toilet... It was far more progressive than what they had before. Amanda uses this example to show that thanks to motivation, thanks to very ambitious targets they can make important progresses. "You need that big vision to inspire and motivate people".

Besides, Eugene reminds us that the mayor of Vancouver talks about cooperation with the other green cities, but he cannot avoid the competition that already exists. Yet, at the end of march, representatives of the city of Portland came in Vancouver to share their experience of green city by holding a conference and organizing other workshops (so the competition seems not te be hard). "There is not a formal greenest city competition, and in the same time there is an informal one" explains Amanda. Portland, Chicago or Toronto say it’s the greenest, and many european cities are also better than Vancouver, according to Amanda. "Competitions help people to act". "So ["Greenest City"] is not just a marketing play".

The competition cannot be but informal as there is not a share idea about what "greenest" means. For someones it’s just trees, and Vancouver’s authorities think it’s deeper, it’s building denser neighbourhoods and buildings connected with district energy systems.

"Boosterism"

This neologism invented by Eugene designates "a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally-developed and/or locally-successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields and to broader communities of interested peers". A long definition from which I will retain that boosterism is a small part of city marketing. Most cities are involved in some marketing activities and get involved the key audiences who are potential business investors, certain groups of coveted workers, granting agencies, and tourists. The two main marketing strategies are :
 livability ("our city is a nice place to live") ;
 business opportunities (promoting the low taxes and the good infrastructures).

According to Eugene, all the rankings about the best cities to live in are just about policy. Cities want to talk about being the number one in the world because these discussions are always popular. People will support their city just like they support their sport team.

The Olympic Village

Eugene’s paper is a criticism of this phenomenon of boosterism because he thinks the municipalities spend too much time boosting the city. Maybe they are compelled to do so because they think that it’s the only way to get revenues and then to provide the basic services, by engaging partnerships with the private sector, just like a shop open to every type of business (metaphor used by Eugene). "And I think that’s dangerous, it’s become so normalized in the last few decades that it’s sometimes hard to believe that the cities will really act in partnership with the businesses rather than just selling themselves". What often happens is that the cities sell themselves to provide tax breaks for the new companies, or free lands... "The public sector is assuming a lot of the risks for speculated development", because the city invests public money to attract these companies which may not do well.

Why is the Olympic Village so empty ?

The classic example is the Olympic Village, "it’s a disaster". If it had gone well, the city would have benefit from the sell of the condominiums, but the developpers would have got the majority of the profits of the sales. "The idea was to built an athlete village in False Creek in such a way that it could become residences or condos". Some of it had to be for low-middle class people with rental systems. This was before 2008, and it was going well, with good ideas. "Partly because of the financial crisis, and for other reasons as well, eventually the developers couldn’t make it", they went bankrupt. These developers were using resources and lands given for free by the city because they expected that it would be good for the city thanks to the revenues (new inhabitants, more taxes). The city has now a debt of several million dollars. The Olympic Village is now empty because the prices were set too high. The investors don’t want to invest in buildings in which many technologies (green technologies) have not been proven, they are afraid of the cost it would be to repair a technology if it doesn’t go well. Eugene uses this example to show how a partnership between the city and the private sector can go bad for the tax payers.

Amanda Mitchell admits that "the decision to make heightened condos was not the best decision because they are not selling". She is worried about this case because people will use this case to say "sustainability is a failure, it’s not the good way". Yet, three elements encorage to consider that it’s not such a failure :
 firstly, it’s not a technical failure, new technologies used in the Village work maintains Amanda. Lyn Bartram, researcher and assistant professor in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at SFU and member of the Green Building working group for Vancouver Greenest City, estimates that some of the green building initiatives are "tremendous" : "the heat capture from the wastewater is fantastic. They have problem with the rainwater collection but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it" ;
 secondly, around the Olympic Village, currently, it’s all in construction, so there are no inhabitants. That reinforces the feeling that the Olympic Village is empty. But according to Amanda, "when the rest of the area will be finished, it will be fine" ;
 to finish with a common argument from Amanda and Lyn, "you can learn more from failure than from success". Lyn even says that, as an expert, she knows that "the only way to see if something work is to try it, learn from it and do it better next time."

Then what was the solution to avoid this failure ? Eugene maintains that people who offer these condos are often speculators who don’t plan to live there but just want to make profit on the short-term. So maybe the development of condos in Vancouver should have been for low-middle class people, then neighbourhoods would have been more vibrant. For example, around Stanley Park in west downtown, many condos are completely sold but empty, "it’s dead". It wouldn’t have happened if the city had tried to attract other classes of population. "It seems that these places have to be the most oppulent possible". Yet, Lyn Bartram mentions the amazing job the city did in the neighbourhoods of west downtown to attract families after getting rid of problems of drugs and prostitution. She believes that it’s one of Vancouver’s "success stories".

I hope you found these two articles about Eugene McCann’s paper interesting as much as I found interesting Eugene’s paper. I will write again about it in the report I will make about my canadian experience (as I did for Finland).

See you soon, Be green, Ben