FREEWAY PRO TUTORIALS YOUTUBE PROFESSIONAL

By 1967, the Chinatown Freeway Debates, as they are commonly known, become weekly events, with 500 to 800 citizens crowding city council meetings protesting the destruction of Strathcona.

FREEWAY PRO TUTORIALS YOUTUBE PROFESSIONAL

Why didn’t these freeway plans materialize as they did in so many other North American cities? The two dominant narratives about why Vancouver did not build the freeway are (1) there was not enough regional planning coordination and resources for a freeway to be built in the metro Vancouver region, and (2) people, through community activism and professional groups, rejected the plan. The reasons for that decision were not due to a lack of money, or austerity measures but because of the sustained efforts of Strathcona residents organizing against urban renewal projects and the transportation projects that ensued from them. In 1971, the federal government stated that money slated for urban redevelopment in British Columbia could not be used for transportation development. Luckily, Project 200 also did not come to fruition.

The plan was to build modern highrise towers and a freeway exit leading commuters straight to parking garages on the waterfront. It included a freeway running along English Bay and through Gastown, Chinatown and Strathcona. The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, built in 1972, are the only completed part of this plan. Around the same time, Project 200, a Vancouver waterfront redevelopment, was introduced. The phenomenon of depopulation and stagnant economies was not as severe in most Canadian cities as in the United States, but Canadian urban planners, politicians and those with economic interests still worried about what might happen to their cities. Vancouver, with a pro-development government at the time, advocated for a large rescaling project based on people driving cars. In 1960, the Vancouver Board of Trade put forward a development plan advocating a 45-mile network of freeways linking the metropolitan region. This narrative of urban decay was often the impetus behind implementing large-scale urban restructuring projects such as highway construction, public housing projects, and modern highrise office buildings. As a result of these large-scale projects, many historic neighbourhoods were destroyed and poor and marginalized communities were displaced. In the 1950s many cities in North America were undergoing urban decay, which was defined by stagnating economies due to deindustrialization, depopulation, changing and racialized populations moving into the urban centres, a wave of immigration to North America, a growing ideology of home ownership and suburbanization, fears of increased crime, and poverty leading to increased instances of ill health, illicit drug use and decreased property values. So how is it that a 50-year-old battle about highways in the city helped to make Vancouver environmentally conscious? How does the city implement sustainability policies? Figure 1.4 The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts Today, the city is exploring options for removing the viaducts completely under the Greenest City Action Plan. It was a defining moment when urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs’ ideas of mixed-use urban spaces populated by socially and culturally diverse communities triumphed over urban planner Robert Moses’s modernist utopia of highways and highrises. Public opposition to the freeway plan is often credited with preserving the city’s historical neighbourhoods such as Gastown, Chinatown and Strathcona. The viaducts are what architect Aldo Rossi calls urban artifacts – public, material structures that have layers of meaning placed on them by people in the city. The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, which connect East Vancouver to the downtown core, are remnants of a failed plan to bring a freeway through the heart of Vancouver in the 1970s. The environmental activist organization Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver, and currently the city is implementing a sustainability framework known as the Greenest City Action Plan. This reputation is built on Vancouver’s history of social and environmental activism on various local and global issues such as migration, economic development and resource extraction. Vancouver has developed a reputation as being a leader in urban sustainable development based on the density of the downtown core, its walkability and the integration of the natural landscape into its neighbourhoods. Case Study 1: The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts Vancouver: The Greenest City?

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