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Abstract
In 1995 Vancouver City Council approved new policy guidelines for future urban development that departed from the traditional model of suburban growth, instead prioritizing urban intensification. Theoretically guided by the Foucauldian governmentality approach, I argue in this paper that this shift towards intensification can be understood through an analysis of Vancouver’s extensive participatory planning process known as CityPlan. Created as an answer to conflicts around the intensification of historically evolved urban neighbourhoods, CityPlan Vancouver exemplifies a specific form of urban governance that has been understudied in geography and participation research: a governance consisting of conducting the conduct of citizens through participatory processes. The paper examines this “governing through participation” by carrying out a microanalysis of the problematizations, rationalities, and technologies of CityPlan. Such an analysis differs significantly from an evaluation of participatory planning processes against normative ideals, and thus enriches critical research on participation in urban governance.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to those who agreed to be interviewed for this project. I also thank the anonymous referees whose input has been very useful for sharpening the argument. I am very grateful to Johanna Hoerning, Nadine Marquardt, Eugene McCann, Jennifer Robinson, and Elisabeth Waczek for their helpful and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Notes
1. Neighbourhood Centres were a central element of a 1990 “Housing Opportunity Strategy” prepared by city planners, which supported new and diversified housing development as a response to unprecedented demand for housing (Tomalty, Citation1997, pp. 44–45).
2. In local political terms, the profundity of this change is highlighted by the fact that CityPlan was introduced by a Non-Partisan Association (NPA)-dominated council, the NPA being a municipal party which was characterized still in 1980 as displaying “a desire for unlimited commercial and physical growth and development in the city, and no desire at all for citizen participation in civil decision-making” (Tennant, Citation1980; cited in Ley, Citation1994, p. 59, emphasis added).
3. For Blakeley (Citation2010, p. 131), for example, it is especially the Foucauldian understanding of power with its special attention to techniques of consensus and the exercise of power through freedom that captures the nature of current participatory exercises more adequately than other governance analyses. In their analysis of local environmental governance and policies in Portland, Oregon, Rutland and Aylett use the governmentality approach and actor–network theory to examine the ways in which specific forms of knowledge and representation of the environment were created in a way that enabled action and “encourage[d] particular forms of behaviour” (Rutland & Aylett, Citation2008, p. 639), and the processes through which priorities of the municipal government had been translated into goals and ambitions of individuals and groups (p. 642). Examples of empirical urban research in Vancouver using the governmentality approach include McCann (Citation2008), who investigates the role of expertise and mundane practices of contemporary urban government analysing urban policy mobility on the case of Vancouver’s “four pillar” drug strategy. Blomley and Sommers (Citation1999) analyse community participation and conflict in Vancouver revolving around mapping and naming parts of the inner-city.
4. I certainly do not wish this paper to be understood as an argument against densification per se. Not least because I have a European planning background, without doubt I see the need for turning away from the suburbanization development pattern characteristic in Canada as in other places for many decades, and the need for a more compact—but not necessarily high density—city development. The focus of this paper is, however, on the process of participation.
5. An exception is the work by Mitchell (Citation1993, Citation1996, Citation1997, Citation2001) that focuses on social and urban form transformations of Vancouver’s affluent single-family areas which resulted from increasing international investment and migration.
6. Future (1) a City of Neighbourhood Centres, (2) a City of Mixed Residential and Main Street Neighbourhoods, (3) The Central City and (4) The Traditional City.
7. Strengthen Neighbourhood Centres; Improve safety and better target community services; Reduce reliance on the car; Improve the environment; Increase the variety and affordability of housing; Define neighbourhood character; Diversify parks and public places; Involve people and redirect resources (City of Vancouver, Citation2003).
8. My data result from 12 months of fieldwork in Vancouver in 2007/08 and consist of primary documents as well as secondary sources. These data are supplemented by in-depth interviews with key interviewees, who were central to the City Planning process, especially the two co-directors of planning, two other senior planning staff, and two former councillors. The research also involved 18 interviews with participating residents. I conducted these interviews, transcribed and coded them with the help of qualitative data analysis software.
9. For another approach based on hegemony theory by Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe, see Purcell (Citation2009); for further suggestions see Huxley and Yiftachel (Citation2000).
10. Importantly, the inaccurate interpretation of governmentality as a particular “mentality” of government as suggested in some of the early papers on governmentality has led to some misinterpretation and a misleading focus on “mentalities of government” (Lemke, Citation2005, p. 334; Senellart, Citation2007, p. 399, note 126). Also, governmentality studies are not to be confused with discourse analysis, with which Foucault’s name is also intimately linked (Rose, O’Malley, & Valverde, Citation2006, p. 89).
11. Indeed, not intended as a “theory of power” but as its systematic analysis which reflects the historicity of power relations, in this way allowing also for a diagnosis of the present (Dreyfus & Rabinow, Citation1982, pp. 184–204; Foucault, Citation1978 [1976], p. 82; Lemke, Citation2005).
12. As a critique of the conventional “juridical” conception of power, which was also the basis of his early discourse theoretical work, he developed a strategic–productive concept, and finally the notion of governmentality. Foucault’s critique of the juridical conception of power criticizes the idea that power can be possessed (by a class, the state, a sovereign, or the people), that it is primarily negative and repressive in its exercise, and that it can be located in a single source like the state or the economy (Lemke, Citation2002, p. 51). He does not ascribe these shortcomings to a lack of understanding though, but shows that there are historical reasons for specific conceptualizations of power. He reveals how the juridical concept of power was historically connected to the juridical-political theory of sovereignty and feudal monarchy (Lemke, Citation1997, pp. 100–103).
13. Empirically, for example, Lanz (Citation2013) demonstrates on the example of the Berlin neighbourhood improvement programme “Soziale Stadt” that new governmental forms of power, based on freedom and choice, have not replaced disciplinary technologies of government but complement them.
14. According to Punter (Citation2002, p. 266), 71% of Vancouver’s area is zoned single-family. Lots with single detached and duplex houses still formed 80% of the residential land use in 2006 (Source: Metro Vancouver’s 2006 Generalized Land Use by Municipality, prepared by: Metro Vancouver Policy and Planning Department, page 1, August 2008, Retrieved October 5, 2009, from http://www.metrovancouver.org/ABOUT/STATISTICS/Pages/KeyFacts.aspx). In 1991, 49.4% of the housing units were ground-oriented (Source: City of Vancouver City of Vancouver Planning Department (2007): Information Sheet CityFacts 2006, Retrieved August 25, 2009, from http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/cityplans/cityfacts.pdf).
15. Vancouver did not have a comprehensive citywide plan at the time; the previous one, the Bartholomew Plan, dated from 1929 (Macdonald, Citation2008). The highly influential comprehensive “Central Area Plan” (approved 1991), to which CityPlan became in some ways the successor, and spatial complement was limited to downtown Vancouver (see Hutton, Citation2004).
16. A former councillor connects this more directly to the continuation of a growth model: “I think it [CityPlan] was a way to continue the growth” (Interview 7, former councillor).
17. Expressed, for example, in the following quotes: “During 1994 thousands of citizens helped to make difficult choices for Vancouver’s future” (McAfee, Citation1997a, p. 245), “choices must be made” (McAfee, Citation1997b, p. 21), and “difficult choices were made” (McAfee, Citation1997b, p. 20). On the first page of the Tool Kit is the statement that “(CityPlan) will define the choices we are willing to make (…) the people of Vancouver face many difficult choices. (…) we need to make choices” (City of Vancouver, Citation1993, CityPlan Tool Kit, section 1, part 1, p. 1).
18. To clarify, I do not contend that participation is something new in the 1990s (see also the earlier literature review). What I suggest is that participation can be understood as a governmental technology and that this offers a new perspective on participation in Vancouver.