slapping a “The” in front of the name of the former building, or nearby street name, etc.). Equally as destructive as well as enraging is the feeble attempt at ‘commemorating’ what was previously there through the condo’s name (ex. From a cookie-cutter list of sparkly urban-friendly words with absolutely no context (read livability, diverse, tranquility) to a rotating image bank of stock urban-friendly images, Hern concludes “By severing any relationship to place, by throwing up random thematic condos one after the other, wherever permits will be granted with primary regard for profit, any notions of real community get butchered” (pg. There is so much more to say about Vancouver’s housing crises but for just a second I want to go back to calling out the absolute bullsh*t that is condo marketing as one of the most effective contributors– as Hern suggests–to faceless urbanism (not to mention the faceless architecture that these condos often generate). Living in Canada’s most expensive city, with the largest gap between home prices and house earnings “means it takes 22 years of full-time work for the typical young person to save a 20% down payment on an average priced home – 17 more years than when today’s aging population started out as young people” ( Kershaw et. There are so many things wrong with the development industry and the housing market more broadly that any criticism mounted against for-profit development should really begin with housing (un)affordability. Hern goes on to say, “There’s a certain amount of cultural value in mining and exploring the free-flowing interplay of images and associations, but on the ground, in the real world of cities, in the everyday lives of everyday people, the effect is to suck meaning out, leaving a hollow, facile urbanism” (pg. It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about trying to make sense of it, just enjoy” (pg. Nothing is impossible and the effect is pure Vegas. Hern, a long-time Vancouver-based activist and urban scholar, wrote, “These are just thumbing through their thesauruses, pulling out anything, and seeing if it sticks. Nearly every time I pass a covered steel construction fence or a wooden sign draped in a gaudy ad for a new condo tower, I can’t help but return to a short passage from Matt Hern’s 2010 book Common Ground in a Liquid City. The soul-crushing creativity of condo-capitalism, pt. Looking inward through an equity lens, how can planners dismantle power and privilege attached to the positions they hold and the decisions they make? one can find historic and contemporary planning decisions that came from a place of power and privilege. Whether it relates to transportation, housing, public space, urban design, etc. Even highway-sparse Canadian cities fell victim to this top down destruction, including Vancouver, where the Georgia Viaduct rammed through the city’s African community, only to fall short of Chinatown, thanks to courageous community resistance. This is in part what made New York City planner, Robert Moses, infamous. For example, transportation planners during the car-centric 1950s, spent millions of dollars displacing and bisecting equity-seeking communities via way of urban highways. Since of the beginning of colonial planning in North America, planners have used power and privilege to dictate where and how people should ought to live, often negatively impacting those most vulnerable, in favour of upholding those with wealth and whiteness. The planning ‘profession’, specifically relating to ‘city or urban or regional or rural planning’, and any practitioner involved in making planning-related decisions within the public domain, inherently holds privilege and power. Planning, privilege, power: Advocacy as a way out?
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