Vancouver viaducts and learning from history
Decades ago, city planners worked to build a massive real-estate development, known then as Project 200, on top of what is now the Downtown Eastside. A freeway system, designed with the real-estate project in mind, would have paved over much of Chinatown. The Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants’ Association spearheaded a grassroots movement which stopped the “revitalization” project and the freeways, leaving the viaducts a mere vestige of a development cul-de-sac.
In 1972, Hogan’s Alley, then the city’s African-Canadian neighbourhood, was bulldozed to build the current overpass, but SPOTA and other groups managed to halt a massive highway system through the city and a dystopian real-estate development on top of the DTES.
Now, Vision opportunistically co-opts this tradition of resistance to cover its current project with a social and activist veneer, claiming that it too wants to reconnect Strathcona to the rest of the city and therefore must tear down the viaducts. The mayor and majority of council are piggybacking on the grassroots movement of Strathcona residents who fought the construction of the viaducts and the demolition and displacement in Chinatown in the late 1960s. But really they’re using the same booster rhetoric of “revitalization” and “redevelopment” that the NPA used back in 1968 to justify Project 200.
The city staff report for the viaduct removal project argues that “[i]n every city’s evolution there are opportunities to correct a past planning wrong”. The entire Project 200 plan, with the freeway and expensive office towers branded as “revitalization”, would have displaced thousands of residents. Now the city is making the same mistake.
