The materials for this Community Planning Forum had a bias toward the villages model of growth (either because the bias was in submissions or the planning department added it). This session was, more or less, a discussion about how to implement that model. Many of the other people attending this session were leaders of neighbourhood associations.

I am far more engaged and educated than the average resident of Victoria, and yet I don’t understand neighbourhood associations. The City’s website provides nothing more than a list of (broken) links. I believe that they specify development permit areas, which restrict aspects of development all over Victoria.

I expressed my opinion that neighbourhood associations are “undemocratic” (I’ll explain why I think this in a future post), which got an amusing response from the other people present. Apparently they hung around in the room to discuss this issue after I left for lunch. I also learned that “NIMBY” is a derogatory term.

My big concern is that the villages plan requires villages to accept thousands of new residents after the next few years. Villages cannot be allowed to choose whether to expand or whether to have services like a needle exchange, because all of them might choose stasis. I am reminded of the provincial NDP’s carrot & stick model for implementing affirmative action in candidate nominations.

I also put up for discussion whether mixed-use villages includes office space and expressed my concern about commuting between villages.

These sessions really disappointed my hopes for deliberation. It was more a process of:

1. share ideas and gripe about the past
2. present ideas collected to date
3. share more ideas and gripe more

There was no weighing of trade-offs and making hard decisions. There was little requirement to give reasons. I’m sure these sessions give helpful guidance to the planners, but it sure didn’t feel like we were authoring the Plan.

This weekend was the second round of Victoria’s Community Planning Forum. I attended planner Robert Batallas’ Friday evening session on Victoria’s Downtown Plan. There were only three people in the audience (apparently the earlier session was much better attended), so I got to ask lots of questions.

Why are the buildings higher east of Douglas?

I was worried this was just to support the “ampitheatre” design, where Victoria gradually rises from the waves, at the cost of not maximizing development along the future Douglas rapid transit corridor. But of course the west side of town up to Chatham Street is mostly heritage buildings, so there’s not much point in zoning for higher density. I still think that north of Chatham should be developed symmetrically.

What’s up with the density bonus system?

I now completely understand the Density Bonus System and Heritage Density Transfer. I’ll write a separate post explaining them.

The other audience member was the first real crank I’ve run into at these planning forums. In a long-winded statement, he expressed a degrowth agenda. He said he didn’t want Victoria to grow not only because it was bad for the environment, but because it would make it less nice of a place to live. I tried to deliberate with him about how we needed to grow the city to get people to move out of the less sustainable suburbs. But when he insisted that rural living was more sustainable than urban, because “cities have lots of problems”, I lost it: in my mind, I punched Habermas* in the face rather than punching this guy in real life.

After the presentation, I had a chat with Robert that blew my mind. He said that every planner in the city reads the Vibrant Victoria forums every day – it’s their best source to get new ideas and the pulse of the community. I’ve been wondering how to influence Victoria’s plan from here on out, it looks like I found my answer.

* The grandfather of deliberative democracy. Habermas produced the theory that people should give reasons for their positions.