Via Vibrant Victoria, the Victoria Police Department is running a blog. The posts are mostly interesting incidents that police have been involved with. The tone is just-the-facts cute, bang-on for improving public relations.

Unfortunately, they don’t identify individual police officers. Still, I think it will have the intended affect of humanizing the VicPD force as a whole. The Canada Day post is particularly amusing.

At Victoria’s Community Forum this weekend, the chief item for deliberation is to choose one of four growth plans:

Waterfront and Green Spaces

More of what we have now: condos with great views and no jobs or shops in sight. This scenario should only appeal to developers and rich people with SUVs. I’m worried that people will support this because “hey, everybody likes trees and dolphins!”

Transit Corridors

This sounds good at first glance, but it results in long tracts of medium density development. They’re too long for walking and too busy for biking. Everybody spends all their time on the bus. I think of West Broadway in Vancouver as representative of this.

Diverse Villages

I’m tempted by this option. I think villages that have, as the poster lists, supermarkets, heavy transit access, services and cute shops are good for both residents and tourists. If all the jobs are in the core, then transit from villages is easy to arrange (but intervillage transit would suck). I doubt Victoria’s ability to pull this off properly: density outside the existing “town centre villages” must be strictly capped and office space must be forced downtown.

Core Area

I think ultimately this would result in the best city, but the “Core” on the map is way too big. Bay Street and the Roundhouse are not within walking distance of downtown. For this to work, the Downtown Core Area Plan needs to allow nearly unrestricted development in the “core core”.

My goal at the forum is to argue against the first two and raise my concerns about implementation of the last two. If you can’t make it to the forum, fill out the online survey.

The current Johnson Street Bridge has two car lanes going east, out of downtown, and one lane going west. Most transit systems seem to be designed around more condensed rush hour in the morning, so I never really understood why they weren’t divided the other way (perhaps growing out of the awkward approaches?). The plan for a replacement bridge maintained three car lanes – I like to think that the middle lane would be reversible, although there’s no evidence of that.

Right now there are signs stating that cyclists have use of a full lane and cars should not pass them on the bridge. I’ve always found this works well (I come from Wharf Street to the south mostly), but Ryley tells me he’s been honked at a few times. Whether they’re actually safer, most cyclists prefer a seperated bike path or bike lanes. So both refurbishment and replacement plans have always assumed one or the other.

JohnsonStreetBridge.org has a good argument that the City should try converting one lane of traffic into two bike lanes for a few weeks to see what happens. Given the cost of such an experiment compared to the amount being spent on analysis of the bridge, I think it’s a no-brainer. The question is whether it’s a fair test if the approaches aren’t tweaked as well?

I’d like to see the City doing a lot more experiments, like converting car parking to bike racks. How about some affordable housing experiments?

I attended the Saturday program of Light on our Feet dance cabaret. There was only one interpretive routine and no bad modern ballet, so I enjoyed it more than other dance cabarets I’ve been to in Victoria. On the other hand, there was two comedy routines that had nothing to do with dance, which kind of muddied the show.

My favourite performances:

Nath Keo

Bellydance fused with Cambodian (Khmer) classical dance. Nath’s gender presentation, particularly his signature costume, is a man. Given that both of these styles were traditionally danced primarily by concubines (although both have male minorities), I consider this performance to be genderqueer. Nath’s dance was aethetically pleasing, technically impressive and very political (in contrast to the banality of interpretive dance).

Ballet Victoria

Classical ballet to contemporary dance music. I’m usually dismissive of ballet, but I have never seen it danced to such engaging music. The dancers stuck to classical footwork while adding a few modern hand motions. It made me want to sign up for ballet class.

Rachel Oates Tribal Fusion

The fusion included flamenco, which kind of stole the show from purer flamenco dancer Monique Salez. Rachel’s dance wasn’t awesome through-and-through, but there were some moments of brilliance.

LauraBellyDance

A pair of traditional bellydancers with burning candles balanced on their heads! I suppose the chance of injury was pretty low, but dropping the candles in front of a big audience seemed likely. One of them was pregnant, which strikes me as a bellydance cliche.

My friend Erin ran a community circle on the weekend. We started by brainstorming issues and then chunked them into logical categories (mostly ignoring the City’s topic areas). By consensus we decided to do a circle on waste management.

One reason we chose that is that I think everyone feels the City needs to be contintually prodded about curbside composting. (Oak Bay ran a “pilot project” for the Capital Region many years ago.) Organic material makes up 30% of the Capital Region’s landfill input. My goal was to keep a plastic bag ban off the table, because at less than 1% of landfill input I think it’s an insignificant step that distracts from real waste diversion strategies.

The visioning stage seemed kind of backward given that we had already narrowed in on a topic. The brainstorm-by-yourself-bring-it-back-to-the-group model worked very well for goals and strategies: we didn’t get any duplicates and by merging some ideas we got strong results.

The triple-bottom-line analysis and implementation planning felt like they were worth doing, but they didn’t change our strategies much. I wonder if the kind of people in our circle were the kind of people who do that thing in their heads?

Our three strategies:

• Composting and all recyclables pick-up for every household and in ubiquitous street bins (outstanding issue: cost!)
• Pay businesses and residences for composting and recycling, charge them a lot for garbage* (outstanding issue: will this create perverse incentives?)
• Establish a reusable container “library” with grocery stores, restaurants and other businesses – like the way that beer bottles are standardized and get reused rather than recycled (outstanding issue: implementation details)

* Based on Nudge, I think this could be accomplished just with information, but nobody else had read the book and I wasn’t able to convince them.

A lot of people who move to Victoria claim that it’s hard to build a social life here. They’re from somewhere else, so it’s at least reasonable to think that they’re comparing to other cities rather than just complaining that their social life isn’t like Friends. But a lot of people in my social group are moving here after university, which is of course the ideal socializing circumstance.

I grew up in Victoria and I’m not completely happy with my social life. I suspect other natives aren’t either. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s relative: Victoria’s social scene is not living up to its potential.

Some of the most literal urban tribes I’ve seen in Victoria are sports leagues: team mates and rivals party together, travel together, take care of each other when they’re sick, etc. So in the past I’ve looked at sports as being the city’s only stable social groups. But I should have thought more carefully about my running metaphor: running is easy to do by yourself and most of the runners you see are by themselves.

My friend Nina moved here recently. We were discussing my difficulty organizing Community Circles in my social group and she offered this theory: Victorians are not in exclusive cliques (tribes) that can’t be broken into, instead they’re all off doing their own thing. Victoria is a city full of people bowling alone. Who knows if it’s happening here more than in other cities (bowling leagues are a Middle American thing, right?), but we should try to figure out how to fix it regardless.

An Official Community Plan is a strategic plan (not to be confused with a government’s internal corporate strategic plan). The City of Victoria is using a bottom-up strategic planning process to write their new OCP. They’re asking citizens to gather in “community circles” and together go through some standard strategic planning steps. The twist is that it’s done in two iterations:

1. Envision the outcome
2. Brainstorm strategies
3. Consider impact on the triple bottom line
4. Envision the outcome
5. Refine strategies

I think insisting people work in groups and go through two iterations will be successful in breaking-up preconceived ideas and challenging groupthink. It’s great that the City is trying to get public participation in the development stage instead of just asking the public their opinion between fully-formed alternatives. But it’s quite daunting to jump into one of these topics that you haven’t already worked on and I’m skeptical that the submissions will be of high quality.

Many of the proposed topics of discussion have two-page briefing notes called “topic sheets”. They’re pretty readable although they contain a bit too much cheerleading about the City’s current initiatives. They’re a great way to get everyone up to speed at the start of a community circle and include some key discussion points (in a green box on the second page). Unfortunately, six of them still aren’t available, undermining planning for those topics.

There are also 60 – 140 page discussion papers. They have key information that doesn’t make it into the topic sheets, for example that Victoria doesn’t have enough land for a food security utopia. I think community circles would be far more effective if at least one participant has read the relevant discussion paper, but it’s quite a a time commitment. If only every topic had a 10-page executive summary like climate change and energy planning. I think the City bit off more than it can chew with the discussion papers, because four of them still aren’t available.

I’m finding it difficult to organize community circles because I don’t know enough people who meet all these criteria:

• have a vested interest in Victoria
• are engaged
• have lots of free time

The Victoria Foundation is a charity aggregator (meta-charity?) in Victoria. Every year, they evaluate the city on different factors. This helps their fundraising pitch and I’d like to think it determines which local charities get their grants, although I have no idea if it does.

There’s an online survey asking which measures the Foundation should be using. It’s a good opportunity to tell them that perception of crime or police officers per capita are not worth basing decisions off of. It’s interesting to think about how things should be measured:

Arts and Culture

I suggested they measure the import/export of art. eg: How many foreign artists participate in our cultural festivals? (Fringe and Film Fest are the two I’m involved in.) To what extent are our local artists exhibited in other cities?

Belonging and Leadership

I liked their idea of measuring the economic value of volunteer contributions much better than counting volunteers or donations. They suggest measuring women in municipal politics, but obviously it would be better to look at the extent to which local politicians at all levels reflect the demographic makeup of the community on many Census dimensions.

Economy

Some interesting suggestions were business start-ups and failures, jobs by sector (economic diversity), and percent of people making a living wage. The latter is much more useful than looking at underemployment or minimum wage or whatever – can people get with however they’re able and opting to work?

Environment

They suggested measuring amount of land with regional ecological significance, which is way more useful than land in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which includes golf courses.

Getting Started

Since Victoria’s population is aging, total childcare spaces isn’t important: I’d rather see them measure the ratio of spaces to children. Similarly, the number of children in government care reflects government policies rather than the actual child poverty rate. And student debt doesn’t matter if graduates can find awesome jobs, so I’d like recent graduate income measured.

Standard of Living

They suggested the change of consumer price index compared to average wage increase, that’s an awesome way of measuring real income change controlling for inflation and supply.

None of the options that I like were in last year’s report, so go vote for what I say!

This session’s expert was Andrea Hudson, the City’s planner in charge of Downtown, North Park and Harris Green. She presented Kevin A Lynch‘s model from The Image of the City as a way to talk about urban spaces:

paths

streets, sidewalks, trails

edges

walls, shorelines, impassable spaces like highways (Hudson’s egs: Dallas Road, upper Blanshard)

districts

areas sharing an identity or character (Hudson’s egs: Chinatown, the Inner Harbour)

nodes

focal points, intersections (Hudson’s eg: Haultain Corners)

landmarks

distinct or distantly visible reference points (Hudson’s egs: Quadra Street churches, the Rockland water tower*)

I was a couple minutes late, but I believe Hudson didn’t discuss the Development Permit Map, which was on a big board next to her. The development permit system gives Council approval power over the appearance of buildings within almost all of Victoria. Combined with land use zoning, it’s how the City exerts control over development: I was shocked that it wasn’t the focus of this session.

It was the last session of the day, so everyone was tired, but I think also no one knew what we were supposed to be talking about. The urban design topic sheet has no specific issues or discussion points. Two Citizen Advisory Committee members planted in the audience trolled about “evil development”. I tried to start a discussion criticising the neighbourhood planning process, but apparently that was out of scope.

The real issue that citizens must discuss is how urban design and heritage conservation can peacefully coexist with densification and economic renewal. Is the development permit system working? Are density bonuses an appropriate trade for well-designed developments? Where does zoning come into this?

* Victoria has a water tower?! I had never heard about it until now.

This session was a hard-nosed look at the economic future of the municipality, less utopian than the rest of the forum. The discussion centered around discussing the current employment breakdown:

Government, tourism and construction won’t grow much in the next few years (although I didn’t get the impression that this was looking 30 years out like the plan is supposed to). Healthcare will grow on demand. High tech presents the best opportunity for growth but it has a variety of land use needs from office space to light manufacturing.

The session expert, Jay Wollenberg, thinks that Victoria’s waterfront represents our most underutilized resource for:

• tourism
• residential (which creates community-oriented and construction employment)
• industry
• public space (which could make the city more attractive for the Creative Class)

The City’s downtown plan is commited to maintaining existing industry on the harbour, but doesn’t say much about development. I like the idea of an intensified working harbour, but Ryley says it’s not necessarily great in practice.

Wollenberg’s other suggestion is that the City could try to get government offices to consolidate in the municipality (right now 7500 government jobs are outside the municipality in the region). Amalgamation would do that for local government. I’m not sure exactly how to get the province to do it, but I really like the idea.

Wollenberg also mentioned that there’s a trend toward raising children in condos and apartments – apparently Yaletown has a shortage of daycare spaces. This is a huge cultural shift that I’d like to know more about.

In the question period, a woman attempted to share her view that Victoria should pursue a no-growth strategy. I’m sympathetic to this concept and will be writing on it in the future, but she came off as a crank because she didn’t know how to articulate this complex idea (I took me a while to figure out what she was talking about and I’ve read papers on it!).

* Community-oriented: services and goods consumed by people living within the municipality