Join Visionary Urbanist Michael von Hausen for a broad yet intimate perspective on Vancouver urban design, from the '70s through to the present day. Michael has been laying Vancouver's groundwork since the ’80s, as a key designer in the early development of False Creek. His multi-disciplinary perspective on urban design draws from landscape architecture, planning, design, and development, to forge an urban ‘greenfrastructure’ to feed our bellies as well as our urban souls. Together Michael and G...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 2Ep. 71
With 10 days counting down to Election Day, Gordon Price pulls in ex-NPA-Council-crony-turned-urban-food-security-activist-and-all-around-mensch Peter Ladner for a frank talk on what is up with this wacky election. With 58 candidates for Vancouver City Council and 10 registered parties in the running, how can we make sense of it all? Among the many chewy topics on the table, Gord and Peter consider: can anyone entice the centre Left to ride to a City Hall majority—and do these labels still have ...
Oct 06, 2022•52 min•Season 2Ep. 70
In this very special episode, author Colin Stein unveils an epic portrait of our place and time: Vanbikes: Vancouver's Bicycle People and the Fight for Transportation Change, 1986-2011 ( An Oral History). In conversation with Gordon and a room full of fans, he relates how the bicycle people transformed Vancouver, and how Vancouver transformed Colin Stein. Related as a series of discussions and anecdotes and packed with photos and memorabilia, Vanbikes tells of culture change from the inside out....
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 69
Welcome to a special dispatch from Gordon Price, checking in from Expo 2022 in Dubai. (With our apologies for the sound quality. At a place like Expo, it was the quietest place he could find.) One of the best things about a world’s fair—after you’ve visited the pavilions, tasted the food, listened to the music —is oddly, also one of the worst things: standing in lines. Because it is in those lineups where you’re likely to engage with people from other places in way you never otherwise would. My ...
Mar 25, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 68
Welcome to Episode Three of Viewpoint Vancouver's election podcast feature: Three Quick Questions . Where, in under ten minutes, Gordon puts civic candidates on the spot with three unusual questions designed to reveal who they are and what really makes them tick. This time up, Gord turns the political spotlight on John Coupar , running as the NPA's candidate for Mayor of the City of Vancouver. Listen in on John's long behind-the-scenes family history with the Vancouver Park Board, and get the di...
Feb 18, 2022•10 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Listen in for Episode Two of Viewpoint Vancouver's election podcast feature: Three Quick Questions . Where, in under ten minutes, Gordon puts civic candidates on the spot with three unusual questions designed to reveal who they are and what really makes them tick. This time up, Gord puts it to Ken Sim , running for Mayor of City of Vancouver with A Better City. For more about Ken check out kensim.ca. ********************************************* The Viewpoint Podcast is a production of Viewpoint...
Jan 26, 2022•9 min•Season 3Ep. 2
The great “BurnaBOOM” started off in the ‘50s, as Willingdon Heights came to model the suburban ideal: a gridded neighborhood of wide streets, tidy flower gardens, and modest single-family bungalows. To some extent, it is still that—but so much more. Lee-Ann Garnett, Burnaby’s Deputy Director of Planning and Building, tells the evolving story of Burnaby housing through the eyes of Albert and Clara—an archetypal blue-collar couple who leave the prairies after the war, to settle in Burnaby and liv...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 67
Join Viewpoint Vancouver for a quickie! Introducing our new Election feature: Three Quick Questions , where, in under ten minutes, Gordon puts civic candidates on the spot with three unusual questions designed to reveal who they are and what really makes them tick. First up in the series: Mark Marissen , running for Mayor of City of Vancouver with Progress Vancouver. What has Amsterdam got that Vancouver doesn't, creating a safer and more vibrant downtown? Mark has an idea. For more of Mark's pl...
Jan 10, 2022•8 min•Season 3Ep. 1
The City of North Van is no bedroom community. With sexy projects like the Shipyards, the Polygon Art Gallery, and new Lonsdale patios and covered seating, North Van is quickly becoming a destination city. In fact, the City has the lowest percentage of single-family homes of any Greater Vancouver municipality. The buzz now is all about market rentals, and affordable housing. First-term City of North Vancouver Councillor Tony Valente talks to Gordon about housing challenges, rapid buses, construc...
Dec 28, 2021•48 min•Season 2Ep. 66
Big news for the Region! Translink has just unveiled Transport 2050 : its blueprint for the next 30 years of regional mobility. Gordon talks to Translink Manager of Policy Development Eve Hou about the evolution of this important document, and what Translink sees coming down the long-range pipes. Will we have a future of integrated mobility: transit pass, car-share, and share-bike, all in one handy package? Translink calls it “mobility as a service”. The acronym is ACES — automated, connected, e...
Oct 28, 2021•51 min•Season 2Ep. 65
All countries have distinctive urban regions, but Canadian cities especially differ from one another in culture, structure, and history. SFU prof Anthony Perl’s new book Big Moves: Global Agendas, Local Aspirations, and Urban Mobility in Canada (co-authored with Matt Hern and Jeffrey R. Kenworthy) dissects how Canada's three largest urban regions have been shaped by the interplay of globalized imperatives, aspirations, activism, investment, and local development initiatives. In this episode Gord...
Jul 14, 2021•47 min•Season 2Ep. 64
An OWG (Old White Guy) enlists the aid of a YBG (Young Brown Guy) in unpacking modern socio-political vocabulary. Can white people be 'racialized'? Is equity of opportunity the same as equity of outcome? What is privilege, really? Who has it now, and where does the balance tip? And, moreover: what does it really take, to be Gord’s perfect gym buddy? Join us for a rambling and entertaining conversation as Mo Amir of popular culture podcast This is VANCOLOUR joins Gordon Price for a trip through t...
Jun 08, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 63
Throughout her 33-year career, Judy Graves was the public face of City Hall to those living in Vancouver's streets and shelters. She knew who they were, what they needed, and how to get a roof over their heads. She reached out to them, often in the late hours of the night. She knew the ins-and-outs of City Hall, especially the ins, and who did what. She knew how to get the right kind of help to the people who needed it. While her successes were measured by the individuals she helped day to day, ...
May 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 62
Marc Lee has a sort of duality imbued in him that gives him a unique perspective on the world. Raised by a single mother who put him through private school at the prestigious Upper Canada College, Marc developed a perspective on both sides of the spectrum. His work as Senior Economist at the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives has taken him from the trade agreements, Globalization and Neoliberalism of the 90s, to today’s housing crisis, and on to looking at the growing precarity of the gig e...
Mar 13, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 61
Recently retired from federal politics, Pamela Goldsmith-Jones has had a distinguished career; from grassroots local politics, to helping improve the peace and security of women on a global scale. Gord and Pamela talk about densification, reconciliation, the reason she got into federal politics, being a good neighbour, and more. Read more »
Mar 05, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 60
Director of government relations for the Homebuilders Association Vancouver and 4th generation Japanese-Canadian Mark Sakai talks internment, immigration, growing up in Steveston and housing. Housing. What’s important? Mark asks: can you find the housing you want at your stage of life? Single family housing? Spoiler, it still dominates, but you’re probably going to look in Maple Ridge or Abbotsford, or Brandon, Manitoba for that matter, unless your pockets have depth and breadth. Two-thirds of t...
Feb 27, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 59
While the majority of the 27 million practitioners of Sikhism live in India — most living in the state of Punjab — half a million Sikhs reside in Canada. In fact, 1 in 20 British Columbians is Sikh. And according to Gian Singh Sandhu, founding president of the World Sikh Organization (WSO), so is 1 in 4 Surrey residents. Sikhism is one of the (if not the ) fastest-growing religion in Metro Vancouver. As the Vancouver Sun noted a few years ago , “B.C. is the only province in Canada, and one of th...
Dec 03, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 58
If you needed more evidence that environmental issues are no longer fringe issues, all you have to do is look at Vancouver Greens’ Adriane Carr. Her 74,000 votes in the 2014 municipal election was the most by a Vancouver council candidate since 1996…and perhaps ever? Had she run for mayor in 2018, she might have won, and by as many as 20,000 votes. Born at VGH and raised in east Van, Carr’s future political life began auspiciously — a Master’s degree in Geography under the tutelage of UBC’s Davi...
Nov 15, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 57
Sarah Blyth first started to see the spike in drug overdoses in the Downtown Eastside community in 2016. From her vantage point as manager of the DTES Market, she couldn’t help but see it. People were literally dying in the street. So she decided to do something about it. Rob sums it up: “You saw the need, set up a tent, and tried to save lives”. Yup. Blyth’s role as founder and Executive Director of the Overdose Prevention Society is the latest in a series of contributions to the city by a pers...
Nov 05, 2019•29 min•Ep. 56
It wasn’t that long ago that British Columbians were saying, “What the hell is going on in Maple Ridge?” In 2014, voters elected Nicole Read as mayor of the region’s eastern outpost …and then subjected her to a virulent strain of online harassment which, after two years, resulted in threats that prompted an RCMP investigation, and ultimately her decision to not rerun in the 2018 election. The reason for the harassment? The appearance of a homeless camp in an empty lot at a cul-de-sac on Cliff Av...
Oct 28, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 55
What does it mean to change a street name? What does it mean to be able to fish? What does it mean to have title over the land upon which you, and your people, were born? This line of questioning may not immediately resonate with the majority of Canadians going to the polls today, intent on electing (or re-electing) the next Prime Minister. But it matters a hell of a lot to Indigenous people, to the Musqueam Indian Band , and specifically to Wade Grant. In this long-awaited discussion with the U...
Oct 21, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 54
The latest in our Passing the Torch series introduces us to Thomas Bevan, a Millennial who’s already left his mark on Vancouver. From his youth in Kitchener, Ontario — and a “difficult relationship” with a downtown that wasn’t quite the hotspot it has since become — to his graduate studies at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning (“a dreamland…a beautiful place”) and current work with BC Housing , Bevan stepped into the world of urbanism with a naturally intuitive sense that the econom...
Oct 08, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 53
One thing is proven without a doubt in this wide-ranging, deep political dive with Gord, Rob, and return guest George Affleck — these guys don’t know their Tolkien. And while there was no cranky, right-wing guy in Middle Earth, there is a central character whose very rigid way of thinking begins to soften. If that seems to be the case with Affleck, it may be with the benefit of retrospect, especially with an eye to the performance of current council, and specifically in contrast to its predecess...
Sep 20, 2019•35 min•Ep. 52
A tale of two city-makers — one, a son of the working poor, who showed an early knack for creation and collaboration, in part through the use of polyhedral dice; the other, a world-renowned urban planner, with a Twitter following as large as the populations of some of the cities he now calls clients. The two are, of course, the same man. Brent Toderian arrived in Vancouver in 2006 as the new Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver, stepping into the role jointly held by Larry Beasley and ...
Sep 10, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 51
It was 2009, Vancouver was about to become the largest metro region to host a winter Olympic Games, and the city faced a challenge of similarly grandiose proportions — how to accommodate a 30% increase in downtown transportation trips alongside a 30% reduction in road network capacity, thanks to Games-related operations. For Lon LaClaire, a transportation planning engineer at that fraught moment in the city’s history, it was an experiment that would prove to be the ultimate litmus test of the ci...
Sep 03, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 50
Every child is full of questions. And while the science is fuzzy, it seems that children who ask questions about the future — not how things work today, but how they could work better tomorrow — tend to make great planners. Michael Gordon was one of those children. And his legacy as one of the most important planners of Vancouver’s Golden Age (thank you, Larry Beasley) has been built by finding answers to the most difficult of questions about the growth of inner cities. Namely, is it possible to...
Aug 31, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 49
There’s nothing like listening to a gifted speaker riff on culture and politics; especially when the riffing is concise, with a judicious use of words, and an almost complete absence of hyperbole or bafflegab. Sure, that sounds like Peter Ladner. But in this edition of Price Talks torch-passing, it also describes Vivienne Zhang, the successor to Ladner’s predecessor. Zhang is a UBC grad, currently en route to the Paris Institute of Political Studies (‘ Sciences Po ‘) to begin her Masters in inte...
Aug 13, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 48
According to Vancouver Green Party councillor Pete Fry, consultation won’t build us the city of the future. “Where we’re going, we don’t need sticky notes on a wall,” he said (kind of). To Fry, consultation simply means, ‘the plan has already been written’ — not the right approach for the city-wide plan. Ironically, it was a lack of consultation that almost resulted in a freeway blowing through his Strathcona neighbourhood, but that’s a story for another time. He wants co-creation. Neighbourhood...
Jul 29, 2019•54 min•Ep. 47
The Price Talks team hosted its first public podcast recording, held in front of a live library audience in the District of North Vancouver on June 26, 2019. We’ve lobbed quite a bit of criticism at the North Shore generally over the past eight months, regarding recent decisions about housing, transportation and the public realm, but felt it was time to actually hear from residents. Joining Gord for the discussion were: Dominica Babicki, formerly Energy Manager with the District, currently compl...
Jul 09, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 46
There’s no two ways about it — TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transit authority, is #1 in North America for year-over-year transit ridership growth. Seattle’s King County Transit is #2. And Kevin Desmond has led them both. Desmond, now in his 4th year at the TransLink helm, didn’t emerge as a transit planning professional as a result of education, nepotism, or some cultish, hippie-era, preternatural NUMTOT trip (though, thanks to Gord, he’s now officially hip to the ELMTOT jive ). No, Desmond came...
Jul 03, 2019•55 min•Ep. 45
