More bus routes with greater capacity. Ground level retail in proximity to low-rise residential buildings. Communities designed with walking, cycling, and integrated multi-modal mobility in mind. And yes, rapid transit. Surrey and Langley are two obvious examples of cities south of the Fraser taking slow, but steady and at times bold, steps towards the future, thanks in no small part to the work done by people like Paul Lee and Nathan Pachal. In this second edition of our “Predecessor/Successor”...
Jun 25, 2019•43 min•Ep. 44
In 2015, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association ( DVBIA ) undertook a strategic planning process that might have invited a bit of cynicism — give a fancy name and lengthy timeline to a stock-in-trade exercise, and call it transformative. That exercise, however, was Re-Imagine Downtown Vancouver, and it has already proven to be anything but typical. For one, it’s a 25-year legacy ‘vision’ project laid upon a foundation of rigorous research and public engagement. For another, it i...
Jun 14, 2019•44 min•Ep. 43
“A lot of people thought we were wildly pessimistic as to the speed with which we were facing this crisis. Turned out we were wildly optimistic. This is happening faster than those of us who started getting interested in it 30 years ago could possibly have conceived.” In recognition of the 30 year anniversary of Clouds of Change , the 1989 report from the City of Vancouver’s Task Force on Atmospheric Change, Gord speaks with a key influencers for his originating motion to strike the task force, ...
Jun 07, 2019•53 min•Ep. 42
“There are places we love, and places we hate…at a certain point, we made it illegal to make the places we love anymore, and we were only allowed to make the places we hate.” So says Jeff Speck , one of North America’s top urban designers, and a leader of the new urbanism movement, in a recent visit — his first — to Vancouver. As co-author of 2010’s Suburban Nation with his mentors Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (of architecture and town planning firm DPZ Partners ), Speck reached a ne...
May 31, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 41
You might be a fan of Vancouver Councillor Michael Wiebe’s previous work with the Park Board, including the Jericho Lands Agreement, the Biodiversity Strategy, and warming shelters. Or maybe you prefer his first big hit, as co-owner of eight 1/2, the well-regarded Mt. Pleasant restaurant. You may even appreciate his 10 years as Park Board staff, or his debut in administrative management in the provincial government. But if you’re invested in Vancouver’s new era of power and politics, you may onl...
May 28, 2019•41 min•Ep. 40
It’s not Vancouver, but it sounds like the Vancouver we want to be: multi-family residential buildings located close to the urban centre. Generously spaced laneways and semi-private lots for kids to play. Sufficient access to high storefronts, services and other amenities, in ever-expanding concentric circles of community, neighbourhood, and city. It’s Heliopolis — once a suburb 10 kilometres outside of Cairo, today swallowed up by the city. And like most neighbourhoods in Vancouver, it’s highly...
May 21, 2019•41 min•Ep. 39
Can we create community out of diversity? If so, will it require changing the scale and character of urban forms within our communities…the very change some Lower Mainlanders have recently become notorious for rejecting? It’s one of many thorny questions tossed around, grappled over, and occasionally outshouted by our venerable host and his subject Mark Busse, Director of TILT Curiosity Labs at HCMA Architecture + Design , and host of the Creative Mornings Vancouver breakfast lecture series. The...
May 14, 2019•59 min•Ep. 38
In George Affleck’s world, the only thing worse than the politician who tries to please everyone is the politician who only focuses on the base. So you can understand why the only thing to possibly vex him more than last council — in which he withstood endless punishment from a neo-leftie Vision Vancouver majority — could be this council, the least experienced in…possibly forever. The two-time former NPA councillor, alongside friend of the podcast Rob McDowell, joins Gord to dissect the goings-o...
May 07, 2019•30 min•Ep. 37
Chris Fair helps places — communities, cities, regions — think about the future. That thinking drives the design of everything from the branding of a destination, to the design of streets, buildings and other public spaces, and what is put in them in order to make a city not just liveable, but loveable. Fair’s belief? That if you stop looking at how people behave, and begin understanding how people may want to behave in the future (in part through creative disruption, and of course big data), yo...
May 03, 2019•46 min•Ep. 36
If you follow Vancouver politics, you don’t need an intro to Melissa De Genova. In just her second term as Vancouver councillor, De Genova suddenly has the second-longest tenure of anyone in council chambers, and has also become (surprisingly, to some) one of the more credible authorities on policy, staff relations, and council protocol. Maybe even one of the adults in the room. Falling on the heels of three consecutive Vision Vancouver council majorities — in which De Genova was a favoured and ...
Apr 29, 2019•33 min•Ep. 35
Legendary is not a term to be taken lightly, but neither are the accomplishments of TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement), the municipal political party formed in 1968 in Vancouver by Art Phillips. TEAM steamrolled into City Hall with an 8-seat majority in 1972, and is credited with steering the city into a direction which is often recognized as upholding a world-class standard for quality of life. Similarly, living legends are rare. But, in the case of V. Setty Pendakur — as with Vancouver counc...
Apr 26, 2019•56 min•Ep. 34
Public transit consultant Jarrett Walker says the value of his work with municipalities around the world is never predicated on delivering his own recommendation. Instead, he says he “fosters conversations, leading to confident decisions”. That might get his firm Jarrett Walker + Associates the job. But as he demonstrates during this enlightening and entertaining chat — Price Talks’ second live recording at Gord’s West End apartment —”convening people in the presence of reality” is Walker’s true...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 33
The Sea Captain is the newly unveiled public art piece, held aloft from the ceiling of the newly upgraded Surrey Central SkyTrain station on Expo Line. It’s also, perhaps, an apt metaphor for themes covered in this episode. Themes like encounters with colonialism, and the different forms they can take. Figuring out how different peoples live together in one place. Gord explores these, and many other themes related to culture, settlement, and “the Canadian experiment”, in his wide-ranging discuss...
Apr 09, 2019•38 min•Ep. 32
Check out Shauna Sylvester’s profile on LinkedIn . Don’t be shy — she invited all Vancouverites to connect with her on the well-behaved social network for the 2018 Vancouver civic election. It was one of a few memorable tactics Sylvester deployed during the endless campaign. Like having policy platforms, and speaking authentically about topics with which she had direct experience. Something definitely worked, because her independent run captured 20% of the vote in the mayoralty race, for third p...
Apr 05, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 31
Past Vancouver City Council candidates — and Price Talks pundits — Adrian Crook and Rob McDowell return to the podcast to give their latest letter grades to our local leaders. And much ground is covered in the process, including Rental 100, the Broadway-UBC subway, and the back-story to the cold shoulder given to Vancouver Rape Relief’s grant request. Plus, teapot tempests such as councillor budgets, and the big mistake Kennedy made early in his mayoral tenure. The team also ruminates on two of ...
Mar 29, 2019•52 min•Ep. 30
It was with some relish that the Price Talks production team spun the guest mic around to hear what the podcast’s namesake, the well-seasoned urbanist Gordon Price, might reveal when lightly grilled. An activist, political and urbanist voice in Metro Vancouver for four decades, Gord’s public life has been informed in no small part by his upbringing in Victoria, which included some formative cultural, social and personal influences that eventually led him — with some trepidation — to Vancouver’s ...
Mar 26, 2019•32 min•Ep. 29
“ Google ‘Tumlin NIMBY’ or ‘Tumlin Santa Monica’, and you can see a little bit of the story arc. ” An effective stage-setting for a dialogue earlier this month, in front of a small gathering at Gord’s West End apartment, with Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy for Nelson Nygaard . One in a long-running series of Price Tags Soirées, and our first live audience recording, the chat included a Q&A with a few special guests well-known to #vanpoli followers. Tumlin, raised in LA and h...
Mar 22, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 28
“There is a time coming, in our lives, when the tap of natural gas into our homes and into our city is going to be turned off. It’s not tomorrow — we have time to make adjustments.” As follow-up to his interview with Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle ( Episode 19 ) — mover of a unanimously-approved motion to declare a climate emergency — Gord wanted to speak to one of the ‘generals’ working on a solution to coming disaster. Someone with the knowledge, experience, and character to not jus...
Mar 15, 2019•49 min•Ep. 27
In 1997, as workers were stripping asbestos out of the old Woodward’s building, the Vancouver planner overseeing the project predicted it would take 10 to 20 years for Hastings Street to change. “From anything we can see, the community will be overwhelmingly low-income for that long,” Nathan Edelson told the Vancouver Sun. Flash forward 22 years, and he was both right and wrong. True, a lot has changed on Hastings Street since the opening of the new Woodward’s Building in 2010. The central passi...
Mar 12, 2019•50 min•Ep. 26
This is the creation story of laneway housing in Vancouver…and, perhaps, the beginning of the end of the Bartholomew era of restrictive zoning. The protagonist is Jake Fry, a self-proclaimed — metaphorical, mind you — child of Trudeau, who grew up in small-town Ontario and attended a one-room schoolhouse. His real education might have come half a kilometre underground; coming from a family of miners, this is where Fry learned hard skills, carpentry first and foremost among them. This ultimately ...
Mar 09, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 25
“You don’t hold referendums in small communities on a case-by-case basis—you do what you were elected to do, and make difficult decisions for the greater good.” For anyone following politics in Metro Vancouver these days, this is become the sentiment of some in the planning profession. It’s a message about (and even directed towards, even if not in so many words) the many new, inexperienced members of council in city halls across the region proposing, and making decisions about, the very real ho...
Mar 04, 2019•47 min•Ep. 24
When Portlandians prepared to elect a new mayor in the months leading up to the May 2016 primary vote, few saw Sarah Iannarone coming. As co-founder of First Stop Portland, the organization responsible for telling the city’s sustainability story, and owner of a popular brunch spot in the so-hip-it-hurts Southeast PDX neighbourhood, Iannarone was a political neophyte. She jumped into the race, and with a firm grasp of progressive environmental, social and economic values — and a compellingly fort...
Mar 01, 2019•38 min•Ep. 23
She’s the new Mayor of the City of North Vancouver, a former councillor and school trustee with a life of public service in her community. He’s a first-time Council member, who’s devoted countless hours in recent years to advocacy for better cycling policies and more public spaces. And while they didn’t run on a ticket — few candidates for public office in Metro Vancouver do — Linda Buchanan and Tony Valente are singing from the same song sheet. Among other ambitions, they want to invite more de...
Feb 22, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 22
In a rite of passage, ‘liminal’ refers to the transition point that is neither here nor there; a threshold that can result in multiple interpretations or outcomes, and thus (often) confusion. In this episode, Wes Regan, Social Planner responsible for Community Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Initiatives with the City of Vancouver, aptly uses this word to describe his work space at the downtown Woodward’s Building and, by extension, the city’s current approach to community economic dev...
Feb 16, 2019•59 min•Ep. 21
Today’s moving day for the Bruntletts, a foursome who have come to represent, over the past decade, Vancouver’s culture of cycling in the mainstream. Think normal clothes, kids in cargo bikes, and families who embrace the car-free lifestyle, riding around the seawall, or along a quiet neighbourhood street— the Bruntletts have helped shape this image. What began as writing to (and for) local media in support of transportation cycling evolved into their own media creations, through their consultan...
Feb 12, 2019•42 min•Ep. 20
During a Vancouver Council meeting on January 16, 2019, a motion moved by Councillor Christine Boyle to declare a global state of climate emergency was carried unanimously. With nine “whereas” clauses — referencing the impacts of BC and California wildfires, the emergency debates at various levels of government following the UN’s recent IPCC report on global warming, the estimated future costs of climate-related disasters to Vancouver, and our current vulnerabilities — plus half a dozen amendmen...
Feb 08, 2019•39 min•Ep. 19
Kate Lambert (IBI), Paige Ritchie (Intracorp), and Carla Guererra (Purpose Driven Development, Planning and Strategy) are members of the Urban Land Institute, an independent, nonprofit research and education organization with almost 40,000 members worldwide, over 400 of whom are based in British Columbia. They’re also founding members of the Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI), with a stated objective of supporting and promoting the advancement of women in all disciplines of the real estate indu...
Feb 06, 2019•45 min•Ep. 18
They call him Downtown Charles. Okay, he calls himself that , but it fits. For the past 27 years, Charles Gauthier has led the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, one of hundreds of BIAs that sprung up across Canada (and the world) in the past 40 years. Beginning in 1992, with a downtown business core saddled with double-digit commercial vacancy rates, Gauthier has helped usher in new programs aimed at stimulating greater public engagement in more public spaces. More promotional...
Jan 29, 2019•55 min•Ep. 17
“Metaphorically-speaking, the clothes I put on fit me,” says Dr. Lawrence Frank, one of the most-published and highly-cited urban planners in the world. Having started his career in landscape architecture, Dr. Frank’s 1985 thesis on transit mall design eventually led to a Masters of Civil Engineering Transportation Studies and a PhD in Urban Design and Planning, both from the University of Washington. Dr. Frank worked for the Washington State Department of Transportation and held faculty roles a...
Jan 25, 2019•58 min•Ep. 16
In recent years, critics have accused both Liberal and NDP cabinets of rushing through inadequate electoral reforms via BC’s Local Election Campaign Financing Act, or LECFA. The most recent round of changes took effect last April, impacting the 2018 municipal elections across the province. What were they all about? Are BC municipalities in-line with campaign financing limits and disclosure requirements at the provincial and federal levels? What is “the dark money”, and why is that still a thing ...
Jan 15, 2019•41 min•Ep. 15
