BC Land Summit 2009 Interviews: Judith Walker, Planner with the Village of Cumberland

by hans peter meyer

This is one in a series of interviews with participants at the BC Land Summit that took place in Whistler in May 2009. Earlier interviews included Sheila Harrington of the Land Trust Alliance of BC, Mark Holland of HBLanarc, Brenda Southam of the Real Estate Institute of BC, Tim Pringle of the Real Estate Foundation of BC, and Angus McAllister of McAllister Research.

The BC Land Summit is an unusual gathering of land use practitioners as it includes hundreds of professionals and lay people, with interests in land use that range from architecture, planning, and real estate development and sales to assessment, stewardship, and conservancy. As part of the CITinfoResource's goal to stimulate and reflect the diverse conversations about land use and sustainability in BC we have featured several interviews from the 2009 BC Land Summit, and will continue to do so.

 

I talked to Judy Walker of the Comox Valley shortly after she returned from Whistler in May.

hanspetermeyer: Judy, please tell us a little about who you are and your relationship to land use, and why you were at the BC Land Summit?

Judy: I'm a planner for the Village of Cumberland and have been for three years now. I'm also a registered landscape architect. My primary interest in the BC Land Summit was that it combines a lot of the professions. We had planners, landscape architects, the Appraisal Institute of BC, the Land Trust Alliance of BC – it was a really good chance to get all those professionals together.

hpm: You are also involved in your local Neighbourhood Association aren't you?  

JW: Yes, I'm on the Nob Hill Neighbourhood Plan Working Group. We're involved in a local area plan for Nob Hill. 

hpm: You're also involved with the Comox Valley Land Trust, is that right?

JW: No, not right now. But yes, I was active with CVLT for quite a while. Now I'm just a member. 

hpm: So you're intimately involved in land use issues and policies and practices in the Comox Valley area.

JW: Yes. Probably more importantly right now, I am on the technical advisory committee for the Regional Growth Strategy, and I also participate as senior staff with the  Comox Valley Sustainability Strategy. These are two big projects in our region. 

hpm: What were some of the highlights of the BC Land Summit for you?

JW: I was thinking about this yesterday. It really was Mark Holland's presentation that probably struck home to me, more than the big, broad brush issues, and particularly speakers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Richard Hebda. They were absolutely inspiring, but on a really large scale. Big picture kind of things which are fun. To sit in a room with eight hundred people and feel that kind of energy from those kind of speakers is really great.

But I like the more detailed level, the how-do-we-fix-it level of discussion. That's worth more to me, especially for a place like Cumberland. It's the day-to-day stuff, the details on to work with existing – and aging – situations, some of the things that Mark Holland was talking about, this is what interests me. Instead of waiting to invent a perfect plan, or a whole system for alternative transportation. At that level people are spending a lot of time developing these systems,  meanwhile I'm thinking, "Yeah yeah, that's all nice, but can't we do something today? Can't we change some little thing right now and make it different?"

And Mark's presentation, well it was about this whole new thing that he's looking at to do with urban vitality, and what makes places really interesting. What it comes down to is that it's not the form of urban development that creates these interesting places – and I just love this: it makes all us urban designers and landscape architects cry because we've always thought that if we could just create the right form you'ld create that energy. What Mark's talking about is that it's the activity that brings people together and creates these really vibrant places, and it's not necessarily the form. 

I mean, I think you can support this activity and energy with the built form, but you need to look at the activities first. This made me think of Cumberland. I think Cumberland has examples of this in spades. Here's a community with this authenticity that so many places are trying to make up and pretend about and lets Disney-fy it and make it look really interesting – and Cumberland already has it. So then, OK, if Cumberland is authentic and that's really valued, how do we keep that? How do we not ruin it? How do we let it go on its own way? You don't have to design it, you don't have to pretend. That was really exciting for me.

hpm: Give me an example in Cumberland of how that's happening. So where are these activities that are bringing together these diverse parts of population?

JW: I would say you see it in things like how we got Village Square built. We got some provincial funding to get Village Square built and it's become this absolutely great hang out place for the skate boarders. I totally love to see them there. They can't wreck the concrete coming off the stairs and it's their hang out spot and it's great. The trouble is they're totally destroying the plants. And I don't think this is malicious; it's an the activity centre. But it presents me with a problem. We've successfully created a space where people congregate, and I like the activity; I just have to figure out how to work with it rather than having Public Works move them off to another location. I don't want to be separating the skateboarders from the other people using Village Square. I like the mix in that. And I like that people, the skateboarders, discovered that stuff on their own. And they're not hidden away somewhere. 

hpm: So Village Square has bought the skateboarders downtown, is that what you're saying? Instead of pushing them off to a corner of the community, they are in the downtown. So, how are people interacting with that? Aside from the bushes that aren't doing so well. What about the other people who might be using the Village Square?

JW: When you see a group of fifteen teenagers hanging out with skateboards you're probably not going to take your sandwich and try and sit down in between them to have a snack. But it's mostly after school that I've seen the skaters down there. And I haven't really talked to them and I haven't engaged to see what's going on or anything. Public Works moved some tubes and stuff they had for jumping over and said "Hey, we'll move it down for you to the basketball courts so that you've still got a place to do it" – so it wasn't done unkindly. I don't know how other people feel, if they're thinking, "Hey, we got this great square designed for all of us to use and now it's been taken over by one group."

hpm: How did Mark Holland talk about that? That to me seems to be the rub: You can create all these activities and sometimes they do bring people together and sometimes they are sources of conflict. Was he talking about that?

JW: Well, he was talking about what he calls precincts and the kinds of mixes that happen. One of his best examples was Mountain Equipment Co-op in Vancouver. He said that about a block away from MEC there's a park that's never used. He asked, "Why doesn't that park have climbing walls? It could be a demo place for every bit of equipment that Mountain Equipment Co-op sells." So you could go down to the park and use all this equipment, and pretty soon it would be the hang out spot for everybody with their cramp-ons and bikes and whatever. If we allow that to happen it generates energy, as people are joined by an activity. It's different because it goes cross gender, religion, everything. Activities like gardening things are like that. People who garden are a really wide range of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and incomes but that activity brings them together. He was talking about small things, almost accidental things that have happened and were not particularly set up. He's starting to notice that these are the kinds of things that really vibrant places. So in Village Square here in Cumberland, eventually you'll see people connecting because they're in the same space, even if some are skateboarding and others are just sitting around watching, or eating a doughnut from the bakery next door.

hpm: There's a bit of irony here because I find malls not very exciting places for me, but for my dad, who is within walking distance of a mall, it's a social centre for him. He and his buddies get together there for coffee.

JW: Yeah, the mall is the new community centre. Mark actually brought that up and he talked a bit about malls and he said that as far as teenagers go, that is the place! It's the activity centre for a lot of them. They like hanging out and being seen. But he suggested that malls could probably be better set up to make more social interaction. I don't think they're generally set up to do that. The coffee shops are but not the interior of the mall. 

Anyway, I what struck me most about Mark's talk was the struggle for authenticity and the places we really like being in are really alive places. Granville Island came up quite a few times in different parts of the Land Summit as a good example, and I thought that we have it right here in the Comox Valley. With Cumberland I thought, Why would you want to kind of sterilize it and clean it up? At the same time, somebody said that we don't want to make a "precinct of poverty," like saying, "Oh well we have an 'authentic' impoverished neighbourhood and that's great and let's make it – being poor – the unifying activity."

hpm: To go back to the Granville Market example, I find that with the local farmers' market it's way more than just a place to buy fresh vegetables. There's music happening there now and there's lots of stuff happening more than just buying food.

JW: I know someone who goes there to sell plants. But it's not so much that she needs to sell plants; she just likes the Farmers' Market. She likes to be there. So there's an activity that's pulling all those people together with that common goal and it makes for a really lively interesting place. And that's just a field. It's people that have made the place interesting and lively, not the form. It's interesting. We could design some very fancy Farmers' Market with all these beautiful things, with little coffee shops, and it might fail. Sometimes the stuff that just comes along and we put together without thinking, like skateboarders on the edge of a set of stairs, sometimes this is the most interesting. Another great thing that Mark picked up on is that when you get that level of activity, people like to watch what's going on and they don't actually engage but they like to be at that edge. So that even the people watching become part of what's interesting.

 

hpm: Thanks for that Judy. Now you were at the previous Land Summit in 2005. How does this on compare to that one, four years ago?

JW: There wasn't the "urgency" in that Summit; it wasn't as charged. This year it was very highly charged. It probably helps again that we were in Whistler and the there is a very different feel or level of activity when you go out in the street in Whistler than we had in 2005 when the BC Land Summit was at the Chan Centre at UBC. Here we stepped into streets full of restaurants and stores and hotels and there are a huge number of people who work there who are hanging out in that place. It's pretty high energy. In the middle of the week in May and everyone is out on the street and there is all this activity. It's pretty surprising when you come from Comox Valley. 

hpm: Particularly Cumberland.

JW: It's already quiet when I'm leaving work at 5.00pm!

hpm: Anything else you want to say about the Land Summit?

JW: Just a note about Sherry Kafka Wagner, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Richard Hebda, three of the keynote speakers. Sherry was talking about stories about her dad and I would have listened to her tell stories about her dad forever. And then Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: One of the things he said was that they used to get called environmental activists and he said, "We don't call ourselves that anymore; we call ourselves 'free market activists'." He said, "We are for the free market" – which for him means no more heavy subsidies for the oil and gas people. He said, "Open a free market for energy and we'd have solutions for a lot of our energy problems." And then Richard Hebda came on and he kind of 'poo pooed' Kennedy's talk, about this big electrical grid over North America so we can run electric cars off it. Hebda was saying, "We are going to do what? Dig up land to put in this copper grid? What are we destroying while we are putting in this grid? And where's the copper coming from?" It was really great. I love it when high powered people are being critical. It makes you think a different way. Sometimes it's just those funny little things that you think are critical things. It's not about a particular solution, it's not about infrastructure and how are we going to pay for the next pipe or anything, but it's about how we look at stuff.

hpm: Is this going to change how you do things in Comox Valley?

JW: Yes. Absolutely. I don't spend three days at something like this and not take notice. That's a huge time investment on my part, I have to make this worthwhile. I just have to figure out how to do that.

hpm: Well, good luck with that. Thank you for the interview.

JW: You are welcome.

©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2009

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