We The City: 2015 Community Summit

The night started with drinks and appies at a community market that was set in one room. While Corey Bulpitt did some live painting, artisans were selling dreamcatchers, accessories and organic coffee. Among those in attendance were City Councillor Andrea Reimer and Aboriginal Tourism BC representative Cecilia Point, as well as many artists and other community members.

Around 8 p.m. everyone moved into the theatre filling it completely. Shane Pointe, ceremonial traditional speaker from Musqueam, was in charge of the emotive opening words and blessings. "This wouldn't have happened 15 years ago," he said later. 

Pointe also highlighted the importance of the event by sending a message to the general public. "We know who you are, the sadness is that you don't know who we are. It's in moments like this that we get to share that with you." 

Then came the highlight of the evening: A set by the Git Hayetsk Dancers that had the audience clapping, laughing, and dancing as they paid tribute to ancestral legends.

Amanda Strong and Bracken Hanuse Corlett then presented their stop-motion film Mia', about an Indigenous street artist who is transformed into a salmon and reconnects with her ancestral land. The movie was highly praised by the audience, as it was when it was showcased at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

Among the final speakers was Ginger Gosnell-Myers, the Aboriginal City Planner at the City Manager's office who had strong words for the Indigenous community. "Hurting isn't what we are," she started saying. 

Gosnell-Myers stressed how important it is for First Nations to know who they are and where they come from to be truly happy and successful. She said studies have proven that the more people know about their background, the more likely they are to vote, volunteer, join a post-secondary institution and grow in their lives. 

Aboriginal voter turnout was so high in the recent federal election that some reserves actually ran out of ballots.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, the iconic performer and member of the Cree Nation, says the election turnout makes her proud.

But she does adamantly point out that electing a new government, and a record 10 aboriginal MPs, is just the beginning.

“Indigenous people can do a lot to help ourselves if we do get out and vote, so long as we don’t just become colonial ourselves,” Sainte-Marie said from her farm in Hawaii (she won’t give an exact location).

“Corruption in government can happen anywhere. There are plenty of corrupt Indian politicians, there are plenty in every group because that’s the nature of contemporary politics — there’s a lot of sleaze.

“I wish our new prime minister every success, but no matter who you elect you have to follow up. You have to keep your eye on the fox that just elected to guard the chicken coop.”

Sainte-Marie has been speaking out since she arrived on the music scene back in the early 1960s, and she will be speaking out again Wednesday at the Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver as part of SFU Public Square’s We the City: An Evening at the Centre, beginning at 7 p.m.

The event is a discussion of the importance of art and culture in shaping a city.

Speaking at the event along with Sainte-Marie will be artist Candy Chang, art historian/photographer/writer Teju Cole, and cultural event producer Mo Dhaliwal.

“A lot of people are kind of interested on my take on whether the presence of aboriginal artists on the scene is going to make the city a better place,” said Sainte-Marie, who spent five seasons as a member of the Sesame Street gang.

“My comeback is: ‘Do the non-artists of the city have any idea of what they are missing in not celebrating all the artists in Vancouver?’

“Because I never see enough attention being paid to either music or art in the schools and out of the schools, music and art at home. I don’t think the problem is not that the city doesn’t do enough. I think as human beings we don’t do enough to encourage art in our little kids.”

Sainte-Marie is riding a wave right now, thanks to her Power in the Blood album having scored the coveted Polaris Music Prize a few months back.

“I’m very, very smiley. It’s a great gift 50 years after I started,” said Sainte-Marie, whose many honours include an Academy Award and multiple Junos.

“I’m really very, very flattered and I’m kind of proud of myself for having come forward with a record that feels so true to myself. But besides being proud of myself, I am very proud of the record company (True North Records) for having got it heard.”

Power in the Blood is a reminder that the fiery Sainte-Marie is one of the most profound purveyors of the protest song, a genre that, aside from some hip hop, doesn’t get a lot of play these days.

“I don’t think the audience has been unwelcome to strong words. I just think that most people are just too chicken to do it — they don’t want to risk their careers,” said Sainte-Marie, whose activism got her blacklisted by U.S. radio stations in the 1970s. “The record company is scared, everybody’s playing politics.”

When she is not in her garden or reading, Sainte-Marie is working on a piece for the Toronto Symphony and finishing up a children’s book.

“I just keep busy in the arts, and then when it comes time to get on an airplane I go out and give it away to other people and see what they can do with it.”

dgee@theprovince.com, twitter.com/dana_gee

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The real estate industry and urban planners have yet to realize women are increasingly the ones buying homes for the household — and that it is for them neighbourhoods should be marketed to, according to a top female developer.

Carla Guerrera, a vice president at Vancouver’s Darwin Properties, has spent 15 years working in the development industry — in an era that’s produced such follies as sidewalks too narrow for strollers to navigate, dimly lit streets that are a hazard to public safety, and neighbourhoods where the nearest services require kilometres of travel by car.

It’s a topic she’ll be discussing as part of Simon Fraser University’s “We the City” community summit, which runs until Nov. 7.

Guerrera’s problem with contemporary cities is men were designing them with little thought as to what the other half of the population needs.

“From a development perspective, there’s a huge business and finacial opportunity with this as well — with the purchasing power women have now ... we have a huge opportunity to build development and communities really targeted and incredibly marketed to women,” Guerrera said.

A lot of this comes down to location, choosing areas most likely to have accessible and inclusive services for women — or creating new neighbourhoods sensitive to women’s needs.

“Regardless of the fact there are more women working and contributing in the work sector, there’s still a primary dominance of women in raising children, caring for parents and in home management,” she said.

“It’s those roles and that kind of lifestyle women primarily find themselves in at various stages of life are very different from men — in terms of the way they use communities, the way they use city infrastructure, city services.”

There are solutions. One North Shore property Guerrera is working on focuses on the “key principles” of a community that works for women. It’s close to schools, daycares, transit, shopping, and green spaces like playgrounds. Guerrera also targeted women in the community for feedback in the development process — voices with lifestyles often too busy to participate in traditional public hearings.

Shauna Sylvester, executive director of SFU Public Square, said the summit will feature 13 events over nine days.

Great cities are not built with bricks alone. They are alive and organic, and their greatness depends less on their physical infrastructure and location than on their cultural assets and social networks.

Cities are places where people engage — where they live and work, where they meet and learn, where they party and play. No matter the grandeur of the architecture nor the beauty of the setting, cities that lose sight of these imperatives soon start to decline, decaying from neglect and dysfunction.

So, we are the city. The question, for citizens and institutions, is how do we best fulfil our responsibilities — and make the most of our opportunities — to build cities that are stronger, healthier and more sustainable?

That’s the question for the fourth annual SFU Public Square Community Summit, running this year from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7. And the Summit itself can be seen as part of the answer. One city-building role that a university can play is as a convenor of important conversations — a public square for enlightenment and dialogue on key public issues.

Actually, there are a host of city-building opportunities for research universities, as well as for colleges, medical institutions, and other creative or knowledge-based organizations. In a major new report from the U.S. National Research Network, these are characterized as “anchor institutions” — the kind of talent magnets and innovation hothouses that can help shape and structure urban economies and enrich and strengthen the artistic, cultural and social life of the city.

As Canada’s most community-engaged research university, we at SFU never stop thinking about these opportunities. For example, in preparation for this year’s Community Summit, we convened a group of students from across the country to brainstorm about universities’ capacities as city builders. They identified four themes:

• First, and perhaps not surprisingly, they raised the role of university students and graduates as change makers — a new generation of animators for growth and development.
• Second, they pointed to the role of research universities to generate and mobilize new ideas and discoveries.
• Third, they noted the related role that universities can play as hubs for economic and social innovation.
• Finally, they identified universities’ potential impact as landowners and developers.

As an institution once dubbed “the radical campus,” SFU has never questioned the ability of our students to provoke or guide change. And being a leader in research mobilization, we have no doubts about the power of our research and discoveries. We pride ourselves on connecting this capacity to communities through facilities such as 4D Labs, a materials science lab that is programmed to work with private-sector partners on research and development.

This year’s Community Summit also follows the launch of SFU Innovates, a university-wide innovation strategy to link and harness our entrepreneurship programs and business incubation facilities — including Venture Connection (our student incubator), VentureLabs (our digital technology accelerator), and RADIUS (our social innovation lab).

Finally, as a landowner and developer, SFU has leveraged its physical assets to strengthen the communities we serve and to facilitate the exchange of education, culture and ideas. In Vancouver, we continue to build the downtown precinct that this paper has called “the intellectual heart of the city.” Our most recent facility, the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, will soon be joined by our new social innovation centre across the street at Hamilton and West Hastings. In Surrey, we’re planning to expand the campus that spurred the development of Surrey City Centre, and given rise to our Innovation Boulevard partnership with the City of Surrey and the Fraser Health Authority. And on Burnaby Mountain, we have drawn the community to our campus with the development of UniverCity, a model sustainable community that has earned environmental awards and international recognition.

The thread that runs through all of these city-building initiatives is engagement. As the National Research Network attests, the best university/city relationships are based not on “discrete transactions” or “partnerships of expediency,” but rather on “identifying shared interests, … co-creating ambitious goals and working together to achieve them.”

Simon Fraser University is leading the way in showing how this can be done, something we hope to advance even further with this year’s Community Summit. From a research activities showcase Friday (Oct. 30), to housing affordability dialogues Monday and Tuesday (Nov. 2 and 3), to a major public forum Wednesday (Nov. 4) on the role of arts in city-building with author/historian Teju Cole and singer/activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, we invite you to join us in a week-long series of events about city-building that are themselves an exercise in city-building.

With your engagement, we will learn and show how to make our precious city even better.

Andrew Petter is president and vice-chancellor of Simon Fraser University.

CBC Vancouver is proud to sponsor We The City - the SFU Public Square Community Summit from October 30th to November 7th. We The City will provide the public a chance to reflect on the important role of creativity, arts and culture in building and sustaining cities and neighbourhoods. The summit aims to remind residents of the power they hold to shape their city.

Various events will be held across Metro Vancouver as part of the SFU Public Square Community Summit. For a detailed list, please visit the SFU Public Square website.

Where is this city headed in 25 years? And what kind of future do we want?

Those are some of the questions being posed at an SFU City Conversation event at a downtown park this Thursday, Aug. 20, co-sponsored by Re-Imagine Downtown Vancouver and Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) .

Re-Imagine Downtown Vancouver is a chance for the public to take in a lunchtime panel and speak up about where it's headed. What do you love about downtown Vancouver? What needs to change? How can we make this community one of the best in the world in which to live, work, play and learn?

These are important questions during this city's rampant growth — not unlike a teenager.

"Vancouver is still an adolescent not realizing it’s becoming an adult and not knowing what it wants to be when it grows up," says renowned architect and urban designer Bing Thom. “The fact of the matter is, it’s going to grow up very fast and if we don’t get a hold of it other people will determine how we’re going to grow up."

The event takes place from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in the urban park setting at the north end of Hornby Street at West Hastings, part of the the DVBIA's 25th anniversary event that includes developing a collaborative and compelling vision for the 2040 downtown Vancouver experience.

A panel of speakers presenting their visions include: Lance Berelowitz, a planner, urban designer, award-winning writer and commentator, who will look at the evolution of downtown Vancouver's urban planning and design culture; Keltie Craig from the City of Vancouver, who will share her vision for downtown as a "healthy city" Rounding and the Very Reverend Peter Elliott, dean and rector of Christ Church Cathedral Vancouver, who will discuss his hopes for social inclusion and community building in downtown Vancouver.

Then it’s the public's turn to question, observe, and offer perspective and opinion. Here are a few: