Robyn Chan

Robyn Chan pursues her conviction that engaged urban communities can plan, replan and shape their home environments to be the best places to live. She lives and is raising her family in Vancouver’s False Creek South, a remarkable part of the city that was designed in the 1970s as an experimental, mixed income community of co-ops, rental, supportive and market housing, where families could thrive in a green and blue oasis of post-industrial False Creek. More recently, False Creek South residents have reclaimed their identity among Vancouver’s most organized neighbourhoods by forming their own, democratically-elected neighbourhood planning committee. The City owns 80% of False Creek South lands, and has revealed its intention to drastically densify development and add a much larger share of new, market-rate condominiums. Robyn has been on the forefront of talking back to the City about viable alternatives to ensure the future of this “economically, social and culturally diverse neighbourhood with a friendly, positive and vibrant sense of community.” The work has included engaging over 3000 neighbours in town halls, design charrettes, an organized 170-person delegation to City Council, community BBQs, and much more. She even helped launch Between the Bridges, an online community newsletter.

Robyn began her work in False Creek South with a track record of engagement and activism with Evergreen, including Green Bloc and 100in1Day Vancouver projects, that address critical and timely urban issues from sustainability choices, to urban nature, public space activation and accessibility. Last year, she moved on from her professional role with the False Creek South Residents Association but she continues to carry forward her pursuit of neighbourhood futures in False Creek South via her Master of Urban Studies thesis research, for which she was awarded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. The research will facilitate more authentic neighbourhood futures by revealing and detailing “the contradiction between a longtime commitment to participatory community planning and the City’s growing reliance on private real estate development,” in the words of her thesis supervisor, Professor Karen Ferguson.

Leadership is growing on Robyn. In 2019, she was appointed to the Vancouver Planning Commission, a volunteer advisory body that advises City Council on planning and development issues, and she took up the chair’s role for 2021-22. About her time on the Planning Commission, Robyn reflects how grateful she is to have been in a position: “to bring new voices to planning discussions and to elevate communities who have traditionally been excluded in City processes.”

Robyn elevates research and discourse in Vancouver whenever she responds to requests from media, including the Vancouver Sun, CTV and CBC, for comment on threshold questions facing our city, about the future of False Creek South, accessibility, taking responsibility for lives lost during extreme heat, planning for climate change, housing affordability, and the role of community participation in neighbourhood change. To fellow students as well as to elected and staff leaders and the media, Robyn passes her knowledge and convictions on in a spirit of growing the circle of engaged urbanism, making her the ideal recipient of the 2022 Urban Studies Alumni Award in Community Engagement.