ABSTRACT
GCAP is noted by the City of Vancouver as one of the world’s most comprehensive and ambitious plans. It goes nine goals beyond climate planning, per se; and well into the domain of urban sustainability. But we should also note the factors GCAP leaves out. Given the city’s reputation for strong planning, and the consequences of land use and development planning for individual landowners and the City alike, notable is the absence of land use and development planners in the process, and of goals that would affect their work, targeting the organization of city space and neighborhoods to advance a green agenda. Notable also in GCAP is the absence of core questions of social value: public health, social connections, social equity, and providing opportunities for marginalized people, cultural diversity, and tolerance, for example. Without goals in these and other areas, GCAP falls short of the kind of standard for a holistic urban sustainability plan. Several city planners and one Blue Ribbon panel member noted this failure of integration as a shortcoming of GCAP: ‘the GCAP was too isolated from other aspects of sustainability.… we need an overarching sustainability strategy for the city that includes affordable housing, housing the homeless, deals with a regional economic strategy rather than the fragmented one we’ve got, deals with some of the cultural issues. In other words brings together the economic, environmental and social, cultural elements that make up sustainability. It’s still kind of ad hoc.’
