ABSTRACT
The trigger for this chapter was a small article by Grant (2010) on experiential planning based on a series of interviews with a well-known urban planner, Larry Beasley, from Vancouver. Grant quoted him for saying that:
what we were doing in Vancouver – but we hadn’t put a name to it – was to try to create for people the experience that they aspire to in their day-to-day lives in the city that houses and accommodates that day-to-day life. … I have dubbed it experiential planning, because it is a planning approach based on the experiential expectation of the users of that environment.
(Grant 2010: 364) This planning approach seemed to differ quite considerably from the global experiential flagship approach practised today by cities and regions striving to enhance their position in the urban hierarchy (Friedman 2010: 150). Today Vancouver unites high density with proximity to natural beauty, public transportation and bicycle lanes, nightlife and shopping, architectural quality and experimentation (Berelowitz 2005; see also Punter 2003), and it serves as show-case of a liveable city for planners and architects around the world. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate and develop the notion of experiential planning as a theoretical construct and as planning practice. Theoretically the chapter takes its point of departure in the classical concept of the experience economy, in which actors are united in experiential staging processes (Pine and Gilmore 1999). It is suggested that city planners act as stagers of urban development. The second section of the chapter unfolds the case of experiential planning in Vancouver, in which planners act as stagers of complex and participatory planning processes. The concluding section summarizes the lessons for urban planning and questions the difficult balance between liveability and economic development.