In the earliest scene in the movie The Burial, a 2023 legal drama, Jamie Foxx, playing a flashy personal injury lawyer, delivers a brief “sermon:”
“What gives us the feeling that our spirit feels safe? I believe it’s home. Home is where the heart is. If I could just get home. Even just saying the word ‘home’ makes you feel a kind of way.”
It’s impossible to miss the potency, the pull, of his language.
The Christmas edition of the TC contained three letters concerned with land use and the social impacts of development.
The letters — “More housing, more crowding,” “Saanich’s plan would change communities” and “We have a right to speak on land use” — shared a tone mixing urgency, impasse, resignation and stymied yearning.
All asked the same question different ways: Are we able to manage this human community to create socially satisfying outcomes, or are we subject to deep and overwhelming forces of social evolution (fancy for “change”) that are far beyond intervention and our control?
As these letters reveal, it’s impossible to consider land-use issues without invoking a glossary of near-volcanic social meanings: the comfort, security and tenure of home versus (ware)housing; density and hints of difference in class or status or investment; ubiquitous fears of some vague social threat or destabilizing influence; the growing ascendancy of the transient over the rooted; developers doing the bidding of some dark, ravenous business urge, and committed to providing no amenity or grace note not required by business goals (a sellout or rent-out); and helpless municipalities whipsawed by all of this and by policy pressure from senior government.
Arrayed this way, it takes on the drama and scale of the freighted conflicts — battles between the Good and the Dark Forces — in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Land-use questions are confounding. They summon deep paradox in social thought and practice.
The force of every legitimate claim raises an equally valid and forceful counter-claim. In some way, the claims seem emotional, aroused by feeling; the counter-claims feel rational, invoking all of the usual arguments in support of density and its equitable distribution over the landscape.
The arguments, emotional or rational, are equally valid. An impasse. After all, if someone says “I don’t like spinach,” you can’t respond “You’re wrong, you do.”
People don’t rush to say “density is bad” if an apartment building or a tower goes up across town. The same building becomes monstrous if it materializes very near your home.
Confession time: While I’ve lived in single-family houses, I’m an apartment guy, happy to own or rent. I’m perfectly willing to put in the time and energy required to turn strangers into neighbours.
Could it be something about the difference in the “energetic signature,” a combination of comparative size and sheer mass — something akin to standing next to a supremely muscled body builder?
After all, big affects us (the biggest ship, the tallest tree) in a way that middling or small doesn’t. Big projects are nice to know about or visit, but not permanently next door.
Maybe big is a threat to territoriality.
Personally, I’m less worried about Victoria becoming dense and more concerned that it is becoming ugly and characterless.
I mean that the vast majority of its new development is architecturally repulsive, un-welcoming, un-generous, monotonous, derivative, hermetic and utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, Victoria’s public realm or the city’s singularity.
Who’s accountable? The profession and the city.
Victoria, remember? A feminine city. That inviting, welcoming Inner Harbour. How much larger a metaphor do you want? The harbour’s the DNA of the place, but you would never know it from most new development.
Instead, we get an ever-spreading fungus of derivative downtown highrises and lowrises elsewhere, almost all of them copies of Vancouver and elsewhere.
Wouldn’t it make sense, for reasons of ego, reputation and social caution, for the city to impose design standards that encourage people to feel more proprietary, more like stakeholders, “owners,” of the city?
Multi-unit density? I’ll take it, but give me something worth looking at.
Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, and originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences.
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