Spaces of transition spaces of tomorrow: Making a sustainable future in Southeast False Creek, Vancouver

The most recent overhaul of the relationship between nature, society and the economy in Southeast False Creek began in the Fall of 1990 when the Vancouver Task Force on Atmospheric Change presented a report entitled Clouds of Change to City Council. The report laid out a set of 35 recommendations designed to set a new course for socionatural transformation in the city by implementing a more comprehensive approach to environmental planning and policy. Among the initiatives outlined in Clouds of Change was a call for the development of a planning and design process aimed at creating a sustainable community on the shore of Southeast False Creek. The subsequent and on-going evolution of the plans to create this “sustainable community” will be used to examine how the vision of Clouds of Change has been forced to interact and react with other concomitant visions of the Vancouver of Tomorrow to produce a new space and a new nature on the city’s waterfront. I will show how various phases of the now decade-old debate over the meaning of “sustainability” in the context of SEFC have exposed the often obscured connections between transformations in the socionatural function of urban space and the process of maintaining and renegotiating the relationship between nature and urban-centered regimes of accumulation.