A New City.

I would like to begin parsing out some ideas that are formenting in my head about cities, and specifically, at the moment, how they are organized.

Let me use Vancouver as an example.

We have a problem here with our civic politics. This problem cuts much deeper that Good Ol’ Sam failing to do anything real to help put the city on the path to solving this increasingly burdensome and intractable housing crisis, be it the unfettered gentrification of the Downtown Eastside in advance of the Olympics, or Westend rental housing disappearing under the firm grip of developers and condos.

This problem goes far beyond the stalemate that has stalled our city government and resulted in heated, and often infantile exchanges between councilmen, that has pushed the real and pressing issues of the city to the back of the stove, to a forgotten slow burner.

This problem originates even further below the absurd reality of a city government being run by political parties, be they right or left; below even the sad predicament of entrenched political, social, and economic interests driving these entities to the detriment, both immediate and long-term, of the flexibility of a government at this level, one that needs to be accountable, and practically effective, and to the citizens and culture of the city itself.

I think that this problem, the one that I have been agonizingly slowly leading to, is that the structure of our city government lends itself to the self-perpetuating buffooneryof ideological and overtly partisan civic politics. Our elected representatives are immediately accountable to who? Nobody! Oh sure, they are re-elected or tossed out every four years, but this is done by city-wide consensus, broad sweeping tides of support or dissent, and these tides are themselves notoriously partisan.

What this city needs is a decentralization of the electoral process, broken down to undermine the ability of often limited and narrow, yet pan-city interests to thrust slates of “non-partisan” candidates upon an unsuspecting public. This party political can obviously lead to majority rule, bullying, and tragically, a polarized city hall. More offensively, however, the division of our council, our city government, government whose decisions affect city inhabitants immediately, and often intimately, along bitterly partisan lines is the general withering of democracy and discussion, of consensus politics within the city limits. City governments cannot operate on the same principles as our parliaments, as debating chambers for partisan bickering. They will stall and the city will begin to lose direction, we, as citizens begin to lose control.

I understand that broader city issues need to be accounted for within any decentralisation of Vancouver politics, and I will certainly be trying to explore this issue in later posts, but I will say that these interests are often better served, both for the city and the interest itself, by non-governmental associations, associations that will by necessity need to team-up with and cooperate with other interests and associations across the city to have demands met. This, I believe, would not only serve to neutralize narrow interests from civic politics, at least to some degree, and thereby, hopefully, de-polarize city government, but also foster a more vibrant and diverse civil society that ultimately makes the city a good, and safe place to live.

Cities are places for people to come together, for a diversity of people, of ideas, of lifestyles to mingle and merge. Cities are by their very nature cooperative organizations, local enough to be personal, but not too small as to be oppressive. A functioning city, a functioning city government needs people to work together towards common goals, basically a strong civic sense, or civil society if you will. A strong civil society can act as a conduit between the immediately local concerns of neighbourhoods and the eminently more politically powerful unit of the district, at which level I believe civic elections need be fought at.

Representation on a civic level should be relatively local, broken down into units big enough to exert influence in city wide affairs, but small enough to be effectively responsive to the needs and demands of the individual or neighbourhood. Basically, cutting to the chase as I am sure you are aching for me to do, Councilmen should be elected from districts, and thereby be accountable to a relatively small set of people. They, then, would be immediately answerable to the ups and downs of their district, with the physical well-being of a distinct piece of geography.

To conclude, I think if we had a more geographical basis for our election of civil officials, increased accountability is never, I believe, a bad thing. We would have broader issue represented within city council chambers, and councilmen finding themselves working towards parallel goals as opposed to the crossing of swords that makes Vancouver city politics both the most riveting, as a horrible car wreck most undoubtedly is, and the most frustratingly bitter, much like watching paint dry on a cold, January morning in North Vancouver.