CELA UBC Poster

"Taken for Good", Vancouver’s parks establishment and development at the CELA Annual Conference_UBC_#3

This poster illustrates the City of Vancouver’s historical acquisition of parks and their evolution to challenge the idea that the government establishes parks for environmental and recreational benefits. Instead, the research reveals that parks often have their genesis in a shifting political milieu that has continually prioritized a colonial notion of growth. In 1886, the Canadian federal government granted the Vancouver Park Board 1000 acres of unceded Indigenous land along the First Narrows–the site of a military reserve and strategic shipping channel adjacent to the city’s emerging downtown–to establish Stanley Park, the city's first and largest park. Thus, from this beginning, any claims of the park land's environmental or cultural value was subservient to the militarized protection of an economic imperative. As with Stanley Park, despite their popular image as ecological oases or equitable open spaces, the locations of public parks in Vancouver have often emerged from the purposeful displacement of Indigenous communities, the continuity of infrastructural logic, and the divesting of land unfavourable to building or development. While the Vancouver Park Board’s mission is to “provide, preserve, and advocate for parks and recreation services to benefit all people, communities, and the environment,” historical analysis of Vancouver’s parks reveals that these landscapes share a greater affinity to perpetuating colonial urbanistic, economic, and military practices. Through archival and cartographic analysis, this poster visualizes trends within park creation, their alignment with significant historical events, and their evolution in relation to economic and political change to reveal why the City of Vancouver established its parks where it did. The poster documents and illustrates the neighbourhood context, size, and establishment of over 200 parks the City of Vancouver oversees. Using timelines and temporal mappings, the research then traces the political and economic transformations that resulted in the establishment and development of 160 of those parks since the late 19th century. In illustrating how parks came to be where they did, the research highlights how various periods of colonial urban change, rather than environmental drivers, catalyzed park creation in Vancouver. Our findings suggest that despite the City’s recent initiatives to address inequity in public parks, these landscapes have consistently overlooked and displaced marginalized communities, promoted a narrow view of ecological sustainability, and been influenced by periods of economic reform, resource extraction, and clearing of undesired land. By Cynthia San and Narita Reyes Ico.

Narita Ico