A Sustainable City. But not for Everyone.
By: Daniel Piché
Tags: Environmental Issues, Sustainability, Urban Planning

Examining Green Infrastructure and Service Inequalities and their Relationship to Eco-Gentrification in Vancouver.

What does it mean for a city to be sustainable?

This essay begins here because how urban sustainability is framed is essential to understanding how it impacts different groups of people. Much has been touted about Vancouver’s both political and cultural emphasis on environmental sustainability, with the city government promoting the “Greenest City” action plan and its ranking as “the second greenest city” in the US and Canada. However, without dismissing the value of positive environmental action it is important to recognize that a holistic approach is needed as previous study has shown “without policies that are attentive to the social justice aspects of sustainability, greening leads to greater inequality” (Gould & Lewis 4). Through reference to images, this essay will examine the extent to which existing green infrastructure and service provisions in Vancouver have made it unjustly harder for residents of lower-income neighbourhoods to live as environmentally friendly as their wealthier peers and the corresponding negative social effects they face. This is done with reference to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) area, the city’s poorest neighbourhood with over 50% of the residents living below the national poverty line (City of Van 46). The DTES also has the greatest percentage of indigenous population in the city (City of Van 29), thus necessitating a racial lens to this analysis. In addition, we will explore how the existence of and response to these inequalities risks exacerbating eco-gentrification, which only serves to relocate existing issues and further marginalize lower-income and indigenous populations.

Just as sustainability itself has many aspects, urban environmental sustainability is also multidimensional. Though more avant-garde proposals like footfall energy harvesting and solar power advances may steal the headlines, one of the most fundamental issues in the context of environmental protection is urban waste management. As a notoriously unappealing process, waste management is at significant risk of slipping between the gaps of the jurisdictional dimensions of urban government, and as such its failures are frequently disowned and passed between different municipal, regional and national authorities. Yet for those without access to adequate waste management the burden of sustainable living becomes much greater. In the context of the City of Vancouver, data from Recycle BC indicates that every area of the city is offered curbside garbage and recycling collection except for the DTES. Therefore, to sustainably dispose of their waste, residents of the DTES must travel to bottle recycling depots, like the one below.

Image 1: A bottle recycling depot off Main Street, Vancouver. Photo credit: Daniel Piché.

In theory, any resident of Vancouver is entitled to utilize the bottle depots and are incentivized with 10¢ refunds. In reality however, the amount of waste a single household can create and store before it becomes a nuisance makes a trip to the facility not financially worthwhile and thus their usage is broadly limited to the most motivated environmental advocates, large-scale fundraising appeals (through schools for example) and for a group known as “binners,” low-income, informal workers who use the depots to supplement inadequate government welfare payments. These workers are primarily based in the DTES but travel throughout the city facing significant health risks, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, and often social disapproval to collect enough containers to make an average of $45 a day. Whilst there are certainly some binners who find their job worthwhile, their existence represents the reality that for residents of the DTES, green waste management is either a vocation or simply highly impractical due to the unjust gaps in environmental service provision. It is therefore unsurprising that the DTES faces greater issues of unsanitary and unsightly waste than the rest of Vancouver however, this is rarely framed as the institutional inequality it is but rather reflected as an inherent environmental failing of the neighbourhood’s residents, primarily low-income and disproportionately indigenous people, so resulting in their increased social stigmatization from the rest of the city.

Another aspect of environmental sustainability is transportation and Vancouver prides itself on its focus on sustainable transportation solutions like mass transit and cycling. In regard to the latter, the public health and sustainability benefits of cycling are well understood (Lubitow et al. 1181), however, in their analysis of cycling infrastructure in Portland, a Portland State University study found that “historical legacies of racist planning and socially unjust investment and development continue to impact how [different groups] experience mobility in the city” (Lubitow et al. 1200). Examining this in Vancouver, it can be seen that whilst maps may show broad cycling infrastructure across the city, there are vast disparities between the usability and appeal of different routes. For example, image 2 shows the cycling corridors of the Arbutus Greenway, which travels alongside many of the most affluent Vancouver neighbourhoods such as Shaugnessy and Arbutus Ridge, and the Georgia Viaduct, which connects the DTES to downtown. It is clear that the former is safer and more pleasant to cycle along than the latter which is highly exposed to both traffic and inclement weather and so commonly found completely deserted, as can be seen in the photo. Thus, unjust infrastructure development in relation to neighbourhood wealth is certainly prevalent in Vancouver. Furthermore, data indicates that the lower-income DTES residents are the most likely in the city to rely on bikes as their primary mode of transportation (City of Van 61). Thus inequalities in suitable cycling infrastructure represent not only a lack of an environmental amenity but also have significantly detrimental consequences to the neighbourhood’s overall mobility, intensifying economic and social marginalization.