Abstract
Introduction
Neoliberalism has arrived in Canadian flood management. Its arrival is not much of a surprise, given the continued entrenchment of state-aided, private market capital in formerly public responsibilities in Canada and other Western democracies over the last five decades. But flood management in Canada had been relatively resistant to these forces until recent years. The Keynesian economic policies that fostered strong involvement of the state in the decades following World War II were responsible for many of the successes in flood management at all levels of government in Canada, including stormwater and drainage infrastructure, protective works, berms and dikes, risk assessment and mapping, land use planning and development regulations, and disaster financial assistance (de Loe, 2000; Shrubsole, 2000). While public responsibility remained the norm longer than it did in other policy areas, the wider ongoing shift from “government to governance” (Swyngedouw, 2005) has caught up to flood risk management. In the province of British Columbia, three major policy changes have successively chipped away at public responsibility for flood management, to the point where it can now be considered a model of neoliberalized flood risk governance: the winding down of the federal Flood Damage Reduction Program in the 1990s (Watt, 1995), the devolving of responsibility for flood risk management from the provincial government to municipalities in 2003 (Stevens and Hanschka, 2014a), and the introduction of overland flood insurance in 2015 by private insurers with active support from the federal government (Oulahen, 2015; Thistlethwaite, 2017). Municipalities, commonly regarded as the front lines of flood risk and climate change impacts, have responded by “rolling with” this new regime as best they can, which has meant vastly diverse outcomes across the province.
The coastal city of Vancouver, British Columbia's largest municipality, is facing rising sea levels and increased coastal, riverine, and pluvial flood hazards due to climate change. The local government has been for years a leader in climate change adaptation planning, passing one of Canada's first municipal climate change adaptation strategies in 2012 (City of Vancouver, 2012). The City is currently pursuing the objectives set out in that strategy by planning for sea level rise in the two areas of Vancouver most exposed to flood hazards, the Fraser River and False Creek floodplains. Under relentless development pressure, these places are important to a wide variety of people, businesses, and other interests. The City is taking a “values-based” planning approach to discerning development choices about how these areas should be used in the future. This approach seeks to incorporate the values of a diverse range of community members in planning decisions; how they value urban space and what matters to them is to be situated at the center of the planning process (City of Vancouver, 2021). It is a progressive approach by intention but raises questions as to whether it can be considered the kind of counter-hegemonic planning process that has been called for in response to the communicative planning model and its service of neoliberalism (Holgersen, 2020; Purcell, 2009; Sandercock, 1998). Such a process would plan for use values over exchange values. So, does values-based planning have any ability to elevate the use value of land? Or is it the best that local planners can hope to do within the constraints of a neoliberal governance model?
Development in Vancouver has long been shaped by the trade of natural resource commodities. The Fraser River meeting the Salish Sea and a natural deep-water harbor provided all the transport advantages necessary to extend the national railway to Vancouver and solidify the city's importance in Western Canada's capitalist economy of the early twentieth century. Today that location faces increasing flood hazards and development pressures, forcing the local government to address this risk within a neoliberalized version of capitalism that continues to define the conditions in which planning decisions are made. The shift to a flood risk governance regime in Vancouver and the rest of Canada begs the big question then, does the neoliberalization of flood management reduce flood risk? This paper seeks to address the question by examining the implications of neoliberal flood risk governance and what it means for adaptation planning; in other words, what it can and cannot do. It does so by historicizing the production of flood risk and flood management in Vancouver, drawing on urban political economy and political ecology of hazards frameworks to illustrate the coproduction of urban landscape, capital, and flood risk. The paper situates an ongoing adaptation planning process in Vancouver in the context of neoliberal flood risk governance and the development history of the city to question whether a values-based planning approach can elevate use values of land. It demonstrates that since flood risk is internal to the capitalist mode of production and the broad social formation around it, the constraints imposed by a neoliberal flood risk governance model restrict even progressive values-based planning from elevating the use value of land. But it suggests, more hopefully, that in asking people how they use and value flood-prone land, interventions and alternatives to the technocratic, apolitical adaptation approaches typically on offer may be possible, if limited.
Neoliberalism and flood risk governance in Canada
Flood risk governance is increasingly gaining attention from academics and policy makers as an analytical framework and approach purportedly more suited to current political economic and climate conditions. The shift from government responsibility for flood management to flood risk governance broadens responsibility for flood risk from governments to include a wide range of private actors, including homeowners, insurers, and investors (Alexander et al., 2016; Alexander et al., 2018; Driessen et al., 2016; Thistlethwaite and Henstra, 2019). The argument for flood risk governance is that governments alone have limited capacities for flood risk management, and that better effectiveness can be achieved by unleashing the power of private capital to reduce flood risk. Insurers and lenders can influence the behavior of homeowners, the thinking goes, by providing financial incentives to avoid risk or take risk-reducing actions. Lower property insurance premiums for homeowners who have installed a sump pit and pump in their basement, or better mortgage rates on a property with disclosed flood risk, are commonly pointed to as examples of roles for the private sector (Golnaraghi et al., 2020; IBC, 2015; OECD, 2015).
Rather than conceiving of flood management as a public good, the governance approach individualizes responsibility. This reshaping of roles and responsibilities typifies the neoliberal hegemony. Harvey (2005: 2) defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.” Privatization, deregulation, and reduced public spending replace social protections with a system of personal, individualized responsibility. Rather than merely getting out of the way of capital in a
Roll-with-it neoliberalism is now an internalized process with far-reaching implications across policy areas. The so-called recent “behavioral turn” in flood risk management is one such area, which signifies a shift toward promoting behavior-related changes to mitigate flood risk (Kuhlicke et al., 2020). This approach places the onus on citizens to address their own risk through a range of low and high cost personal “adaptive” actions. It promotes murky concepts like resilience and resilient communities (Oulahen et al., 2019a). This new “turn” harkens back to the earlier human ecology approach to hazards research, also called the behavioral paradigm, which aimed to understand people's perceptions of risk in order to discourage development in hazard-prone areas (e.g., Burton et al., 1978). But it neglects what the critiques of that paradigm and subsequent hazards research in the vulnerability approach revealed about the uneven impacts of wider political economic structures on how people interact with environmental hazards (Hewitt, 1983; Wisner et al., 2004). The current behavioral turn is apolitical in much the same way as the earlier human ecology approach and subsumes a new iteration, or recycling, of the cultural ecology-inspired idea of adaptation as incremental local adjustment that can be pursued while ignoring power and history (Watts, 1983). Similarly, flood risk governance is presented as a neutral approach. It is anything but; it serves to empower self-interested actors that have clear financial motivations. Those actors are working to naturalize flood risk governance, making it seem like there is no other choice. As part of the neoliberal hegemony, which is built for a narrow range of stakeholders and puts capital over people, flood risk governance arrangements will work for some people and not others.
Canada has a long tradition of public responsibility for flood management. A large country with a history of settlement on coasts, lakeshores, and riverine floodplains, flood is Canada's most common and costly hazard. Federal, provincial, and municipal governments have shared a primary responsibility for flood management. Generally, the federal government provides the financial backstop for disaster relief and recovery, provincial governments lead the construction of protective works and set the framework for land use planning, and municipal governments carry out local decisions on development and infrastructure. Each level of government, however, has the mandate to go beyond these primary functions. The Flood Damage Reduction Program (FDRP) was a prime example of the federal government providing strong leadership in flood management, beginning in 1975 and lasting in some parts of the country until the late 1990s (Bruce, 1976; de Loe, 2000; Shrubsole, 2000; Watt, 1995). In British Columbia, the FDRP produced flood hazard maps in partnership with the provincial government that helped municipalities identify a flood regulatory standard and make development decisions with some understanding of flood risk (Doughty-Davies, 1976). After three decades of leadership, the provincial government in 2003 took the major step of devolving responsibility for flood management to municipalities, without transferring the resources or revenue streams to handle those new responsibilities. Municipalities have ever since been trying to catch up to these duties, with highly uneven outcomes across the province (Stevens and Hanschka, 2014a; Stevens and Hanschka, 2014b). The federal government backstops a discretionary agreement with the provinces called the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangement (DFAA), which provides financial assistance to communities in the event that uninsured disaster losses exceed what the local government can cover. Facing growing demands for funds, the federal government since 2014 has revised the per capita cost-sharing formula of the arrangement with the provinces to be less burdensome and pursued a new national market for private flood insurance in Canada (Oulahen, 2015; Thistlethwaite, 2017).
These three major policy moves have left a vacuum of leadership at higher levels of government, creating the conditions for neoliberalized flood management that emphasizes individualized responsibility for flood management to municipalities and residents. Neoliberals claim this type of devolution of authority is democratization, by giving more power to local governments (Purcell, 2009). Municipalities in BC have responded to provincial downloading in variable ways. Some cities are very progressive in local planning and policy efforts to reduce risk and adapt to climate change impacts, while others are much less so, with different levels of public involvement in decision making and openness of relevant information and data (Gouett-Hanna et al., 2022). Some municipalities have even chosen to raise capital for adaptive infrastructure works by selling municipal green bonds on the private finance markets (Weber and Saravade, 2019). The federal government, for its part, has gone from leading the FDRP and compensation of disaster losses through DFAA to actively recruiting and promoting private overland flood insurance for homeowners, which had not been available in Canada before 2015 (Government of Canada, 2014). In seeking to transfer its responsibility for compensating the costs of flood damage to private insurers, overland flood coverage is currently an optional product with growing availability across the country. The result is that some people who can afford it will buy it, and those who do not will be ineligible for government assistance because flood is now considered an insurable peril. The private insurance industry and federal government have together created a narrative that the state is unable to handle flood risk on its own (IBC, 2019). Insurers have thus become a major player in flood risk management without being subject to any kind of democratic oversight. They are not accountable for how decisions on availability, premium price, and incentives like deductibles affect how people live in flood prone areas. The (re)insurance industry, in its global recurrent crisis cycle of overaccumulation in soft markets and devaluation through disaster losses, provide a “catastrophic fix” for big capital by making climate change impacts a driver of growth (Johnson, 2015). Facing this shifting landscape of privatized and devolved responsibility for flood management at upper levels of government, municipalities must find their footing amid an increasingly important role in a neoliberalized flood management regime.
Planning for use values or values-based planning?
As neoliberalism began replacing Keynesian welfare state public policy in the 1970s, the dominant model of urban planning was undergoing a change from the rational comprehensive model to a communicative approach. The communicative turn in planning emphasized the active involvement of citizens in the planning process and their participation in decision making, in response to the previous technocratic model of expert-led planning which generally ignored local perspectives. While it succeeded in adding more seats to the planning table than had been behind the closed door of the rational comprehensive model, the communicative approach has in many cases served as an enabler of neoliberal hegemony in urban policy (Purcell, 2009). It has tended to neglect underlying political economic structures, reinforcing and legitimizing uneven social and environmental outcomes in planning decisions (Naess, 2015). In communicative planning, Purcell (2009) argues, citizens might have some power to influence decision making but their range of choice is often so narrow that it can hardly be considered a decision at all. Instead of focusing on matters of planning process such as communication, participation, and deliberation, some planners have called for a counter-hegemonic planning practice in order to shift power relations (Holgersen, 2020; Sandercock, 1998). Such a practice would plan for use values rather than exchange values. It would consider what urban space means to people and how they ascribe value to using it over and above the capitalized, monetary value of that land as private property. In the current complementary arrangement of neoliberalism and communicative planning, private property ownership and exchange value are privileged in decision making, and those who own private property are the stakeholders typically included in the planning process.
Like everything else in the capitalist political economy, land is a commodity. As such, it has two kinds of value: use value and exchange value (Harvey, 1973; Logan and Molotch, 1987). Exchange value is the monetary price in dollars and cents for which a commodity is sold on the open market. For land in Canada and other Western democracies, this is the value that is most familiar. It is the price of private property bought and sold on the real estate market and applies to every kind of land use, including residential, commercial, industrial, and public uses such as parks and school grounds. The use value of a commodity, on the other hand, is the direct utility received from its consumption. Use value is relative; it depends on the needs and wants of the people who consume it (Pivo, 1984). In the case of land, its use value accrues not only to the owner of the property but also to other people who derive utility from that particular use of land. The property owner receives a direct benefit from the land but so too do the people who encounter it and interact with it in their own lives. Land, and the buildings on it, means something to people beyond just those who own it. Use value is tied up in culture and time and wellbeing and other elements often considered intangible, so the context and history of a place must be understood in order to properly consider its use value. Lefebvre's (1996) concept of the right to the city situates the importance of use value over that of exchange value. It does not accept the privileging of market forces and private property rights as the only way to organize urban space. Rather, those who derive use value from the space can and should use it, or “appropriate” it by making it their own, and participate in decision making about how it is used (Purcell, 2013).
The idea of planning for use values over exchange values raises considerations and implications for flood management. Flood-prone areas—coastal zones, lakefronts, riverine properties, and other floodplains—are valuable real estate because of the environmental rewards they provide. Their exchange value is often considerably higher than comparable inland property because people are attracted to the environmental amenities that come with the location, such as proximity to water and nice views, and are willing to pay a premium for it. Processes of facilitation enable powerful, wealthy groups of people to pursue the environmental rewards that come with living in flood prone areas through institutional arrangements that externalize much of the cost and simultaneously marginalize others (Collins, 2010; Oulahen et al., 2019b). Real estate pressure and speculation continue to drive property values upward in coastal cities around the world, where sea level rise is expected to increase average annual losses from flooding by 100 times or more even after controlling for economic growth and coastal subsidence (Hallegatte et al., 2013). In Miami, for example, where sea level rise and the city's porous limestone foundation make traditional protective infrastructure particularly ineffective, insurance-linked securitization serves as socio-ecological fix for capitalism in a changing climate. New insurance products and financial instruments link capital markets to coastal homeowners in Florida, allowing development to continue in highly exposed places and increasing future risk, but enabling continued property-based accumulation (Johnson, 2015). Institutional investors securitize insurance policies that cover flood losses, providing a reserve of capital that allows the (re)insurance market to expand despite growing flood exposures, in what Taylor (2020) calls a real estate risk fix. In Metro Manila, post-disaster planning after Typhoon Ondoy displaced and relocated informal settler families in exposed areas to make room for public-private development projects, creating a spatial fix for capital in the name of resilience (Ajibade, 2022).
The use value of coastal and waterfront land in Canada is important to people, again for its environmental rewards and resources. When it is public space, people pursue recreational and leisure activities there—walking, cycling, relaxing alone, or meeting others in a place near water. Urban residents can appropriate coastal lands and shorelines of rivers by using them and making them their own. When people are using those lands by walking, playing, swimming, visiting, and enjoying the view, it is an illustration of how use value can dominate exchange value. Use value represents how a commodity satisfies a social need. The use value of land is how it benefits the people who use it in some way. There is no common metric for use values—the use value of something means different things to different people—so use values cannot be quantitatively compared. The only way for value to be quantified is by exchange value, which serves to homogenize commodities so that they can be compared and exchanged, or sold, on the market.
The use value of coastal land is diminished when its exchange value and private property rights are privileged. This is the tension in land, or place, as a commodity: the contradiction between its use value and exchange value (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Use value is enjoyed by everyone who uses it. Exchange value is reaped only by the person who owns it. Exchange value and private property rights separate decisions about how the land is used from all the people who previously used it, making those decisions the purview of the owner alone, in concert with the state. When a coastal property is sold as real estate, a developer can buy the materials and labor power required to “improve” upon that land with houses or condominium buildings, and then sell those units at a profit due to the surplus labor that went into constructing the built environment. The environmental and human processes that made that land habitable and desirable—the geophysical characteristics of the coastal zone and the dredging, transport, infilling, and piling of sediment that turned what was naturally a wetland into land that can be built upon—are not accounted for in the exchange value of the property. The developer and the people who buy the houses or condos do not see all the things that went into making that landscape desirable, or produced its use value; the only thing they see is the price, or exchange value, of the land as private property. In purchasing it, they exploit the environmental and human forces that make the land desirable. Exchange value consumes those forces. The developer does not make so much profit from the land because of the buildings constructed on it or the labor and materials that went into those buildings, but because the land and its physical attributes are already so valuable (Cronon, 1991). This is the exploitation of the environment more than the exploitation of materials and labor.
In a capitalist society, the use value of land as a commodity is not enough to keep it from being sold as private property for its exchange value, so the state must step in to protect use values through zoning by-laws and development regulations. By designating some land as public, meaning owned and controlled by government, members of that public are allowed to use it for “free,” or for a small user-fee in the case of some protected areas, such as conservation areas and provincial and federal parks. It is free as in the government pays for it with tax revenues from the public for whom the land is set aside. By keeping it public, however, the government misses the opportunity to reap the exchange value of the land by selling it as private property. That exchange value exceeds the associated revenues from taxes, at least in the short term, so there is a monetary price to pay for keeping it public. This cost discourages governments from making development decisions based purely on use values. Planning for use values would allow people to appropriate space, make it their own, and use it to meet their needs. Rather than coastal property fetching a high exchange value as private property then, its use value would be ascribed by how people living in the city use it in their daily lives.
Some progressive municipalities are seeking to make plans and policy that recognize use values while operating in a neoliberal regime that is driven solely by exchange values. Incorporating how people value land in planning decisions may serve to privilege use values, or at least begin to elevate the importance of use values. While planning for use values would be letting people decide how to use urban spaces for themselves, “values-based” planning asks participants, or stakeholders, to articulate how they value those spaces—what it means to them and how they use it. It can be conceived as a way of planning differently while “rolling with” the neoliberal hegemony. Values-based planning seeks to incorporate people's values in decision making and can reveal what people value about a property. If they place importance on certain activities in their lives, they will value the places they do those activities, and be invested in decisions about how that land is used. Values are challenging though to incorporate in planning and management because they are diverse, multifaceted, often abstract, and can be contested (Rawluk et al., 2018). Values-based planning processes draw heavily on qualitative data such as local knowledge, perspectives, and observations (Ramirez and Selin, 2014). Values evolve from relationships between people and a place. For example, Artelle et al. (2018) identify the guiding values of relatedness, respect, and reciprocity among Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand and First Nations on the west coast of Canada that are critical to sustaining a healthy environment and society. Values-based planning draws on some of the participation and deliberation objectives of the communicative approach but seeks to elevate diverse values in decision making.
Coproduction of environment and economy in Vancouver
From the city's initial settlement, Vancouver's environmental characteristics enabled economic growth and, in turn, political economic changes shaped the geophysical environment. The City of Vancouver was first incorporated in 1886 on a settlement previously known as Granville located on the southern shores of the Burrard Inlet. The development of the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway in this area in addition to the deep-water port served as major expansion factors in the following decades (Hutton, 1994), evidenced by Vancouver's rapid population growth from around 1000 residents at incorporation to over 115,000 people by 1921 (Macdonald, 2008). These conditions placed Vancouver among Canada's most important municipalities during a time in which the resource economy was a central motivator of European settlement. Vancouver emerged as the center of British Columbia's staples economy specializing in the export of commodities from forestry, agriculture, fisheries, and minerals (Carpenter and Hutton, 2019). While city boosters have long prized Vancouver's connection to nature through its proximity to mountains and sea, commonly going so far as to claim settlement was cut from “virgin” forest, development was a process of colonial displacement and dispossession of First Nations throughout the region (Harris, 1997).
The early industrial expansion that occurred within the city ensured that economic factors would play a major role in altering the surrounding natural environment. Such industrial activity was clustered along Vancouver's waterways and left a lasting imprint on the city's landscape. The industrial zoning of waterfront land through the 1970s, seen in blue hatching in Figure 1, shows this development pattern dominated for much of the city's history. In False Creek, resource processing industries—mainly pulp and lumber mills—dominated the area while fish canneries and sawmills were built along the Fraser River (Hutton, 2011). To accommodate such heavy industrial operations, these waterways were subjected to filling and other physical alterations. False Creek, which previously extended kilometers further inland as a natural wetland, underwent significant filling in the early 1900s (Wernick et al., 2012). Similarly, nearly the entire Vancouver Harbour has been subjected to historical infilling (Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, 2018). The various changes to Vancouver's natural waterways illustrate how “under the growth-orientated, competitive and labour-value orientated conditions specific to capitalism, nature itself becomes internal to the economic system” (Castree, 2000: 26). These physical alterations would increase future flood risk by reducing the natural dissipation of floodwaters while leaving assets exposed to future sea level rise.
1974 City of Vancouver zoning map (City of Vancouver Planning Department, 1974).
Municipal plans and the objectives they pursue influence future vulnerability and exposure to natural hazards due to the lasting impact they have on urban form. The Plan for the City of Vancouver, known as Bartholomew's Plan, was the first iteration of a comprehensive plan for the city. The plan was completed in 1928 but was then revised following amalgamation with South Vancouver and Point Grey in 1929 (Macdonald, 2008). Prior to this time, planning within the city was done in an area-specific manner and was not subject to the same restrictions imposed by a coordinating mechanism like a comprehensive plan. Among the plan's key guidelines, it was recommended that the False Creek area remain a center of industry by retaining present industries in the area, illustrated in Figure 2, while also encouraging other industrial operations to locate there (Vancouver Town Planning Commission, 1930). The plan also expressed concern about the lack of supervision regarding the mass filling occurring in False Creek. As such the plan recommended the city avoid the complete filling of the waterway and carefully supervise the manner of further filling, a recognition of the link between the health of the environment and economy (Worster, 1993). The plan similarly emphasized the concentration of industrial growth in the Vancouver Harbour due to its close access to the sea and railway network. It was suggested that the city exploit the remaining 29 percent of undeveloped waterfront in the harbor for industrial purposes to maximize the economic advantage of the location (Vancouver Town Planning Commission, 1930).
Canadian Pacific railway yards at the height of industrial activity in False Creek (Price Family, 1913).
The plan also set aside large areas to be protected from development to ensure resident access to coastal environmental amenities was maintained in the future. The effort to establish public parks on waterfront land was hampered by the privileging of private property ownership and exchange value over use value. This is especially true on the Vancouver waterfront along English Bay. As of 1930, of the total English Bay waterfront from Stanley Park to the University Lands, 2.6 kilometers of waterfrontage was publicly owned while 6.1 kilometers of waterfrontage was privately owned (Vancouver Town Planning Commission, 1930). Given the reality that waterfront property was mostly in private hands at this stage of the city's history, the challenge of restricting development along Vancouver's shoreline meant that development was allowed to proceed relatively unhindered by land use restrictions. This planning policy shows a clear prioritization of economic productivity of land rather than any potential use value that waterfront land may have to people and flood mitigation. The revised 1929 plan was never legally enacted but the zoning by-laws that accompanied it were adopted, which allowed the plan to serve as a guide for the city's civic departments as well as the Parks Board (Macdonald, 2008). This is evident in the fact that industrial development continued to occur in False Creek, the Vancouver Harbour, and other industrially advantageous areas while a number of parks were developed in areas proposed by the plan.
Although much of the city's early development occurred without regional oversight, there have been several regional plans since the 1960s that have shaped Vancouver's development trends. The first iteration of a regional development plan was introduced in 1966 when the Official Regional Plan for the Lower Mainland Planning Area was created (Taylor, 2019). The central mandate of this plan was the protection of productive farmland and the redirection of all development to previously established urban settlements (Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board, 1966). Restricting development within floodplains was another policy that was embedded within the wider plan. The plan made clear that floodplains would be kept free of urban land uses unless development was already present in such an area, in which case “floodproofing” would be required to prevent flood damages (Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board, 1966). Notably, floodproofing requirements or any articulation of what constitutes floodproofing are absent in the plan, which raises questions about the effectiveness of such a mandate.
The 1980 Plan for The Lower Mainland of British Columbia reaffirmed many of the policies put in place in the original 1966 document and once again made clear that any urban development that had already occurred in floodplains were exempt from floodplain development restrictions. The goal of this action was to minimize damage once again through floodproofing requirements on new and future development. In this updated plan, floodproofing is described as the alteration of buildings or the raising of land levels to withstand a 1-in-200-year flood event (Central Fraser Valley Regional District et al., 1980). Two later regional plans sought to maintain agricultural and floodplain land protection in combination with urban densification to support population growth in the region. The Liveable Region Strategic Plan took a slightly different approach to accomplishing these objectives by establishing a “Green Zone” where development would be inhibited in order to direct development to growth concentration areas, one of which was the Burrard Peninsula (Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1999). Similarly, the Regional Growth Strategy adopted in 2011 reaffirmed previous policies of the last half century through the formation of urban containment boundaries, once again setting defined areas for urban expansion (Metro Vancouver, 2020).
Since it was first applied to the Lower Mainland in the 1960s, regional planning has been rescinded and reaffirmed numerous times as the provincial government changed hands (Taylor, 2019). Consistent during this period was that each iteration of a regional development plan sought to restrict development in agricultural and floodplain areas while directing urban growth to previously urbanized areas. This meant that floodplains in places like the City of Vancouver would continue to be developed to meet regional growth demands. This trend shapes ongoing flood risk governance challenges faced by decision makers in Vancouver and other municipalities in the region. Relative growth rates of suburban cities outside Vancouver have long exceeded that of Vancouver (Wynn, 1992). It is not the only city in which development is bounded by its geography but there is little available space in Vancouver due to its location on the coast and Fraser River, with especially high density in the downtown peninsula. The momentum of urban growth in Vancouver extended beyond its boundaries to nearby suburban communities in the Fraser Valley, such as New Westminster and Surrey (Peck et al., 2014), where floodplain development would continue as a result of zoning allowances. Avoiding development on flood prone land was not a viable option, especially when development on such land was, and continues to be, mandated by regional planning strategies.
With the decline of industrial operations along Vancouver's major waterways, the city sought to redevelop the vacant and degraded properties into housing to accommodate growth. This change would help shift the makeup of the city from a production-based urbanism to a consumption-based urbanism and had a tangible impact on floodplain development. During the 1970s, False Creek South was the focus for redevelopment in which medium density, mixed income housing was built in combination with parks, open spaces, and public walkways on city-owned lands (Hutton, 2004). Flooding was not a major concern in the False Creek area during this time. As indicated in the False Creek Official Development Plan created in 1974, the only flood risk reduction measure employed was a mandatory requirement for stabilized shoreline treatment and public access to the waterfront edge (City of Vancouver, 1998). This was achieved through the creation of the waterfront walkway. Coal Harbour was another area that experienced redevelopment following a decline in the need for industrial port use. As such, the end of the twentieth century saw wide scale redevelopment replacing previous land use with high density residential condominiums in Coal Harbour (Macdonald, 2008). The extensive residential development in these areas typifies Vancouver's planning model in recent history, one that “effectively exchanges (super-profitable) density for (a measure of social) amenity” (Peck et al., 2014: 398). Redevelopment of industrial land in False Creek North took a unique approach compared to False Creek South and Coal Harbour. The land in False Creek North, originally held by the Canadian Pacific Railway, was purchased by the provincial government in 1980 and soon after BC Place Stadium and facilities related to the 1986 Expo were constructed (Eidelman, 2018). The 2000s saw the redevelopment of Southeast False Creek initially with the construction of the 2010 Winter Olympic Village which now serves as market housing for general residential use (Wernick et al., 2012). The self-styled “Vancouverism” trend of increasing urban density in the city's core through relentless condo tower development has contributed to an overheated real estate market while not dissuading suburban development in Richmond, Surrey, Delta, and other communities outside the city (Carpenter and Hutton, 2019; Peck et al., 2014). This has famously attracted real estate investment and speculation, and accelerated the change from a production-based industrial urban form to a consumption-based, real estate-driven (sub)urbanism (Hutton, 2004; Keil, 2018; Quastel et al., 2012), exacerbating development pressure and increasing flood risk in exposed areas.
Flood risk management approaches in Vancouver
The flood risk management literature identifies four broad strategies to reduce exposure to coastal and riverine flood hazards: protect, accommodate, avoid, and retreat (Doberstein et al., 2019). The provincial government outlines these strategies in a sea level adaptation primer produced to support municipal adaptation efforts (British Columbia Ministry of Environment, 2013). The protect approach is defined as a reactive strategy whereby structural mechanisms like dikes and seawalls are employed to protect people, property, and infrastructure. The accommodate approach is described as an adaptive strategy that allows for continued occupation of coastal areas by making changes to human activity and infrastructure, often through elevating land and buildings or creating flood storage areas. The avoid approach is described as ensuring new development does not take place in areas subject to flood risk utilizing tools like land acquisition, zoning restrictions, as well as transfer of development rights to areas of lower risk. Lastly, the retreat approach involves making a strategic decision to relocate or abandon assets in highly exposed areas due to coastal flood hazards. As suggested by the province, these approaches may be applied in combination with one another depending on the nature of the risk.
This prescriptive approach to adaptation focuses on proximate adjustments to behavior rather than on the structural, political economic processes that shape how people interact with flood hazards. An enduring normative view of what adaptation means when applied to hazards, it carries on from earlier cultural ecology and cybernetics research to delineate technocratic, market-based actions that fit within capitalism, neoliberal, or otherwise. The four applied strategies for adaptation are teleological in that they constitute the range of choice available while operating in the capitalist political economy: if something, anything, is done to reduce exposure to flood hazards, it is adaptation (Watts, 1983). The persistence of such an apolitical, naturalizing view of adaptation limits the local options on offer whether the planning process is values-based or not. While risk is produced by the interaction of locational exposure to a hazard and people's vulnerability to it (Wisner et al., 2004), such an approach focuses solely on exposure. Adaptation as currently conceived in practice is not set up to address how the co-production of nature and capital shape flood risk and any responses to it. When both the state and private sector capital are dependent on the economic activity generated in places exposed to flood hazards, adaptation options in neoliberalism refrain from addressing the vulnerabilities created by a system in which exchange values rule. The options available seek to make incremental adjustments—marginal changes—to buildings and infrastructure. These conservative, status quo choices are within the existing planning policy and regulatory toolbox as to be made available but they maintain, or at least do not go so far as to address, existing uneven socioeconomic structures that produce flood risk. Even the retreat strategy, often pointed to as the most radical option, is tied up with all kinds of uneven socioeconomic implications for vulnerability while it is busy addressing exposure, whether it be, for instance, a class-based Anthropocene urbicide that remakes a drowning Miami into the ‘Islands of South Florida’ (Wakefield, 2022) or geoengineering distractions from who is responsible and who should pay for relocating the barrier island residents of Kivalina, Alaska (Millar and Mitchell, 2017).
Historically across the lower mainland of British Columbia, what would be considered the protect approach has been primarily used to defend against flood hazards. This is evidenced by over 500 kilometers of dikes that have been built to variable standards over several decades in order to protect communities from both Fraser River and coastal flooding (Fraser Basin Council, 2016). In contrast to the vast dike network that dominates the region, the City of Vancouver has taken a somewhat unique approach to structural flood risk management. The city prioritized the construction of the seawall at the beginning of the twentieth century, Figure 3, and its construction and expansion continued toward the end of the century (City of Vancouver, 2020). This has been the primary source of protection for all assets from Coal Harbour to Kitsilano Beach. In the Vancouver Harbour, the city has employed various shoreline protection structures, such as rock armor and rip rap, to simultaneously combat flooding and reduce erosion (Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, 2018). Other than a few private dikes located on industrial properties on the Fraser River foreshore, the city has not historically integrated diking into its flood risk management policies (BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, 2015). In alignment with Keynesian economic policies, the construction of flood infrastructure was facilitated by legislation at higher levels of government that enabled financial support for municipalities. Between 1953 and 1970, under the Canada Water Conservation Assistance Act, senior governments could provide grants to local governments covering up to 75 percent of the cost of protective infrastructure (Quinn, 1985). Once the grants were exhausted, provincial and local governments were forced to adjust and implement less costly flood risk reduction measures, typifying the beginning of a transition to neoliberal governance.
False Creek seawall construction (Matthews, 1917).
The Fraser River flood of 1972 caused extensive damage in the interior of the province and acted as a catalyst for new flood policy to be adopted by the provincial government. As such, under the Floodplain Development Control Program (1975–2003), the province managed development in designated floodplains whereby land use zoning and floodproofing measures were employed to diminish potential losses in at risk areas (Fraser Basin Council, 2016). At the local scale, Vancouver was not severely affected by the 1972 Fraser flood and accordingly, it took time for the program to influence the city's municipal policy. In fact, in a municipal engineering report dated May 1972, the conclusion was made that “existing development in the floodplain in the City of Vancouver is not a cause for concern” due to the fact that vital infrastructure was generally located above the highest recorded flood level (Council of the City of Vancouver, 1972: 11). Despite such assertions, the city introduced flood construction levels in the Southlands floodplain in 1986 to ensure all new development was elevated, thereby reducing future flood damages (City of Vancouver, 2018a). The introduction of flood construction levels and their adjustments in the following decades were no doubt influenced by the provincial government, who played a major role in controlling development in high-risk areas during this period. Alongside the extensive floodplain mapping that occurred during this time, flood construction levels would have longstanding impacts on development restrictions in the city's floodplains.
Responsibility for flood risk management has shifted over time as policies at higher levels of government have been introduced and rescinded. The provincial Local Government Act was altered in 2003 to place authority for developing zoning policies and bylaws related to flood management in the hands of municipalities, without any provincial oversight. Under this governance framework, municipalities have been thrust into a leading decision-making position while the province contributes through guideline setting and some funding support. This downward transfer reflects the scalar change in regulation from upper levels of government to local governments found so often in the wider shift from Fordism-Keynesianism to neoliberalism (Keil, 2009). The Government of British Columbia currently contributes to flood risk management funding by reviewing applications under the Dike Maintenance Act and allocating funds through similar infrastructure improvement programs (Fraser Basin Council, 2016). Other than publishing guidance documents like the Flood Hazard Area Land Use Management Guidelines and the Sea Level Rise Adaptation Primer, the province has employed a hands-off approach by allowing municipalities to use individual discretion when addressing flooding.
The downloading of responsibility for flood risk reduction implicates private businesses and homeowners, who are forced to accept greater responsibility for managing risk through measures such as physical retrofitting of property or purchasing flood insurance. Neoliberal responsibilization for flood risk extends what had been previously attributed to the state, for example, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) designating “special flood hazard areas” and asking floodplain homeowners to accept higher insurance premiums (Davis, 1998; Desfor and Keil, 2000), and broadens it to big capital. The City of Vancouver has responded to this in part by requiring private developers to engage in and actually do the work of adaptation, thereby managing flood risk by leveraging private developers through what can be viewed as a surcharge to build on floodplain land. In practice, private developers implement much of the adaptation measures happening in the city, through the flood construction levels, setbacks, and protective infrastructure that are required with the approval of their development applications. For instance, Coal Harbour's development plan specifies that developers are responsible for financing half the cost of saltwater pumping stations (City of Vancouver, 2002). In other cases, development firms are required to contribute directly to the extensive flood protection network. In False Creek, developers are required to either fund or construct shoreline protection apparatuses (City of Vancouver, 1998). When flood risk reduction or adaptation is predicated on development there are all kinds of perverse incentives for building on flood zones; real estate pressure drives prices higher on new development, people are willing to pay a premium for waterfront proximity, and municipalities are dependent on growing the property tax base to fuel municipal revenue, all of which fuels recursive development pressure. Developers incorporate prescriptive adaptation measures in construction and homeowners purchase insurance to protect against any losses, enabling adaptation as a socio-ecological fix.
The legislative changes that occurred in 2003 further exacerbated challenges the City of Vancouver previously faced when it came to addressing flood hazards. The population growth the city has continued to experience since its incorporation has meant that development pressures on floodplains often overcome concerns surrounding building in high risk areas. The challenge of protecting existing infrastructure in floodplains has also meant that decision makers must come up with innovative solutions to protect it from flooding while preserving current land uses. Transferring the onus for physical adaptation to private developers has thus become highly attractive for financially restricted municipal governments with competing priorities. Furthermore, the existing infrastructure the city relies on to defend against flood hazards has been deemed unsuitable for long term protection by recent assessments. The seawall, for example, was not built to accommodate anticipated sea level rise and greater coastal storm surge intensity set to occur in the coming decades (Northwest Hydraulic Consultants, 2014). Upgrading infrastructure like the seawall and other shoreline protection are among several challenges faced by the municipality in lacking the previous funding support to address these significant issues.
Flood risk management policy in the City of Vancouver continues to be epitomized by structural flood protection financed partially or entirely by developers combined with accommodation tools including setbacks and flood construction levels. City policy mandates that all new buildings developed in floodplains must meet the 4.6 meter flood construction level while maintaining a setback of 30 meters from the Fraser River, and 15 meters from the Burrard Inlet, English Bay or False Creek (City of Vancouver, 2014). This arrangement essentially places the burden of adaptation in the hands of developers as they absorb the cost of elevating new construction while simultaneously financing flood control structures and pumping stations. The city's floodplains are currently afforded some protection by aging protective structures like the seawall, shoreline armoring structures, and to a lesser extent, several dikes (Deering Island and the River District, for example). However, it has become clear that this combination of approaches is no longer acceptable for long-term management of flood hazards given updated sea level rise projections exceeding the design parameters of such infrastructure. Currently the city is exploring potential adaptation solutions that would be suitable to implement in the highest risk areas under the Coastal Adaptation Plan (City of Vancouver, 2018b).
Values-based planning for sea level rise in Vancouver
In an effort to move away from the expert-driven approach to planning and flood management that historically occurred in Vancouver, the municipal government has recently employed a more inclusive approach to addressing coastal flood hazards. Values-based planning for sea level rise in Vancouver is principally administered through the Coastal Adaptation Plan. The planning program seeks to determine the overall risk, vulnerability, and possible consequences of sea level rise within the city and develop feasible adaptation opportunities (City of Vancouver, 2018b). To date, it has carried out two distinct projects to engage stakeholders and develop solutions in the city's highest risk floodplains: the first phase of the Coastal Adaptation Plan focuses on the Fraser River Foreshore while the second phase focuses on False Creek (City of Vancouver, 2021). The program is intended to engage various stakeholders in discussing sea level rise and its associated risks using a values-based approach to develop design principles that will guide future adaptation efforts.
In the first phase of the Coastal Adaptation Plan, focusing on the Fraser River floodplain, a diverse set of stakeholders were engaged using a participatory approach. Nearly 1400 residents, various business and asset owners, as well as Musqueam First Nation staff and community members were involved in the process through multiple rounds of workshops, open houses, and surveys conducted over a seven-month period. Discussions with participants uncovered several values that should be elevated in addressing risk along the Fraser River, including communities and people, the environment, health and safety, infrastructure and transportation, the local and regional economy, culture and heritage, and recreation. There were also adaptation-related concerns associated with the values identified through the engagement process, including property value losses, permanent displacement of residents, damage and loss of intertidal habitat, and disruptions to essential services and infrastructure, in addition to loss of access to the river (City of Vancouver, 2018b). Among the most significant deliverables of the first phase of the plan was a set of design principles that provides direction for the evaluation and selection of potential adaptation options that reflect some version of the protect, accommodate, avoid, and retreat strategies. The principles were based on feedback from stakeholders but ultimately developed by the project consultant team. The principles were identified as adaptability (flexible options that can be adjusted to future climate conditions), co-benefits (support community values), nature (protect habitat and expand riparian areas), safe-to-fail infrastructure systems (minimize risks to lifeline services), safety and public health (prioritize built in redundancy and minimize risk to people where possible), and access (improve access to river and maintain recreational opportunities) (City of Vancouver, 2018b).
The second phase of the Coastal Adaptation Plan, focusing on the False Creek area, was heavily informed by the values and design principles identified in the Fraser River project. The second phase was intended to identify and confirm values that will guide future adaptation efforts as well as explore possible adaptation options with a higher degree of depth and detail. The project involved over 2000 residents, business owners, utility operators, and Musqueam First Nation members through an engagement program that included workshops, community conversations, surveys, and digital outreach strategies (City of Vancouver, 2021). The participants of this engagement process largely confirmed the applicability of the community values identified during the Fraser River project phase to the False Creek floodplain. Participants identified several gaps and concerns related to these values specific to the False Creek area though, including maintaining existing housing stock, equitable distribution of adaptation efforts, potential damage to the seawall and recreational routes, the economic impact flood adaptation may have on small businesses located on Granville Island, in addition to potential loss of outdoor space were all identified. The False Creek phase reaffirmed the design principles generated in the Fraser River project as foundational guidelines for future adaptation. Findings from the False Creek engagement program “clearly indicated that most participants and respondents felt the design principles were comprehensive and covered all their concerns” (City of Vancouver, 2021: 73).
The importance and integration of community values and design principles will ultimately be determined in future project phases. According to the City, “measures will be developed for the identified values and will be used along with more technical engineering and risk criteria to help more fully evaluate coastal adaptation management options” (City of Vancouver, 2021: 76). The next phase of the Coastal Adaptation Plan is focused on a design challenge that will create a vision for flood management in Vancouver. The Sea2City Design Challenge will involve the creation of site-specific flood management designs for four sites in False Creek by two multidisciplinary teams. Resulting designs will be used to inform the eventual implementation of the Coastal Adaptation Plan. The municipal government intends to continue to engage and collaborate with key stakeholders by maintaining a “values-based, participatory process through future project phases” (City of Vancouver, 2021: 81).
Conclusion
The City of Vancouver is pursuing a values-based approach to adaptation planning for flood risks that are increasing due to climate change and development pressures. It is doing so in the context of a neoliberalized flood management regime and an urban environment coproduced by capital and nature. As Vancouver moved from a staples resource-based economy of early colonial capitalism, to a Fordist-Keynesian industrial-based economy, to neoliberalism where the main commodity produced in the city is real estate, coastal and riverine lands have gone from being sites of transportation and manufacturing to high-demand residential areas. Amid relentless development pressure on these places, the local government has turned to private sector capital to fund adaptation measures in exchange for development approval, and a values-based planning program that aims to discern how people use and value flood-prone places. Values-based planning seeks to elevate the diverse values of a broad range of community members about what a place means to the front and center of planning decisions. It is a progressive approach to communicative planning but is not a counter-hegemonic process that plans use values over exchange values. It is how planners in Vancouver are rolling with the neoliberal governance model that now defines flood management in Canada, to try to make development decisions that reflect how people value urban space. This flood risk governance model, however, has implications for how people interact with flood hazards that are beyond the reach of values-based planning and can only be understood through a historical-geographical lens.
Neoliberal flood risk governance entrenches the exchange value of land and private property rights. It individualizes responsibility, with highly uneven outcomes that remake space. Powerful groups of people are facilitated in living in desirable but flood prone areas because they can afford to pay the premium on real estate and purchase private flood insurance. Vulnerable people living in places exposed to flood hazards, on the other hand, will not have insurance coverage, either because it is too expensive or is not available. The state is breaking the existing social contract for flood risk by transferring responsibility to the private insurance industry, contributing at once to hegemonic discourses and a socio-ecological fix for a crisis of overaccumulation (Oulahen, 2021). People protected by insurance will fight to live and stay living in exposed areas, exchange values of property in those areas will increase, and vulnerable people will be marginalized and displaced. This process of “splintering protectionism” leaves the state to underwrite the places and populations not profitable for insurers, and manage any idea of retreat from exposed locations (Johnson, 2015). In transferring risk to insurers, housing markets, lenders, and individuals, a neoliberal flood risk governance model gives more power to actors that are not democratically accountable to the public. Far from neutral, by further capitalizing flood prone landscapes it is a recipe for climate gentrification (Taylor and Aalbers, 2022). In Vancouver, instead of the Fraser River and False Creek floodplains being designated simply as public open space that can be used by all city inhabitants, the municipal government is operating within such a regime by recruiting private sector capital to implement adaptation measures as part of continued development in exposed areas. Planners are seeking to redeem values about these places held by members of the community and charge developers with realizing them. While it cannot elevate use values, values-based planning may be capable of generating ideas and alternatives that challenge prescribed technocratic adaptation measures that target only exposure and not vulnerability.
Highlights
The wider ongoing shift from “government to governance” has caught up to flood risk management in Canada.
Development history of Vancouver and path toward flood risk governance illustrate coproduction of urban landscape, capital, and flood risk.
Elevating use value of land is beyond reach of even progressive values-based planning within a neoliberal risk governance model.