A New Space of Evaluation:

To Be Done with the Planner-Judge

IASTE 2022 Conference: Rupture and Tradition
National University of Singapore, December 2022

Foong P. Chan, PhD

City of Vancouver Planning Department

Assembled on Unceded Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh Territories

Contact: patrickfoong.chan@gmail.com | posing.urbanite@gmail.com
Introduction

Sections from Vancouver’s By-Laws and Guidelines

By-Laws are often posited as Planning’s Unquestioned / Unquestionable Ground,
which in turn reproduces the “Planner-Judge” Figure.
Introduction

PLANNER-JUDGE
Aims + Questions

PAPER’S WORKING QUESTIONS

How may the encounter between by-laws (including the
Planning Department) and a project (including the
applicants) move beyond the hierarchies and binaries of
the “Court of Planning”?

How to foster new relations and behaviours with each

other that can increase our capacities to act, transform,
and cultivate new desires outside imperial law?
Theoretical Framework

SPINOZA’S CONCEPT OF A BODY

“What constitutes the form of the individual consists
the union of the bodies.”
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“If two or multiple bodies come together and unite their

strength, they have jointly more power, and
consequently more right over nature than both of them
separately, and the more there are that have so joined in
alliance, the more right they all collectively will possess.”
- Baruch Spinoza, A Political Treatise
Project in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver

Neighbourhood Setting
• Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood
• High Homelessness, Overrepresented by
Indigenous Populations
• Corner Lot, Site Area 120 ft. x 120 ft.
Applicant
• Indigenous Senior Housing Provider (Non-Profit)
Project in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver

Anticipated By-Law & Design Guidelines

• Downtown Eastside Official Development Plan
• Permitted Plot Ratio 7.00
• Permitted Height 120 ft. (~12 Storeys)
• L-Shape Block
• L-Shape Footprint for Corner Lots
• Maximise Natural Light into all Units
• Strong Streetwall Expression on both
Main and Side Streets
• Generous Courtyard at Read-End of Site
Project in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver

Site Constraints
• Unconsolidated SE Corner
• Existing Older Apartment Building with
Low-Income Housing Units
• Impacts L-Shape Building’s Developability
• Impacts Subsequent Liveability
Project in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver

Alternate Solution to L-Shape (Initial Option)

• Two Block Scheme
• North-Block (12 Storeys)
• South-Block (9 Storeys)
• 25 ft. Wide Courtyard
• Drawbacks
• Liveability Issues: Inadequate Natural
Lighting into Narrow Courtyard and
Courtyard-Facing Units
• Lack-of-Liveability compounds onto the
hardship the Seniors endured during
Residential School
Project in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver

Alternate Solution to L-Shape (Revised Option)

• Two Block Scheme (Revised)
• North-Block (12 + 3 = 15 Storeys)
• South-Block (6 Storeys)
• 25 ft. Wide Courtyard
• Adjustments
• Liveability Issues improved with more Natural
Light into Courtyard and Units
• Legal Mechanism needed for Height Variance
• “Hardship Clause” in City of Vancouver’s
Zoning and Development By-Laws, which permit
variances due to site-based hardships
Why Senior Management were Hesitant to Support Variance

MANAGEMENT’S REASONS FOR INTIAL HESITANCE

• Inadequate liveability may not count as hardship, as the initial
alternate two-block scheme can achieve the density without
height-adjustment.
• Hardship Clause applies only to physical site hardships, so
colonialism-related hardships cannot be factored.
• By-laws must have universal applicability for all developers –
market and non-profit.
• Height-overage disrupts the good streetwall proportions and the
neighbourhood’s image of good urbanism.
Imperial Power Structures Remains in Approval Process

… BUT, the process retains the imperial power structures,

hierarchies and binaries, and which privileges the planner-judge figure.
Does Law = Good… Always?

HOW (BY)LAW VALIDATES ITS CLAIM OF THE “GOOD”

1. Assumes everything is subsumable and judgeable under existing
legal concepts Law sees itself as
2. Things judged to be the “unlawful” still remain within law’s immutable since
predetermined categories it represents the
3. Things that are not subsumed as lawful (or unlawful) are immutable good
expected to be better moulded to law’s categories
- Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of Law
Regulating Eyes on the Street… and its Limits

Is “Eyes on the Street”

and care for each other
in a neighbourhood
reducible to a fixed
glass-to-wall ratio?
Circular Logic isn’t Uncommon

The By-Law itself is

THE LAW IS THE GOOD IS exalted as the Ideal,
THE LAW rather than it being a
THE GOOD
reference of an ideal
urbanism.
Unsettling Empire’s Judgement

AGAIN… HOW TO
UNSETTLE EMPIRE’S
STRUCTURE OF
JUDGEMENT?
Humour and Irony Contra Lex

HUMOUR AND IRONY’S UNDOING OF LAW

“Humour and irony subtend a possibility for social and political
thought and true apprehension of movements and desires.”
- Alexandre Lefebvre, A New Image of Law

“The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears
as an art of principles, of ascent towards the principles and of
overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an art of
consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls.”
- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Reversing the Roles

Typical Encounter: Reversing the Roles:

The Project / Applicant is to mould itself to fit The “Judge” and the “Judged” are reversed; with
the Court of Planning’s Image of the Good City the planning department / planner needing to
satisfy the queries of the project / applicant

Parts/Forces that Parts/Forces that

Make up the Make up the Court
Project / Applicant of Planning
How to Make Yourself a Franken-ByLaw Body?

Typical Encounter: Decomposing The Bodies: Recomposing The Bodies

The Project / Applicant is to mould itself to fit The Bodies of the Planning-Court (Incl. By-Law The Parts and Forces can be reconnected in New
the Court of Planning’s Image of the Good City Documents) and the Project are fragmented into Ways to Express New Relations and Behaviours
their Constitutive Parts and Forces that may produce New Modes of Care and Ethics

Parts/Forces that Parts/Forces that

Make up the Make up the Court
Project / Applicant of Planning
Reflections

SOME REFLECTIONS ON LIMITS

• The urgency to build social housing fast may leave not
much space and time to experiment on how the bodies
of by-laws and projects may be recomposed or flipped.
• The Planner-Judge is intertwined with Dominant
Economic Modes. Undoing one requires undoing both.

However…

• These Experiments can still proceed in studios and

“para-planning” organisations and universities to fuel
other ways to challenge how to dwell on stolen lands.