Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No.

10, 1953–1982, September 2004

Post-industrialism, Post-modernism and the

Reproduction of Vancouver’s Central Area:
Retheorising the 21st-century City

Thomas A. Hutton
[Paper first received, July 2002; in final form, April 2004]

Summary. Planning and local policies, informed recurrently by theories of transformative

urban development, have represented influential (and at times decisive) agencies of change in
Vancouver’s metropolitan core. A commitment to principles of post-industrialism in the 1970s,
realised through the conversion of False Creek South from an obsolescent industrial site to a
medium-density, mixed-income residential landscape, effectively broke the mould of the mid-cen-
tury urban core. The seminal Central Area Plan (approved 1991) enabled the comprehensive
reordering of inner-city space, exemplified by a post-modern diversity, complexity and interde-
pendency of territory and land use, and a strategic reversal of the employment–housing
imbalance in the core. The city has broadly succeeded in asserting public interests as contingen-
cies of change within the core, but these processes have created new social conflicts, tensions and
displacements, as well as a glittering and paradigmatic 21st-century central city. In theoretical
terms, the Vancouver experience marks a clear break from the classic model of the post-indus-
trial city, the latter typified by a monocultural, office-based economy, extreme spatial asym-
metries of investment and development and modernist form and imagery. At the same time,
emergent production clusters, residential mega-projects and spaces of consumption and spectacle
in the central area present marked contrasts to the spatial disorder and chaotic patterns of
‘incipient’ post-modernism, underscoring an exigent need for innovative and integrative retheo-
risation.

1. Introduction: Dialectics of Policy and

Process in the Central City
Since the 1960s, market forces have compre-
hensively reshaped the metropolitan core,1 as
seen in the collapse of inner-city manufactur-
ing, and in the expansion of intermediate
service industries and related labour cohorts.
Episodes of industrial restructuring have
transformed the form, space-economy and
employment base of the central city within
advanced and transitional societies
(Gottmann, 1970; Wu and Yeh, 1999). At the
same time, social processes (intersecting
with industrial change and occupational

Thomas A. Hutton is in the Centre for Human Settlements, School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British
Columbia, 242-1933 West Mall, Vancouver, V6T 1Z2, British Columbia, Canada. Fax: 604 822 6164. E-mail: thut-
ton@interchange.ubc.ca. John Friedmann and David Ley read an earlier draft of this paper and each generously provided
instructive insights for subsequent iterations. The author would also like to acknowledge the comments of two anonymous referees,
as well as the constructive editorial advice of Ronan Paddison. Eric Leinberger of the UBC Department of Geography prepared
the maps, while Karen Zeller and Christine Evans of the UBC Centre for Human Settlements contributed essential technical
support. Michael Gordon of the City of Vancouver Planning Department assisted with access to City planning reports and other
documents, and willingly shared his deep knowledge of the Vancouver Central Area. Finally, research for the study was supported
in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Council Grant No. 503-2001-0036.
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/04/101953–30  2004 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080/0042098042000256332
1954 THOMAS A. HUTTON
trends) have been influential in the evolution
of the central city’s class structure and resi-
dential morphology, as observed in the social
upgrading of older inner-city residential
neighbourhoods (Smith and Williams, 1986),
in the ascendancy of a professional class of
élite service industry workers (Hamnett,
1994) and in the social polarisation of core
area communities (Smith, 2000). More re-
cently, the convergence of social processes
and market trends has underpinned the rapid
growth of the urban cultural economy (Scott,
1997), constituent industries and institutions
of which are typically concentrated within
central districts of the city.
Over the past two decades, market and
social dynamics have assumed a more perva-
sively exogenous character, in the form of
global processes of growth and change.
These include the growing presence of multi-
nationals within the central business district
(CBD) (Daniels, 1993); the increasing
influence of foreign direct investment (FDI)
in the central city’s property market (Edging-
ton, 1996); the importance of high-profile
(and high-externality) ‘urban mega-projects’
(UMPs) in the comprehensive redevelopment
of inner-city spaces (Olds, 1995); the growth
of foreign and expatriate labour cohorts
working within the core of ‘global cities’
(Sassen, 1991); and new enclaves of inter-
national immigrant communities situated
within and proximate to the inner city, seen
as defining elements of the ‘transnational
city’ (Smith, 2001). Globalisation has also
underscored the role of central cities as pri-
mary nodes within extensive international
networks of capital, services and information
trade and exchange, as highly specialised
labour markets within emerging international
divisions of labour (Ho, 1991) and as centres
of cultural production (Zukin, 1994). The
central city is thus in many ways the signify-
ing locus of the global or transnational
metropolis.
These processes of restructuring and
globalisation are widely seen as the most
decisive influences on the reshaping of the
metropolitan core, with attendant disloca-
tions of local employment, housing, culture
and identity. That said, local governments
and agencies can contribute to the re-
configuration of the central city’s form,
space-economy and social ecology, having
recourse to a repertoire of policy instruments
which include zoning and land use policies,
development regulations, design guidelines,
public investments, fiscal mechanisms, infor-
mation services and public processes. These
instruments may be deployed singly or in
combination, although their influence is of
course constrained by the power of counter-
vailing market, social and central govern-
ment forces.
This article presents an assessment of the
local planning and policy record in the com-
prehensive reshaping of Vancouver’s metro-
politan core, an experience widely
acknowledged as both distinctive and in-
structive (Cybriwsky et al., 1986; Punter,
2003). To be sure, Vancouver’s central area
bears the familiar imprint of market forces
and social change, but the premise of this
article is that planning values and public
policy interventions have been important
(and in some respects decisive) agents of
transformation in the core (CBD and inner
city) over the past three decades, encompass-
ing periods of destabilising industrial restruc-
turing, accelerating globalisation and shifts
in the nature of local and external (provincial
and federal) political control.
The record of scholarship on Vancouver’s
central area planning and development story
includes well-known research on interdepen-
dencies between social class, political ideol-
ogy and planning innovation (Ley, 1980) and
on the role of the ‘new middle class’ in the
remaking of Vancouver’s central area over
the 1980s (Ley, 1996), as well as Kris Olds’
narrative on the globalisation of False Creek
North (Olds, 2001). Accordingly, emphasis
here will be placed on the extraordinary re-
ordering of inner-city space which has pre-
sented a post-modern exemplar of diversity,
complexity and interdependency associated
in large part with the implementation of the
seminal Central Area Plan, approved De-
cember 1991 (City of Vancouver, 1991). The
Central Area Plan both represented a decis-
ive break with the past (as well as a marked
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
contrast to planning models deployed else-
where), as it consolidated the CBD within a
more restricted territory, privileged housing
and public uses adjacent to this more tightly
bounded CBD, and enabled the rise of a
specialised inner-city ‘New Economy’
shaped by intersections between culture and
technology (Hutton, 2000). But reference
will be made to earlier initiatives which es-
tablished planning as an agency of change
within the metropolitan core, opening with a
realisation of a vision of post-industrialism
which broke the classic mid-century form of
the inner city in the 1970s, and will include
the problematic efforts to reconcile
conflictual social relations associated with
the introduction of new land use regimes
within the core.
Theoretical Reference Points: Problematis-
ing the Narrative
Planning policy in Vancouver, as in other
cities, has at times been influenced by a
complex array of ideologies and concepts,
including elements of rationalism, Marxism,
new urbanism and a more recent engagement
with sustainable development. But amid
these contending ideologies, two influential
theories of urban development, post-industri-
alism and post-modernism, have informed
policy values for decisive periods of the
metropolitan core’s transformation. These
multifaceted theoretical constructs have ap-
plications in the realms of architecture and
urban design, social class reformation, poli-
tics and governance, and epistemology,
among other spheres, and are subject to in-
terpretation and contestation from various in-
tellectual vantage-points. As an analytical
posture, Soja asserts that “post-industrialism
is associated with a deprivileging of industri-
alisation processes as a foundation for study-
ing urban phenomena” (Soja, 2000, p. 165),
although this viewpoint implicitly discounts
the important contributions that service in-
dustry scholars have made to this domain of
inquiry. But here we propose to deploy pre-
cepts of post-industrialism and post-mod-
ernism in a more categorical sense, to inform
1955
an evaluation of defining changes in urban
structure and land use within Vancouver’s
metropolitan core and the expressions (ex-
plicit and implicit) of planning and policy
values underpinning these important dimen-
sions of transformation.
Post-industrialism is interpreted here not
only as a phase of urban development char-
acterised by the contraction of basic manu-
facturing and the supplanting of traditional
industry and labour by service industries and
the centrality of theoretical knowledge (Bell,
1973), but also as an expression denoting
political acceptance of the implications of
industrial restructuring (Bluestone and Har-
rison, 1982; Cohen and Zysman, 1982). A
post-industrial planning agenda may in fact
imply policy commitments to accelerate in-
dustrial restructuring in pursuit of alternative
urban visions and vocations, facilitated in
large part by changes in land use and zoning
policies. At the local scale, where impacts of
industrial decline have been most immedi-
ately felt, political statements of post-indus-
trialism have been socially contested, as the
costs and benefits accruing from restructur-
ing fall unevenly among specific urban
classes and communities (Massey and Mee-
gan, 1980). The post-industrial ethos can,
however, embody more progressive values,
as recurrently observed in the insertion of
important social and environmental concerns.
Post-modernism for the purposes of this
article carries the conventional meaning of
an acknowledgement (and even celebration)
of diversity, pluralism, complexity and ambi-
guity in urban form and land use patterns,
with a corresponding rejection of hegemonic
tendencies and tastes. Ed Soja’s pioneering
research on the decentralised space-economy
of Los Angeles and its related socio-spatial
fragmentation and cultural and ideological
ramifications, stands as a unique and
influential contribution to the notion of the
post-modern city (Soja, 1989). Within the
domains of urban planning and land use,
David Harvey suggests that post-modernism
signifies “a break with the idea that planning
and development should focus on large-
scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically ra-
1956 THOMAS A. HUTTON
tional and efficient urban plans, backed by
absolutely no frills architecture” and pro-
poses instead an acknowledgement of “the
urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a
‘palimpsest’ of past forms superimposed
upon each other” (Harvey, 1990, p. 66). Post-
modern planning styles acknowledge the
need for inclusivity in an increasingly di-
verse and pluralistic urban society. To the
extent that urban planning (including policies
for urban structure and land use) can facili-
tate the territorial claims of increasingly di-
verse social groups and interests,
differentiated by occupation, class, lifestyle
and other signifying attributes, we may at
least provisionally acclaim the virtues of the
post-modern city. After all, the emergence of
new land use patterns more fully reflective of
the social heterogeneity of the city is an
important equity issue, as well as heralding a
new urban aesthetic. At the same time, there
is considerable asymmetry in the relative
power of emergent and long-established
groups in the central city, leading to new
processes of dislocation and displacement
(Schön et al., 1998).
These theoretical precepts, applied cate-
gorically to defining features of urban spatial
structure and land use, can inform and enrich
an analysis of local policy influences on the
reshaping of Vancouver’s metropolitan core.
The central thesis of the article is that the
local policy role in the reconfiguration of the
central area has extended well beyond con-
ventional regimes of regulation, in the form
of development control and growth manage-
ment, to include transformational visions and
assertive implementation programmes at im-
portant points over the past three decades.
Local policy and planning powers have been
deployed in the interests of reproducing Van-
couver’s central area via dialectical relations
with market actors and with certain social
groups. In practice, this has meant accommo-
dating the profit-seeking imperatives of capi-
tal (including both local and foreign
development interests) and facilitating the
emergence of ascendant social contingents,
but has also incorporated the insertion of
broader public values and needs, including
social housing and public amenity.
Further, these new public policy visions
for Vancouver’s central area have been in-
formed by tenets of post-industrialism (from
1972 to the mid 1980s) and post-modernism
(from the late 1980s), and have embodied
principles of progressive public interest, al-
though the balance (and relative weight) of
these interests in cycles of territorial repro-
duction is certainly open to contestation. We
can therefore reference defining spatial as-
pects of these theories to problematise and
interrogate the key episodes in the transform-
ation of Vancouver’s core, expressed in the
following questions. First, in what ways have
post-industrialism and post-modernism
influenced the recasting of local policy vi-
sions for Vancouver’s metropolitan core?
How have these principles been deployed to
assert the broader public interest in the trans-
formation of the core’s spatial structure and
land use patterns? In what respects have the
City’s policies for the core’s transformation,
as expressed in the vernaculars of post-indus-
trialism and post-modernism, constituted a
form of dialectical interaction with social
groups and (more particularly) market actors,
in the sense of a reconciliation of “opposing
social forces” (OUP, 1982, p. 264); or alter-
natively, a capitulation to these tendencies?
What are the principal commonalities (and
discontinuities) which characterise the City’s
planning models deployed during the periods
influenced by post-industrialism and post-
modernism? Finally, how have the City’s
urban structure and land use policies
influenced a reordering of social class (in-
cluding hegemonic relations and new social
conflicts and tensions) within the core and
the city at large, and what implications for
urban studies scholarship arise from this
analysis?
2. Reproducing Vancouver’s Central
Area: Expressions of Post-industrialism,
1972–85
Until the 1960s, Vancouver’s metropolitan
core presented defining features of the classic
regional central place, together with certain
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
Figure 1. The spatial structure of Vancouver’s metropolitan core in the mid 20th century.
elements of the industrial city, although here
(as we shall see) significant aspects of excep-
tionalism can be discerned. The central area
of the city exhibited a basic tripartite struc-
ture comprising: a downtown area which ac-
commodated financial and commercial
functions within the metropolitan region’s
CBD, as well as a diverse range of other
service and quasi-industrial activities within
the CBD fringe; an extensive belt of (mostly
obsolescent) resource processing and associ-
ated manufacturing, together with warehous-
ing, transport and distribution, situated along
the shores of False Creek and the Central
Waterfront; and, older residential neighbour-
hoods and communities, characterised by
small apartments, residential hotels, rooming
houses and wooden single-family housing
(Figure 1).
This basic structure of commercial, indus-
trial and residential uses situated within the
CBD, CBD fringe and inner-city zones was
replicated (with local variation) in many
North American city core areas at mid-cen-
tury and was embodied, with revisions, in the
classic formulations of urban spatial structure
proposed in sequence by Burgess (1925),
Hoyt (1933, 1939) and, later, Harris and
1957
Ullman (1945), but there were distinctive
features of the Vancouver case. Vancouver
was already a ‘service city’ in large part,
with service industries and employment lead-
ing labour force growth in the period 1945–
70 (Barnes et al., 1992, p. 180), underscoring
the centrality of tertiarisation as a process of
urban growth and change in the city and,
more particularly, in the metropolitan core.
The overall form of the city was still very
much low-rise, with few true skyscrapers on
the scale of other North American metropoli-
tan cities, except along the Burrard Street
corridor, which included the art-deco Marine
Building (1930), the Hotel Vancouver (1939)
and the strikingly modernist Burrard Build-
ing (1956) and British Columbia Hydro
office tower (1957), evocations of the mid-
century spirit of modern architecture in Van-
couver (Windsor-Liscombe, 1997). Resi-
dential form within the core was also mostly
low-rise, as seen in the two- and three-storey
wooden structures in Kitsilano, Fairview, the
Downtown Eastside and the West End (Fig-
ure 1), constructed in the early post-colonial
period.
But perhaps the most distinctive (and cer-
tainly most visible) feature of Vancouver’s
1958 THOMAS A. HUTTON
central area at mid-century was the extensive
linear agglomeration of resource processing
and related heavy industry situated along the
margins of False Creek (extending approxi-
mately 8 km around the perimeter; see Figure
1), reflecting Vancouver’s role as the core of
British Columbia’s vast and expansionist sta-
ple economy (Hutton, 1997). As observed by
Barnes et al., “Vancouver lacked traditional
Fordist industries and did not develop into a
classic industrial city”; rather, “such manu-
facturing employment as existed was either
in the processing of staples or the production
of goods for local consumption” (Barnes et
al., 1992, p. 180). Many of these resource
processing and manufacturing operations
were obsolescent if not obsolete, employing
outdated production technologies which gen-
erated high levels of negative externalities in
the form of air and water pollutants, contami-
nated sites and excessive noise. Despite pub-
lic disaffection with the civic blight
represented by the industrial character of
False Creek, city councils tended to resist
pressures for change. As late as 1967, Coun-
cil extended the industrial leaseholds on the
extensive City-owned land on the south
shore and reaffirmed the industrial desig-
nation of False Creek. The City’s decision to
extend security of tenure for obsolescent and
high-externality industries which had pre-
sented a landscape little changed during the
20th century may be attributed to the domi-
nant business-industry composition of Coun-
cil and its essentially economistic policy
values.
TEAM and the Redevelopment of False
Creek South
The City was, however, on the threshold of
important, redefining shifts in social atti-
tudes, which found political expression in the
election of an avowedly reformist Council in
1972, dominated by a mayor and aldermen
affiliated with The Electors Action Move-
ment (TEAM). There were broader (and
powerfully complementary) social and politi-
cal contexts which informed a new urban
policy direction in Vancouver. This story has
been fully elucidated in David Ley’s
influential article (Ley, 1980), but the princi-
pal features included the election of pro-
gressive, centre-left governments both at the
national level (the Liberal government of
Pierre Trudeau elected in 1968) and for
British Columbia (David Barrett and the
New Democratic Party in 1972), which in-
spired (and to some extent enabled) reformist
and political movements at the local level in
Canada; the emergence of a progressive ur-
ban planning ethos which inter alia champi-
oned diversity, a new emphasis on social and
environmental values, and public housing,
exemplified by the scholarship and advocacy
of Jane Jacobs; and the rise of a new service
economy which included a professionalised
occupational structure imbued with cultural
values that contrasted sharply with those of
the old industrial classes it was soon to sup-
plant, as articulated in Daniel Bell’s prescient
volume (Bell, 1973).
TEAM’s platform for the municipal elec-
tions in Vancouver embraced a far-reaching
reformist agenda, but certainly the party’s
proposal to transform False Creek’s environ-
ment from a high-externality, obsolescent in-
dustrial landscape “to a combination of
residential, recreational and ‘clean’ industrial
uses” (quoted in Cybriwsky et al., 1986,
p. 109) was a potent new vision and a
defining policy priority for TEAM when it
swept into office with 9 of 11 Council seats
in the election of 1972. As Ley (1980) ob-
served, TEAM rejected the pro-business (and
pro-growth) biases of its predecessor, the
Non-Partisan Association (NPA), instead de-
claring the virtues of ‘quality of life’, ‘the
livable city’ and ‘people before property’,
consistent with the lifestyle preferences of a
restructured urban society dominated increas-
ingly by an assertive, professionalised ser-
vice workforce.
The defining expression of TEAM’s plan-
ning record was the comprehensive redevel-
opment of City-owned lands on the south
shore of False Creek. The redevelopment
programme included precincts of medium-
density, mixed-income housing, together
with parks and open spaces, public walkways
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
Figure 2. Industrial restructuring, social upgrading and new modernist landscapes in Vancouver’s
metropolitan core, c. 1972–85.
and community facilities, situated between
Granville and Cambie Streets, north of 6th
Avenue (Figure 2). The plan included a
significant social planning dimension, with
865 units of the initial phase accommodating
a mix of families, couples, singles and se-
niors, with one-third of the housing allocated
for low-income occupants and a range of
tenure options including co-ops, subsidised
rental housing and market condominiums
(Cybriwsky et al., 1986, p. 114). Site plan-
ning for the False Creek South redevelop-
ment incorporated not only provision for a
diversity of occupational and social groups,
but also urban design components to foster
social interaction, as a means of breaking
down the alienation of the industrial city.
At one level, the redevelopment of False
Creek South over the 1970s represented an
important example of extensive inner-city
conversion, with obsolescent industrial oper-
ations and buildings cleared for progressive
new housing and open spaces. The project
concept emphasised aesthetics as well as so-
cial ideals, with the creation of a new urban
community accommodated in a high-quality
1959
built environment, situated in a natural set-
ting. But the project marks a more funda-
mental development reorientation and urban
reimaging experience for Vancouver and the
expression of a new and more assertive urban
policy direction. As David Ley noted almost
a quarter of a century ago, the False Creek
South project was
the most dramatic landscape metaphor of
liberal ideology, of the land use implica-
tions of the transition from industrial to
post-industrial society, from an ethic of
growth and the production of goods to an
ethic of amenity and the consumption of
services (Ley, 1980, p. 252).
Taking a longer historical perspective, ac-
knowledging the social criticisms of Marx
and Dickens, the redevelopment of False
Creek South categorically addressed each of
what Asa Briggs had identified as the four
most problematic features of the industrial
city: deterioration of the environment, social
segregation, impersonal human relations and
materialism (Briggs, 1982, p. 29), underscor-
ing the comprehensive nature of the post-in-
1960 THOMAS A. HUTTON
dustrial vision guiding the City’s planning
posture towards this critical urban terrain.
Accelerated Post-industrialism and Points of
Resistance, 1977–85
The City’s redevelopment of False Creek
South conveyed a repudiation of the central
area’s industrial role, as well as an endorse-
ment of the more progressive ideals of social
development and environmentalism. But lit-
tle concern was evinced regarding the evic-
tion of a substantial inventory of industries
and related labour cohorts, or the dislocation
effects on the city’s industrial base as a
whole. No consideration was given to the
possibility of an industrial renewal of the
area, following the (eventual) closure of the
resource processing enterprises and residual
heavy industries.
As a corollary of the accelerated civic
post-industrial agenda represented by the
City’s False Creek South project, the 1970s
also saw a dramatic transformation of the
downtown peninsula, which took the form of
a rapid expansion of the corporate complex
of the CBD (City of Vancouver, 1981), as
well as new high-rise housing (Figure 2).
The rapid ascendancy of the City’s down-
town office sector over the 1970s and 1980s
can be described as a process of ‘hyperspe-
cialisation’—an acceleration of a longer-run
process of functional specialisation within
which the overall growth of services (and
decline of traditional resource processing and
allied manufacturing) was succeeded by the
expansion of higher-order service industries
and the contraction of more routinised ter-
tiary activity. Within Vancouver’s down-
town, the number of business and
professional service firms increased by a
“remarkable 140 per cent” (City of Vancou-
ver, 1982a) between 1966 and 1980, during
which most other service industries experi-
enced relative (retail and wholesale trade) or
even absolute (personal, health and educa-
tional services) decline. As another measure
of the core’s transformation, net rentable
office floorspace in the downtown more than
doubled in the period 1966–82, reaching an
estimated 1.52 million square metres, repre-
senting an annual compound growth rate of 6
per cent per annum (City of Vancouver,
1982a).
The rapid expansion of the CBD’s corpo-
rate complex, coupled with the rezoning and
land use changes in False Creek South, rep-
resented the defining episode of Vancouver’s
comprehensive restructuring experience, but
the physical transformation of the central
area included the development of a new
high-rise residential community in the West
End, immediately to the west of the CBD
(Figure 2). Again the City was an important
agency of change in the reconfiguration of
the core, as Council had rezoned much of the
West End in 1956 from low- to medium
density (six-storey) residential to an RM-4
Multiple Dwelling District Schedule (High
Density) (personal communication, B. El-
liott, City of Vancouver Planning Depart-
ment, 2001). During the 1970s and 1980s,
this markedly greater development potential
was largely realised and the West End
emerged as one of Canada’s densest residen-
tial communities. Over a compressed period
of a decade and a half, the growth of the
CBD and the West End high-rise residential
district generated a new, explicitly modernist
landscape, presenting a striking departure
from the relatively low-rise patterns of Van-
couver at mid-century depicted in Figure 1.
This reconfigured central area, driven (or
endorsed) by City Council policy statements
and programmes, accommodated both the
workplace and the residential needs of an
ascendant services class in Vancouver and
was broadly seen as a progressive phase of
the city’s development. Even within the busi-
ness community, which had largely resisted
the deindustrialisation of False Creek South
through the agency of the Board of Trade
and other bodies, a significant contingent—
probably a majority—now saw the benefits
of policy-accelerated industrial restructuring,
with respect to opportunities for developers,
real estate and property specialists, archi-
tects, consultants and other professionals.
But the City’s post-industrial agenda cre-
ated social costs and disaffected constituen-
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
cies, as well as beneficiaries. Concerns about
gentrification and the erosion of traditional
working-class neighbourhoods in the core
and in East Vancouver, coupled with a grow-
ing perception in some quarters of rapid in-
dustrial decentralisation and decline both in
the central area and the City as a whole, were
inserted into local policy debates and public
discourse. A report prepared by the Overall
(or policy) Division of the City Planning
Department in 1977, only a year after the
TEAM administration, riven by factionalism,
had lost control of Council, recommended
the formation of a new municipal agency to
preserve industry in the city, implicitly chal-
lenging the post-industrial biases of the
TEAM years. A year later, an Industrial De-
velopment Office (later rebranded as the
Economic Development Office to address
broader sectoral concerns and opportunities)
was established. And in 1980, a new Council
was elected with Michael Harcourt as Mayor.
Harcourt (who had been a member of the
TEAM Council of 1972–76) was elected
with the endorsement of the Vancouver and
District Federation of Labour and strongly
supported the idea of a viable manufacturing
sector within a vigorous urban economy, as
well as a social democratic policy agenda
which included investments in a range of
social and cultural programmes.
The City’s commitment to post-industrial-
ism as a tenet of policies for urban structure
and land use was tested in two separate
strategic planning exercises during Har-
court’s mayoralty (1980–86), in the form of a
growth management process (the Coreplan)
led by the Overall Planning Division and,
secondly, an economic development pro-
gramme led by the Mayor and supported by
Finance Department policy staff. The Core-
plan exercise was initiated principally in re-
sponse to concern about externalities of
office development within the CBD (City of
Vancouver, 1983), but the core’s industrial
future was part of its remit.
In a 1982 volume of the Quarterly Review,
a digest of City trends and policy issues
published by the Overall Planning Division,
the City’s industrial planning specialist
1961
raised concerns about the prospective post-
industrial trajectory of False Creek North, the
largest remaining industrial district in the
core following the redevelopment of False
Creek South (City of Vancouver, 1982b).
Here, the agency of post-industrialism was
not the City but, rather, the provincial
government, which was beginning to as-
semble land resources for the 1986 inter-
national exposition, Expo ‘86 (which the
City had initially opposed, to the extent of
submitting a letter of opposition to the Bu-
reau of Expositions in Paris) and for the
construction of a domed stadium, to seat
60 000. These projects would precipitate, as
expressed in the industrial planner’s report, a
“rather sudden disruption of industrial ac-
tivity and established transport systems” in
the area and it was further acknowledged that
“virtually all industrial establishments on the
north shore of False Creek will have to relo-
cate”; this would involve rail yards and ware-
houses, freight forwarding and trucking
operations, and a sawmill (the last such facil-
ity in the area), as well as smaller operations
(City of Vancouver, 1982b, p. 55). The same
report estimated that about 4000 manufactur-
ing and production-related jobs would be lost
through displacement and succession on the
site and that, given the patterns of interfirm
linkages within the core, other enterprises
would be negatively affected by this ‘sudden
disruption’ of industrial activity, underscor-
ing the role of public agencies in the acceler-
ation of deindustrialisation in the city. As an
important secondary effect, industrial em-
ployment losses associated with the conver-
sion of the False Creek North industrial lands
(following the earlier redevelopment of False
Creek South) contributed significantly to the
erosion of long-established working-class
neighbourhoods in East Vancouver. This at-
tenuation of the city’s industrial class consti-
tuted a critical pre-condition for gentri-
fication and the subsequent accommodation
of new immigrant groups from the mid 1980s
to the present, demonstrating the linkage be-
tween major changes in urban land use and
social class reformation.
The Coreplan’s purpose as a growth man-
1962 THOMAS A. HUTTON
agement exercise for the central area was
seriously compromised by a severe recession
in the early 1980s, precipitated by com-
modity price shocks within the provincial
staple sector. By 1983–84, unemployment in
metropolitan Vancouver approached 14 per
cent, levels not experienced since the de-
pression of the 1930s. The Coreplan was
effectively abandoned in 1985, its concerns
about the industrial dislocation impacts of
redevelopment of False Creek North muted
by the more grandiose globalisation visions
associated with the 1986 international expo-
sition. By 1985, there was also agreement on
the part of the city and provincial govern-
ment that industrial redevelopment would not
be an option for the north shore of False
Creek following the exposition (P. Leckie,
City of Vancouver Finance Department, per-
sonal communication, 1985). At the same
time, City Council approved in 1983 its first
comprehensive economic development strat-
egy, which largely subordinated possibilities
of industrial renewal in favour of strategies
for advanced services (banking and finance,
producer services, higher education, gateway
functions). There were to be sure voices of
(and for) the city’s industrial constituency,
both corporate and labour, within the city’s
economic advisory commission which had
prepared the strategy, as well as a number of
advocates for industrial labour and communi-
ties within Council itself. But the severity of
the recession tended to favour the growth
industries within the city’s service sector,
which seemed to offer the best prospects for
economic recovery, rather than the important
but generally less dynamic manufacturing
and ancillary industries.
The major land use changes in Vancou-
ver’s core over the 1970s and 1980s (in
addition to the steady attrition in the indus-
trial land base resulting from more local
rezoning decisions) served to accelerate the
city’s post-industrial trajectory, driven by
episodes of industrial restructuring, recession
and strategic local policy interventions. As
we have seen, there were points of resistance
to this induced or accelerated post-industrial-
ism, as observed in the Overall Planning
Division’s support for an industrial develop-
ment agency, in Harcourt’s advocacy of
more balanced sectoral development and the
interests of working-class communities in the
core and in East Vancouver, and in efforts to
insert a stronger industrial policy element in
the City’s economic development strategy.
But the industrial constituency in Vancouver
lacked the size and political power either to
mount a serious ideological challenge to
post-industrialism, as seen in London, Liver-
pool and Sheffield during this period, or to
influence a redirection of public resources in
support of the local regeneration of old inner-
city industrial areas, as documented in cities
within the European Union (Moulaert, 2000).
The post-industrial agenda was advanced
without a serious discussion of alternatives,
or even (apart from the Overall Planning
report cited earlier) a full accounting of the
dislocations accruing from the major and
more incremental changes in land use in
Vancouver’s metropolitan core.
3. Reproducing Vancouver’s Central
Area: Post-modern Visions and Values,
1986-91
The severe recession of the early to mid
1980s eroded public and political support for
assertive growth management in Vancou-
ver’s core and arrested the expansion of
speculative office development in the CBD
that had given rise to the Coreplan exercise,
although the ‘new middle class’ of mostly
office-based managers and professionals was
now firmly established as the dominant so-
cial cohort in the city (Ley, 1996). But a new
context for planning in Vancouver’s central
area emerged over the second half of the
1980s, characterised by a resurgence of
growth, incipient clusters of creative and de-
sign-based services in the inner city (Brail,
1994) and a major external reorientation of
the city’s economy (Davis and Hutton,
1991). This latter dynamic took the form of
two redefining processes: first, a significant
weakening of the city’s linkages with the
provincial resource hinterland, resulting from
both the depth of the recession (which in-
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER 1963

Table 1. Change in Metropolitan Vancouver’s experienced labour force, by major industry group and
selected service categories, 1961–91

Industry 1961 1971 1981 1986 1991

(000s) (000s) (000s) (000s) (000s)

Agriculture 3.8 5.4 7.7 10.2 11.6

Forestry 2.5 3.4 4.2 3.9 4.1
Fishing and trapping 1.8 1.6 2.3 2.7 2.9
Mining 1.6 3.4 3.3 2.9 2.9
Manufacturing 57.5 78.8 96.3 89.9 98.7
Construction 19.9 32.0 44.6 43.7 64.3
Transport, communications and utilities 34.9 50.0 69.6 73.8 80.0
Wholesale and retail trade 59.9 85.7 126.5 129.9 162.1
Finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) 15.9 28.2 47.3 51.9 66.4
Community, business and personal services 70.4 127.8 216.7 265.3 386.5
Business services 18.2 42.0 50.6 70.1
Education services 12.1 27.5 41.0 41.6 55.3
Health and social services 18.8 30.3 52.3 56.9 76.5
Accommodation, food and beverages 12.9 22.3 42.6 57.0 66.5
Government services 18.0 22.3 37.9 39.5 45.1
Other services 0.7 7.2 0.9 19.7 73.0

Total 268.3 416.2 618.6 673.0 883.1

Source: Census of Canada, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991; mid-term Census, 1986.

cluded structural as well as cyclical ele-
ments) and from a sequence of corporate
acquisitions and mergers which eroded Van-
couver’s resource head office sector; and sec-
ondly, an accelerated globalisation experi-
ence, which included the stimulus of the
1986 international exposition, increased
Asian-Pacific investment in the central area’s
property market and a major upturn in inter-
national immigration, especially from Asia-
Pacific societies. These inflows implied
redefining functional and symbolic transfor-
mations for Vancouver (see Hutton, 1998;
Olds, 2001) and a new growth stimulus for
the core and the metropolitan region as a
whole. Table 1 shows changes in metropoli-
tan Vancouver’s labour force from 1986 to
1991, in comparison with earlier census peri-
ods. The metropolitan labour force expanded
by 210 000 from 1986 to 1991, representing
an increase of 31 per cent over the 1986 level
and almost four times the growth in the
1981–86 period (which had included a major
recession).
The Central Area Plan and the Re-
configuration of Urban Structure
In response to the new forces of growth and
change in the core and the city as a whole,
Council (now led by Mayor Gordon Camp-
bell, with an NPA majority) authorised in
1987 a new planning exercise to provide “a
policy framework for the central area” (City
of Vancouver, 1991, p. 1). Priority issues for
the new plan included: office zoning ca-
pacity; displacement of support activities;
new Central Area housing; livability and new
high-density residential development; and,
retail activity. The future of industrial land in
the core was subsumed within a separate
study of city-wide industrial land use, rather
than incorporated explicitly as part of the
new central area planning process. Following
a programme of policy research and public
dialogue with key stakeholders, a draft docu-
ment was submitted to City Council in the
fall of 1989, followed by additional research
and a refinement of planning directions
through a series of sub-area studies designed
1964 THOMAS A. HUTTON
to test the validity of these policy directions.
In June 1991, City Council released the re-
vised Central Area Plan for public comment,
and subsequently approved the new plan at a
special session of Council on 3 December of
the same year.
While post-modernism is not explicitly
identified as an element of the Central Area
Plan’s conceptual framework, post-modern
ideas and terminology formed part of the
lexicon of staff discussions and policy dis-
course (Desrochers, 1992) and can be readily
discerned both in the expression of planning
goals and values, and in the construction of
policy choices. The celebration of diversity
and pluralism inherent in virtually all inter-
pretations of the post-modern ethos is fully
represented in the opening statement of plan-
ning goals for the core. Here we read of the
City’s preferences for ‘a mix of activities’
and commingling of social groups (incorpor-
ated in the goal of ‘An Alive Downtown’)
and the need to promote a central area “for
all people; for all income and ethnic
groups … and for all ages, from children to
seniors” (‘For All People’). The importance
of the local is emphasised, recalling the post-
modern principles enunciated by Ted Relph
(1987), as seen in the expression of
the unique qualities and symbolism of the
central area as a special place—its skyli-
nes, heritage resources, character areas,
livable neighbourhoods, and active public
spaces (‘A Spirit of Place’) (City of Van-
couver, 1991, p. 3).
The underscoring of the local as a key plan-
ning principle also stands as a counterpoint
to the dislocations associated with the in-
creasing globalisation of the core’s property
market and the accelerated contraction of
local industrial production and labour de-
scribed above.
The post-modern spirit of the Central Area
Plan is also captured in the treatment of
areas and activities in the core beyond the
CBD. There is an appreciation of the differ-
entiated landscapes, textures and forms of the
inner city, including not only the heritage
districts on the southern and eastern fringes
of the downtown, but also the highly vari-
egated terrains of the Downtown South,
Mount Pleasant and ‘South of Granville Is-
land’, each of which contained a mix of
industrial, commercial, retail and residential
uses. These territories were seen not merely
as nondescript residuals of a core area domi-
nated by specialised, higher-order service in-
dustries, but as essential support areas which
included printing, office supplies, office
equipment repair and design and creative
services, “all of which are part of the down-
town economic system” and which “usually
find their way into spaces different from new
CBD office towers—spaces that are more
affordable, that offer a more flexible layout,
and/or that offer a distinctive image” (City of
Vancouver, 1991, p. 16).2
These expressions of the post-modern
ethos were essential features of the new vi-
sion, but land use policies for office develop-
ment and housing represented the most
decisive programmatic elements for reshap-
ing urban structure and territory in the core.
The Central Area Plan proposed a strategic
reordering of space favouring residential and
public uses, to be achieved by consolidating
the CBD within a smaller and more tightly
bounded territory, effectively freeing-up
significant land resources for housing. As
Figure 3 shows, the consolidation of the
CBD would remove substantial office devel-
opment potential from the Downtown South
(i.e. between Nelson and Pacific Streets) and
lesser but significant amounts from Victory
Square (to the east) and Triangle West (west
of Bute Street).
The corollary of the Central Area Plan’s
policies for consolidating office development
was the opening up of the CBD fringe and
inner city for new residential development,
public spaces and other activities. Figure 4
shows the pattern of existing (1991) housing
in the central area, together with approved
residential areas (“new housing areas re-
cently supported”), proposed additional
housing and provisional “choice of use” or
mixed use districts. Housing was seen as “of
major importance in achieving central area
goals”, in terms of vitality (bringing “a diver-
sity of human activity to the downtown”),
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
Figure 3. Consolidation of the CBD in the Central Area Plan, 1991.
stimulating retail activity and reducing re-
gional commuting pressures by encouraging
residential development close to the CBD.
The proposed housing areas created a ca-
pacity for about 20 000 new units (for ap-
proximately 30 000 residents) within the
central area, to be accommodated for the
most part in high-rise point towers (in con-
trast to the medium-density False Creek proj-
ect of the 1970s, described above), situated
in the Concord Pacific Place project on the
north shore of False Creek (City of Vancou-
ver, 1990), but also in Granville Slopes and
in new development along the Central Wa-
terfront. Here, the exemplary value of the
West End residential district (with a 1991
population of 37 000) should be cited, as it
provided a model of successful high-density
neighbourhoods in the downtown peninsula
which could in some respects be emulated in
the proposed new housing areas, in contrast
to other cities where high-density develop-
ment in the core may have been seen as more
experimental (and perhaps entailing more
risk).3
Post-modernism, Process and the Public In-
terest
The Central Area Plan approved in 1991
1965
effectively broke the Gordian knot of
long-standing planning problems associated
with the hegemony of the CBD within
Vancouver’s metropolitan core, including
congestion, long-distance commuting and
constrained housing capacity. The problém-
atique was articulated more strategically
as a structural imbalance in the allocation of
land resources in the core, rather than as an
essentially tactical growth management
question which could be addressed by means
of adjustments to development control poli-
cies and regulations. Post-modern values
were invoked at several key points in the
plan’s discourse, to assert the importance
of social diversity and pluralism, and to
justify the retention of varied landscapes
and spaces within the inner city. We can also
identify a powerful expression of the
post-modern spirit in the taming of the
CBD’s corporate complex, which represents
in form and imagery the defining feature
of hegemonic modernism in the metro-
politan core (Loukaitou-Sideris and
Banerjee, 1998).4 The CBD’s unique
significance as an economic asset was
acknowledged, but the consolidation
of the office complex within a more restric-
ted domain was essential to the task of
1966 THOMAS A. HUTTON
Figure 4. Designation of new housing areas in the Central Area Plan, 1991.
fundamentally reordering urban space and to
increasing greatly the land use capacity for
new housing.
The Central Area Plan was also an ad-
vance on the preceding Coreplan exercise
(and indeed the False Creek South project of
the 1970s) with respect to process. Coreplan
was essentially an in-house policy exercise,
directed by senior policy professionals who
represented the bureaucratic élite of the pe-
riod, buttressed by the resources of consul-
tants and episodic contacts with key
informants and experts among the academy.
In contrast, the process management for the
Central Area Plan included engagement with
key stakeholders within the core, although
this fell far short of an extensive public
consultation process. Rather, dialogue with
these constituencies was designed in large
part to test stakeholder reaction to proposals
and to elicit support for key recommenda-
tions.
The policy measures of the Central Area
Plan offered the potential for major public
benefits, as well as the broader planning ad-
vantages of a more balanced spatial pattern
of development in the metropolitan core. Ex-
plicit changes in the spatial structure of the
core (and implied policy directions at the
more localised scale of land use) promised to
‘open up’ the core for housing and new
activities and public amenities beyond the
CBD. The new policy preferences expressed
in the Central Area Plan catered largely to
the interests of the city’s service industry
élite of managers, professionals, en-
trepreneurs, creative services workers and
knowledge industry specialists: this is seen in
the generous allocations of land resources for
housing and provision for recreational, cul-
tural and leisure amenities. There would also
be new employment potential for these élite
service workers, not only in the areas of
opportunity in the rezoned inner city, but
also within the CBD proper, as even in the
newly consolidated (and appreciably less ex-
tensive) CBD, potential for almost a doub-
ling of the 1991 office floorspace levels was
achievable.
The Central Area Plan was principally a
strategy for urban structure and land use,
rather than a social or community planning
instrument, but even so there were poten-
tially significant benefits for less privileged
groups, consistent at least in part with the
dialectical workings of the policy process in
Vancouver’s core. First, the consolidation of
the CBD would prevent the office sector
from overrunning marginal communities and
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
heritage districts to the east (which contained
significant stocks of single-room occupancy
hotels—SROs), providing a measure of pro-
tection from inflationary pressures and dis-
placement for low-income residents. The
retention of mixed use areas supported the
idea of socioeconomic (as well as industrial)
diversity in the core. Within the new residen-
tial communities of the inner city, the bulk of
the housing would be in the market sector,
but for major projects the city stipulated that
20 per cent of the unit capacity should be in
the social or non-market categories, to
achieve a measure of social balance in each
district and to provide opportunities for
lower-income-groups and individuals in
Canada’s most expensive housing market.
4. Reproducing Vancouver’s Central
Area: Post-modernity and Polarisation,
post 1991
Council’s approval of the Central Area Plan
in December 1991 enabled in part new cycles
of change (spatial, physical, economic, social
and cultural) in Vancouver’s metropolitan
core over the following decade, in many
respects more comprehensive, complex and
far-reaching than the earlier processes de-
scribed above. Here, we can propose a re-
alignment of influences on the core’s
transformation which takes the form of inter-
secting global processes, new rounds of in-
dustrial restructuring and innovation
(including the IT-driven ‘New Economy’ and
the ascendant urban cultural economy), so-
cio-cultural shifts and policy influences.
These have produced an increasingly di-
chotomous pattern within the core, as the
glittering new inner-city landscapes and the
increasingly marginalised communities of
the Downtown Eastside and other sites of
deprivation present a far more polarised
profile of urban form and social conditions
than was evident a decade ago.
The Respatialisation of Vancouver’s Core:
Urban Structure and Land Use
At the broadest level of spatial change, we
1967
can discern a very significant shift in devel-
opment from the corporate complex of the
CBD, the signifying expression of the mod-
ernist ideal in the central city, to the spaces
of the CBD fringe and the inner city. Follow-
ing the period of functional hyperspecialisa-
tion from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s,
during which commercial (and more particu-
larly office) development dominated invest-
ment within the core as a whole, the past
decade has seen a pronounced diminution in
commercial investment in the CBD. This can
be attributed both to cyclical conditions (in-
cluding the overhang of office space from the
speculative development of the 1980s) and to
structural factors (notably corporate mergers
and take-overs which have disadvantaged
some second- and third-level business cen-
tres).
While investment in the CBD has fallen
off over the past decade, the CBD fringe and
inner city have experienced accelerated pro-
cesses of redevelopment, succession and
transformation. The proliferation of new
spaces and reconstructed landscapes within
Vancouver’s metropolitan core can be ar-
rayed within four principal spatial and func-
tional aggregations: new service industry
ensembles and production networks; residen-
tial ‘mega-projects’ (typified by a single de-
veloper or consortium); major ‘uncon-
solidated’ housing projects, with multiple
site owners and developers; and, ‘frontier’
planning areas, positioned on the eastern
margins of the central area, which inter alia
demonstrate the continuing reterritorialisa-
tion of inner-city space (Figure 5).
A dozen years after the approval of the
Central Area Plan, the consolidated CBD
still encompasses the largest concentration of
employment within the core (and the region
as a whole), but there is now a burgeoning
mosaic of new service industry clusters
which has reconfigured the central city’s
space-economy and spatial divisions of
labour. Many of these new service clusters
are oriented towards consumption, exem-
plified by the professional sports complex at
the east end of Georgia Street (Figure 5,
sub-area 5), the cultural and entertainment
1968 THOMAS A. HUTTON

Figure 5. Twenty-first century landscapes of production, housing and amenity in Vancouver’s

post-modern metropolitan core.

district (sub-area 2) and various specialty
retail and tourist districts. There are also
important new clusters of intermediate ser-
vice industries ensconced within the metro-
politan core (Figure 5), which incorporate
related labour cohorts and networks of sup-
pliers and sub-contractors, underscoring the
reassertion of production in the inner city,
several decades following the (policy-accel-
erated) contraction of manufacturing and re-
source processing. Many of these technical
service and support operations are situated
within the CBD and mixed use zones of the
inner city, justifying the decision to protect
these areas in the Central Area Plan. We can
observe a number of distinctive services pro-
duction regimes in the inner city, differenti-
ated by product sector and by spatial
divisions of labour.
As important as these emergent systems of
specialised economic activity are to the
reshaping of Vancouver’s core, the most
striking features (and the most direct out-
comes of the policy directions embodied in
the Central Area Plan) are the new high-rise
residential projects and neighbourhoods,
which have transformed the central area’s
urban form and land use patterns. Following
the development of the West End 25 years
earlier, a new high-rise district has emerged
along the north shore of False Creek, includ-
ing Granville Slopes (Figure 5, sub-area G),
Concord Pacific’s Pacific Place (sub-area A)
and International Village (sub-area C), while
the CityGate project (which incorporates
high-quality social housing and well as mar-
ket housing) has generated a new landscape
and imagery for the formerly industrial east-
ern margins of False Creek (sub-area B). The
landscape of the Downtown South (sub-area
F) is now given over to new high-rise apart-
ments and condominiums, a process enabled
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
by the City’s rezoning of the area in the
Central Area Plan. Precincts of up-scale
high-rise towers have comprehensively trans-
formed Coal Harbour, near to the Central
Waterfront (Figure 5, sub-area D) and also
on the former Pacific Press site on Granville
Street (the Portico project, site E in Figure
5), exemplifying the shift in investment and
development from the CBD to the CBD
fringe and inner city. These new condomini-
ums have been aggressively marketed in
Asia, underscoring both the globalisation of
residential property markets and Vancouver’s
increasingly transnational quality.
A Framework for Interpreting the Trans-
formation of the Urban Core
A closer examination of the experience of
change in Vancouver’s core discloses more
nuanced (and problematic) aspects. Table 2
presents a framework which proposes no-
menclature for defining categories of trans-
formation in the core and identifies
exemplary outcomes positioned within two
broad classes: Part 1 encompasses ‘structure,
territory and form’; Part 2 incorporates
‘labour, class and identity’. These are not in
fact discrete processes and consequences, but
rather highly interdependent dynamics of
change, so the idea of the framework is
rather to demonstrate the range and com-
plexity of change in Vancouver’s central area
and to provide reference for analysis and
discussion.
The processes and experiences situated
within Part 1 address defining spatial and
physical aspects of the core’s transformation
over the past decade. These include the stra-
tegic reconfiguration of the core’s structure,
from a highly asymmetrical pattern of devel-
opment concentrated in the CBD, to a more
extensive redevelopment experience within
the broader core. The 1990s produced a com-
prehensively restructured space-economy for
Vancouver’s central area, including both as-
cendant intermediate service clusters and
new consumption spaces within the CBD
fringe and inner city. Table 2 underscores the
growth of the urban cultural economy and
1969
the rise of the technology-based ‘new econ-
omy’ as leading processes in the formation of
new production clusters in the inner city,
driven by a synthesis of culture (design and
creative functions), technology and the at-
tributes of place—specifically, the aestheti-
cised environment of heritage sites in old
industrial districts of the core. Here, we ob-
serve the ascendancy of new production
ensembles in the inner city, each with a
distinctive aggregation of industries, includ-
ing the ‘creative spaces’ of Yaletown and
Gastown, ‘cultural spaces’ such as Victory
Square and Granville Island, ‘techno-spaces’
which include software firms and web-de-
signers in ‘Greater Yaletown’ and re-
colonised offices of the northern crescent of
the CBD, and the critical technical support
and supply firms in the mixed use ‘flexi-
spaces’ of the CBD fringe, Mount Pleasant
and South Granville Island. The City has also
designated the former railway marshalling
yards of False Creek Flats as a site for high-
technology industry (Figure 5), signalling a
new episode in the civic direction of land use
change in the core (City of Vancouver,
1999). At the same time, there is also a
continuing presence of ‘old economy’ firms
(such as garment and food production) on the
eastern margins of the core, many owned or
managed by new immigrant entrepreneurs,
notably (but not exclusively) from the Asia-
Pacific, exemplifying the juxtaposition of
‘new’ and ‘old’ economy firms as observed
in the inner-city precincts of (for example)
London, Toronto and San Francisco. There is
still a ‘factory world’ of sorts on the doorstep
of the central area.
These specialised production clusters have
redefined the space-economy of Vancouver’s
metropolitan core, but we can also identify
new consumption spaces that comprise im-
portant features of the most recent phase of
transformation. There is a mix of influences
and trends which include the growth of
multinational retail outlets in the core’s
tourism and shopping districts, patronised by
local consumers as well as by international
visitors (‘global-space’); the growing resi-
dential population of the mega-projects
1970 THOMAS A. HUTTON
Table 2. Processes of transformation in Vancouver’s metropolitan core, 1993–2003: globalisation,
postmodernity, and dislocation
Processes and policies
Part 1. Structure, territory and form
1. Reconfiguration of urban structure
End of ‘hyperspecialisation’ era in the core
Reassertion of production in the inner city
Land use policy changes in the Central Area
Plan
2. Reterritorialisation of urban spaces
Global capital flows
Industrial restructuring
Social class reformation
Accelerated transition and displacement
processes
3. Emergence of new production clusters,
districts, and networks
Growth of the urban cultural economy
Rise of the technology-based ‘new economy’
Importance of both ‘place-based’ and ‘cyber’
production networks
International immigration
4. Rise of new consumption spaces
Globalisation of retail trade
Internationalisation of professional sports
Rise of ‘new middle class’ (Ley, 1996)
Growth of new central area residential
communities
Public investments in amenity
Growth of international tourism
5. Reconstruction of urban form
Post-modernism
Local architects and design vernaculars
Importance of city’s modernist built
environment heritage
Globalisation of the design profession
Exemplary outcomes
Major shift of development momentum from
CBD to CBD fringe, established inner-city
districts and ‘frontier’ inner-city territories
Rearticulation of central area district territories
and boundaries
Emergence of urban mega-projects
Increasingly variegated and complex core area
space-economy and social morphology
‘Splintering’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001) vs
‘regeneration’ hypotheses
‘Creative-space’: design industries,
postproduction
‘Cultural-space’: heritage industries, ‘cultural
product’ industries and services
‘Techno-space’: Internet firms and dot.coms,
software designers
‘Flexi-space’: clusters of business/industry
support firms in mixed-use zones
‘Retro-space’: growth of ‘old economy’
industries (garments, food production) in eastern
margins of the core
‘Global space’: multinational retail outlets and
new international tourist districts: village for
2010 Winter Olympics
‘Play-space’: new recreational and leisure
facilities and precincts
‘Exhibition-space’: new professional sports and
conference complex; convention centre
‘People-space’: new municipal library and civic
precinct
‘Night space’: rise of night clubs, rave-spaces,
entertainment strips
New high-rise residential landscapes in urban
mega-project sites
Reconstructed production landscapes in the old
industrial districts (Hutton, 2000)
Loft-housing/live–work studios in heritage
districts
Adaptive reuse in older office/commercial
buildings
New ‘landmark’ buildings: One Wall Centre,
Vancouver Public Library
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
Part 2. Labour, class and identity
1. New divisions of production labour in the
metropolitan core: intersections of technology,
culture and globalisation
Social divisions of labour (product sectors)
Technical divisions of labour (occupational/
task specialisations)
Spatial divisions of labour (clusters of
production tasks and labour specialisations;
after Massey, 1984)
2. Reformation of social class
Industrial restructuring
Immigration
New divisions of labour
Socioeconomic polarisation
3. New residential districts and styles
Social class reformation
New residential preferences and patterns of
demand
Rezoning and land use policy changes
4. New identities and ‘re-imaging’
Accelerated transition and displacement
Globalisation of the property market
Increasing social pluralism/diverisity
5. New social tensions and conflicts
Spatial juxtaposition of competing groups
Emergence of the ‘24-hour city’
Conflicting visions for the inner city
Reterritorialisation processes
which have stimulated demand for rec-
reation, leisure and entertainment (‘play-
space’, ‘exhibition-space’ and ‘people-
space’); and the emergence of a new youth
1971
Intermediate (business) services
‘Cultural products’ (after Scott, 1997)
‘Technological products’ and services
Managers and professionals
Creative designers: graphic artists, architects,
industrial design, fashion design
Technology designers: web and Internet design,
computer software design, computer graphics
and imaging
Producer service labour in the CBD
Design professionals and IT workers in the
CBD fringe and inner city
Technical support labour in the CBD fringe and
mixed-use districts
Hegemonic ‘new middle class’ of managers and
professionals (after Ley, 1996)
Emergence of ‘new’ middle class of young
design/technology workforce
Ascendant immigrant entrepreneurial class
Growing class of contingent labour
Expanding underclass: drug users, street people
and the homeless
New high-rise condominium neighbourhoods:
Concord Pacific Place, Coal Harbour
Adaptive reuse of older commercial buildings
Loft housing in heritage districts
Live–work and work–live studios
New social housing in ‘mega-projects’:
Downtown South, Downtown Eastside
Yaletown as ‘epicentre’ of the ‘new economy’
of the inner city
Globalised (re)imaging of False Creek North
(Olds, 2001)
Post-industrial landscapes of the inner city
Multiple/contested identities of the Downtown
Eastside
‘High-technology’ visions for False Creek Flats
New gentrifiers in the Downtown Eastside
‘Rave culture’ and residents of the Downtown
South
‘Dot.coms’ and displaced groups
Chinatown/Gastown merchants and inner-city
drug culture
Strathcona residents and the ‘high-tech’ vision
for False Creek Flats
culture seen as underpinning the rise of new
clubs and rave-spaces in the core. These
developments underscore Vancouver’s dis-
tinctive role as a lifestyle city, where con-
1972 THOMAS A. HUTTON
sumption and quality of life are defining
features of the city’s development trajectory
and image, not simply adjuncts to more pri-
mary economic functions.
These spatial and physical aspects of
change in Vancouver’s core are accompanied
by related transformations of labour, social
class, residential preferences and social
identity, (outlined in Table 2, Part 2), incor-
porating examples of social tension and
conflict. Central to social class reformation,
housing demand and reconstructed identity
are the new divisions of labour associated
with the industrial restructuring experiences
and larger economic processes of the 1990s.
An identification of defining changes in so-
cial, technical and spatial divisions of labour
in the reconstructed core includes of course
the important cohorts of office-based pro-
ducer service labour ensconced within the
CBD, including managers and professional
workers. This social aggregation is still very
important, but has been under some pressure
over the past decade, as a result of the se-
quence of corporate mergers and acquisitions
that severely undercut the resource sector
head offices that had supported Vancouver’s
business control role during the 1970s and
1980s, described earlier. Corporate downsiz-
ing has cut deeply into the ranks of man-
agers, while secretarial staff have also been
subject to considerable job-shedding through
capital substitution. This significant loss of
corporate workers in the core has, however,
been somewhat offset by the growth of a new
cohort of professionals, managers and en-
trepreneurs associated with the large-scale
immigration (including a high proportion of
business immigrants) from Asia-Pacific soci-
eties over the past two decades.
The intersections between the city’s cul-
tural economy and technology-intensive New
Economy imply important new divisions of
specialised labour, which incorporate the cre-
ative service workers and design profession-
als, technology specialists and the hybrid
occupations associated with new production
tasks which include Internet services and
software design. Research conducted in Van-
couver over the past two years has disclosed
that these ascendant labour groups are char-
acterised by quite distinctive demographic
and human capital attributes, more particu-
larly overrepresentation among younger
workers (many in their 20s and 30s) embody-
ing design or technology-based skills or, in
many cases, both (Hutton, 2004). Many of
these workers prefer live–work (or work–
live) studios, loft housing or cheaper apart-
ments in Kitsilano and the West End, while
others favour (for reasons of lifestyle or
economy) lodgings in older housing in
Strathcona or Mount Pleasant. Again, we see
the influence of planning and public policy in
the reshaping of Vancouver’s core, as the
Planning Department and City Council have
encouraged a diversity of housing styles and
choices as part of the implementation of the
Central Area Plan. These youthful working
cohorts also patronise the night-clubs and
rave-spaces of Vancouver’s inner city, seen
(and acknowledged by the Central Area Div-
ision of City Planning) as convivial adjuncts
to the reconstituted social structure and econ-
omy of the core. This cohort may be situated
as a distinctive subset of Ley’s new middle
class; alternatively, it may be argued that this
group is sufficiently differentiated from the
white-collar professionals and managers with
respect to skill sets, social and technical divi-
sions of labour and lifestyle preferences as to
constitute a new social cadre, as Richard
Florida has proposed (Florida, 2002).
Industrial restructuring, the rise of new
services production regimes and global pro-
cesses have thus contributed to the formation
of ascendant social classes in Vancouver’s
core, but the experience of the past decade
also includes more problematic outcomes,
including an increasingly dualistic labour
market. There is a growing cohort of contin-
gent labour, workers excluded from the
higher echelons of the new service economy
by virtue of educational deficiency or lan-
guage issues and relegated to menial, low-
paying and often short-term forms of
employment. Here we find janitors, cleaners,
laundry workers, retail clerks, personal ser-
vice workers, messenger and delivery service
staff, and others who perform essential tasks
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
in the operation of the central area’s econ-
omy.
For some within the contingent labour
force, these so-called entry-level jobs may in
fact lead to more remunerative employment
and entrepreneurial opportunity, but Vancou-
ver’s central area includes significantly more
disadvantaged groups, for whom life on the
margins of the core (both in geographical and
social terms) presents a harsher reality of
disease, despair and (for many) premature
death. As in other North American cities, a
combination of economic trends, shifts in
government policy (for example, in welfare
and housing provision) and personal circum-
stances has led to a large and growing num-
ber of homeless people, including those
literally living on the street, and a larger
group that is underhoused, or with no secur-
ity of residential tenure. Vancouver’s core,
and more especially the Downtown Eastside,
is home to one of Canada’s largest concen-
trations of drug users, the range of addictions
including heroin, crack cocaine and the ‘soft’
drug groups. Many of those addicted to drugs
are involved in the local sex-trade, obliged to
work the streets to support drug dependency.
These are features of every North American
inner city, but in some respects the Down-
town Eastside presents an especially harsh
profile (Ley, 1994). The City’s Social Plan-
ning Department and Health Department
staff record hundreds of deaths annually
from drug overdose. There is also an extraor-
dinarily high rate of AIDS and HIV infection
among drug users in the Downtown Eastside,
despite counselling services and an innova-
tive needle exchange programme operated by
the City. Then there is the high incidence of
violence against sex-trade workers, including
the death (or disappearance) of over 60 such
workers, the subject of a current serial mur-
der trial and continuing investigation.
But there are also global processes that
contribute to the social issues prevalent on
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, including
the international drug cartels that use Van-
couver as a convenient entry point to the
North American market. Conflict and exploi-
tation in other countries contribute to the
1973
flow of refugees to Vancouver, many of
whom settle precariously in the Downtown
Eastside and its environs. For these and other
reasons, the social issues and deprivation
characteristic of the Downtown Eastside
have now been recognised as being too large
and complex for local government to address
effectively, so a programme (‘The Vancou-
ver Agreement’) is now in place which
brings together the resources and expertise of
the federal, provincial and local govern-
ments. There are hopes of significant amelio-
ration over the next decade, although there is
an experimental quality to the enterprise. But
for the moment the Downtown Eastside pre-
sents a gritty, harsh and even brutal counter-
point to the crystalline and textured
landscapes of the new inner city described
above.
5. An Appraisal of the Vancouver Experi-
ence and its Wider Significance
Market forces and social factors have been
influential in the reshaping of Vancouver’s
metropolitan core, as seen in successive
rounds of industrial restructuring and related
occupational change. What distinguishes the
Vancouver case since the 1970s, however, is
the salient role of local policy as an agency
of change in the central area, informed by
post-industrial and post-modern principles at
a number of key decision points. These theo-
ries have been interpreted here chiefly in the
spheres of urban structure and land use, as
first-level impacts of policy innovation and
implementation. But as we have seen there
have also been redefining implications for
social class reformation, cultural values and
political preferences, consistent with Daniel
Bell’s (1973) axial principles of post-indus-
trialism, enunciated fully three decades ago.
A rough balance-sheet of impacts of the
City’s policy commitment to reshaping the
core during the post-industrial policy era (c.
1972–85) would include the following. First,
local policy served to accelerate processes of
industrial decline in the core, realised
through the rezoning of False Creek South in
the 1970s, the primacy of service industries
1974 THOMAS A. HUTTON
Figure 6. Rus in urbe: arcadian landscapes of the 1970s inner city, False Creek South, Vancouver.
in economic development strategies and the
rejection of industrial renewal as an option
for the north shore of False Creek following
the 1986 exposition. Secondly, the repro-
duction of False Creek South constituted a
decisive expression of post-industrial policy
values, imposed environmental order (in
places almost of a suburban character; Figure
6)5 on an obsolescent industrial landscape
and established housing as the preferred
mode of redevelopment in the core for the
ensuing decades. Finally, the city’s post-in-
dustrial agenda in this period contributed
significantly (if unintentionally) to social up-
grading, with respect (first) to the rezoning of
industrial land, which indirectly weakened
(through job displacement and income
losses) the working-class neighbourhoods of
the inner city and East Vancouver; and, sec-
ondly, to civic investments in amenity, which
enhanced the attraction of the core to gen-
trifiers among the ascendant services class.
As important as this sequence of redevel-
opment was to the reshaping of Vancouver’s
core, the period since the approval of the
Central Area Plan in December 1991 has
seen a far more comprehensive experience of
reproduction and respatialisation. At one
level, the Central Area Plan enabled the
management of rampant speculative office
development by means of the effective con-
solidation and shrinking of the CBD, inci-
dentally signalling an end to the long period
of hyperspecialisation in the core.6 But the
more strategic outcome of the Central Area
Plan’s policies for urban structure and land
use has taken the form of a redefining shift of
investment and development from the CBD
to the CBD fringe and inner city, comprising
residential mega-projects (Figure 7), recon-
structed production districts (Figure 8) and
new spaces of consumption, amenity and
spectacle depicted in Figure 5. In turn, this
comprehensive respatialisation of the central
area has produced an essentially post-modern
profile of diversity, complexity and interde-
pendency with respect to the core’s form,
economy and social structure, as outlined in
Table 2. This experience can be seen as an
encompassing regeneration of the inner city,
restoring a measure of spatial balance to the
core following the wrenching experiences of
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
Figure 7. Crystalline landscapes of the 21st-century inner city: residential point towers, False Creek
North, Vancouver.
industrial decline and rise of a specialised,
post-Fordist services economy concentrated
in the CBD. But the physical (and social)
demarcations of inner-city territory repre-
sented by these residential, production and
consumption sites have also generated new
forms of social exclusion and conflict, and
can therefore be interpreted as a ‘fracturing’
(Wheeler et al., 2000) or ‘splintering’ (Gra-
ham and Marvin, 2001) of urban space.
These processes and experiences have thus
imparted “greater complexity and instability
to the restructured social mosaic” (Soja,
2000, p. 282), so there is an exigent need to
investigate the relative cogency of the anti-
thetical regeneration and splintering hypoth-
eses in the new inner city.
Care must be taken not to overstate the
influence of planning and local policy, as the
‘big forces’ of industrial restructuring,
globalisation and gentrification constitute
leading processes of transformation in the
metropolitan core. But as a measure of the
effect of City policies, we can recall that
while the overriding concern 20 years ago
(during the Coreplan process) was that office
development was far outstripping the con-
1975
struction of new housing in the core, the
situation has now been effectively reversed,
enabled in part by the land use changes
introduced in the Central Area Plan. The
City has striven throughout this period to
balance the interests of the market, the
broader public and marginal groups by
means of a dialectical process of plan-mak-
ing, including an increasing commitment to
public consultation. But overall the City has
endorsed majoritarian interests in the repro-
duction of the core, by privileging the future
over the present, ascendant ‘new class’ inter-
ests over those of declining occupations and
social groups, and imperatives of develop-
ment over preservation.
Epilogue: Theoretical Implications of the
Vancouver Case Study
The complexity, variegation and volatility of
the early 21st-century urban condition do not
readily lend themselves to transcendent mod-
els of change along the lines of Bell’s post-
industrial principles. That said, there is a
clear need to retheorise the city in light of the
1976 THOMAS A. HUTTON
Figure 8. Textured production landscapes of the post-modern inner city: Yaletown, Vancouver.
consequential episodes of change elucidated
in this narrative. There are limits to the uni-
versalising possibilities to be derived from
any particular city, but Vancouver’s central
area has been recurrently invoked as a theor-
etical exemplar of urban transformation (see
Ley, 1996; Hutton, 2000; Olds, 2001) and
may provide fresh insights for integrative
conceptualisation. A useful point of refer-
ence is Sharon Zukin’s earlier exhortation for
social scientists to “move beyond the sensual
evocation of the city that post-modernism
now represents” and instead “conceptualize it
as a social process and periodize it in terms
of production as well as consumption of
urban space” (Zukin, 1988, p. 434), a stance
endorsed by Paul Knox (1988) among others.
In this spirit of conceptual enterprise, we
can interpret the defining features of the Van-
couver experience to define and delineate
signifying shifts in urban structure, space and
land use along the following lines. First, a
restatement of the conditions of the post-in-
dustrial metropolitan core, c.1965–90, in-
cludes
1. processes of industrial restructuring,
comprising the collapse of Fordist manu-
facturing and labour in the inner city and
the rapid growth of a new specialised
service economy; accompanied by the
growing internationalisation of the core’s
property market;
2. an asymmetrical respatialisation of the
metropolitan core, marked by a ‘cen-
tripetal’ pattern of investment and devel-
opment skewed increasingly towards the
CBD; and accompanied by disinvestment,
decline and social polarisation throughout
much of the CBD fringe and inner city;
3. production of a dominant modernist ur-
ban form, represented by the growth of
the high-rise office complex of the CBD,
the supreme expression of the functional-
ist ‘machine city’ of advanced capitalism;
4. a comprehensively reordered division of
labour in the core, comprising principally
the growth of intermediate services em-
ployment, a highly segmented and hier-
archical office labour force including
executive, managerial, professional, tech-
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
nical, sales and clerical workers, and the
rapid decline of Fordist manufacturing
and ancillary industrial labour; and
5. the ascendancy of the post-industrial so-
cial class largely along the lines predicted
by Bell.7
This restructuring experience of the central
area is still in evidence in Vancouver and
many other metropolitan cities, so our peri-
odisation of change cannot yield discrete,
neatly compartmentalised divisions. As
Charles Jencks has observed, the ‘posts’ (i.e.
post-industrialism, post-modernism)
are sublations, not destroyers, of their pre-
decessors [and the] theories of the modern
paradigm have not been overturned so
much as transformed into parts of a larger
framework where they still keep their
identity (Jencks, 1992, p. 12)8
As a preliminary contribution to retheorising
the early 21st-century urban core, we can
propose the following conceptual outline of
redefining change.
(1) Development trajectory. The lineaments
of a new trajectory include (first) an apparent
maturation of the long-running hyperspecial-
isation of the metropolitan core and its
‘monocultural economy’ of office industries;
and, secondly, the emergence of a new spe-
cialised cultural economy (Scott, 2000) com-
prised of increasingly technology-intensive
creative industries, typified by: new spatial,
social and technical divisions of labour; the
growing significance of ‘cultural products’
imbued with high levels of symbolic or semi-
otic content; and, the intimate comingling of
social and working worlds in the new indus-
trial production spaces of the inner city.
(2) Urban structure. A reconfiguration of the
core’s spatial structure takes place, from the
highly asymmetrical post-industrial model, to
a reordered metropolitan core in which the
development momentum has shifted to the
CBD fringe and inner city, characterised by a
finer-grained (and more dynamic) mosaic of
land use and simultaneous processes of re-
1977
generation and splintering (or fracturing).
This reconfigured spatiality of the core in-
cludes: investments in residential and mixed-
use mega-projects; reconstructed production
districts (including ‘New Economy’
precincts and cultural production sites); and,
new spaces of amenity, consumption and
spectacle (Hutton, 2004).
(3) Urban form. The 21st century metropoli-
tan core presents a ‘sublation’ (after Jencks)
of urban form comprising both: the high-rise
modernist CBD corporate complex, the prin-
cipal residual feature of the post-industrial
(or late capitalist) period in the central city,
but increasingly subject to local policy regu-
lation, market constraints and pressures, and
adaptive reuse for housing and mixed use
redevelopment; as well as, a post-modern
complexity, heterogeneity and interdepen-
dency of urban form and land use at the
localised scale in the core beyond the
confines of the CBD. This post-modern ur-
ban form includes the more intimate juxtapo-
sition of new industries, activities and social
groups within inner-city space, producing
variously both positive spillover effects (for
example knowledge transfers and labour
market information) and new social tensions.
(4) Divisions of labour. New social, spatial
and technical divisions of specialised pro-
duction labour are incorporated, as exem-
plified by the technology-intensive New
Economy and the creative/cultural economy
industries of the CBD fringe and inner city
(Pratt, 2001). These fluid, rapidly evolving
labour cohorts (which include the rise of
‘neo-artisanal’ labour in cultural industries;
see Norcliffe and Eberts, 1999) represent a
marked contrast to the highly segmented and
hierarchical occupational structure of the
monocultural office economy of the classical
post-industrial period, c.1965–90.
(5) Urban social class. Here, we can discern
clear evidence of continuity in the form of
Bell’s principle of theroretical knowledge
and related labour and social groups as cen-
1978 THOMAS A. HUTTON
tral to the evolution of advanced urban soci-
eties, but there are also processes of urban
social reformation, as seen in: the ascen-
dancy of the urban ‘creative class’ described
by Richard Florida; market and technological
pressures on the office-based cohorts of the
new middle class; the rise of an immigrant
entrepreneurial and professional class; and,
new patterns of social upgrading, conflict and
polarisation, with a growing underclass of
homeless, unemployed and marginalised im-
migrant populations congregating within the
interstitial zones of the inner city.
These signifying features of the re-
configured metropolitan core of course vary
in expression (and stages of progression)
from place to place. The force of policy
directions embodied in the Central Area
Plan, together with related urban design poli-
cies, are likely to have imposed a greater
degree of spatial order upon the redevelop-
ment of Vancouver’s inner city than is the
case in many other cities. Further, not all
cities among advanced societies have been
subject to the same ‘hollowing out’ of the
downtown corporate office complex as Van-
couver, although in many cases, perhaps
even a majority, there has been an appreci-
able maturation of the long-running hyper-
specialisation process. The locus of rapid
growth in intermediate services has shifted
markedly from the mature urban areas (and
economies) of Europe and North America to
more dynamic Asia-Pacific city-regions
(Daniels, 2001).
The Vancouver experience unequivocally
signals a clear departure from the defining
features of the modernist, post-industrial pe-
riod encompassing (roughly) the quarter-cen-
tury from the mid 1960s to about 1990. At
the same time, the reconfiguration of the
21st-century urban core, shaped by new in-
dustrial clusters and related labour cohorts,
the adaptive reuse of the heritage environ-
ment and large-scale residential development
and complementary amenity provision, ex-
hibits a redefining contrast to the spatial dis-
order and chaotic patterns of ‘incipient’
post-modernity, as implied in an earlier
model proposed by Michael Dear and
Stephen Flusty (1998). These emergent pat-
terns are, to be sure, characterised by socio-
cultural heterogeneity, complexity and
conflict, and have stimulated new urban plan-
ning styles (in Vancouver and elsewhere)
emphasising social intermediation and pro-
gressive urban design to manage processes of
respatialisation, in contrast to the bolder
statements of urban structure and land use
policy expressed in the Central Area Plan.
We might conclude this narrative then by
proposing a nomenclature of ‘advanced post-
modernity’ to describe the emergent contours
and structures of the reordered contemporary
central city, in contrast to the inchoate post-
modern urban geographies of the late 20th
century.
Notes
1. The metropolitan core is defined here as
encompassing the mid-century central busi-
ness district (CBD), the CBD fringe and the
older industrial and residential districts of the
inner city. By the 1960s, the CBD was being
reshaped by the ‘hyperspecialisation’ of
high-rise office development to accommo-
date headquarters operations, banking and
financial corporations and producer services,
while the inner city experienced the wrench-
ing processes of industrial decline and social
displacement driven by gentrification, the
causes and consequences of which generated
an important sequence of articles in Urban
Studies (see, for example, Scott, 1982). More
recently, new processes of industrial and so-
cio-cultural change have in many cases dra-
matically shifted the momentum of
development from the CBD to the CBD
fringe and inner city, with profound conse-
quences for urban structure, form and land
use. The term ‘Central Area’ as used by the
City of Vancouver Planning Department
conforms broadly to this concept of the
metropolitan core, with some variations in
spatial extent as described in this paper.
2. A new, strategic-level review of the city’s
industrial lands was underway at the time the
Central Area Plan was approved and plan-
ning staff were interested in the role played
by support industries in the operation of
Vancouver’s post-Fordist economy, increas-
ingly driven by flexible services production.
Many of these support industries were con-
centrated within the CBD fringe and inner-
city districts such as Mount Pleasant and the
South of Granville Island area, a number of
 POST-INDUSTRIALISM, POST-MODERN VANCOUVER
which may have been considered for rezon-
ing for residential uses had the ‘highest and
best use’ principle been applied.
3. This point is vividly illustrated by the current
debate in planning for housing in San Fran-
cisco’s Eastern Neighborhoods, South of
Market, to the west of Mission Bay. Trevor
Boddy, a Vancouver journalist specialising
in urban design and planning issues, cites
San Francisco Chronicle columnist John
King’s description of a ‘Vancouver cult’
among (some) Bay Area planners, develop-
ers and community groups. This apparent
affinity for the Vancouver model of central
area housing is expressed as a “near consen-
sus that high-density, socially mixed com-
munities of tall, skinny towers on townhouse
bases” should be emulated in San Francisco.
(Boddy, 2004, pp. B1 and B4). But recent
site visits by the author to San Francisco’s
South of Market area, which included inter-
views with city planners and community rep-
resentatives, disclosed somewhat greater
ambivalence and scepticism concerning the
replicability of the Vancouver high-rise,
point tower experience in San Francisco,
without further exploration of comparative
features of local social structure, amenity,
siting (including block size and
configuration) and other important contex-
tual issues.
4. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib
Banerjee are among those who have ob-
served the irony of modernist high-rise office
towers, the embodiment of the capitalist im-
perative, supplanting progressive concern for
social welfare (including public housing) as
defining attributes of modernism (Loukaitou-
Sideris and Banerjee, 1998, p. 278).
5. In places (Figure 6), the landscape of False
Creek South appears almost suburban, bring-
ing the ‘suburbs into the city’, in contrast to
processes described in Pahl’s classic study
(Urbs in Rure) of the urbanisation of the
British countryside, published in 1965, just
before the conversion of False Creek South.
6. Only four new office towers have been con-
structed in Vancouver’s CBD since the ap-
proval of the Central Area Plan in 1991. In
contrast, the 1970s and early 1980s saw the
construction of 36 office towers in the CBD
(Punter, 2003, pp. 60–61) This is consistent
with trends in Toronto and Montreal, so it is
likely to be incorrect to attribute the recent
fortunes of the Vancouver CBD office sector
to the stringency of the Central Area Plan’s
land use policies. Indeed, there are new high-
rise towers (several of which will be taller
than any existing structures) under construc-
tion or approved for the downtown, but they
1979
are in the form of hotels, condominiums, or
hybrid hotel-condominium-retail develop-
ments, rather than office buildings, under-
scoring the ‘post-corporate’ identity of
Vancouver’s 21st century central area.
7. As David Ley has observed in a recent re-
view of the social geography of the services
economy (Ley, forthcoming), there is sub-
stantial empirical corroboration of essential
features of Daniel Bell’s post-industrial the-
sis. The force of evidence concerning the
centrality of theoretical knowledge among
advanced economies, the sectoral compo-
sition of urban employment growth and re-
lated impacts on urban society and culture
would appear to be almost beyond contesta-
tion, and Ley cites a number of urban studies
scholars who have (at least in part) recanted
their earlier scepticism concerning the post-
industrial thesis. For some scholars, exem-
plified by Charles Jencks, post-industrialism
is accepted as a precursor to post-mod-
ernism, while for others (notably Lyotard)
the urban condition embodies a simultaneous
conflation of the two processes. But there is
a significant rearguard action against the
post-industrial model led by exponents of
‘industrial urbanism’, in particular Edward
Soja and Allen Scott of the UCLA-based
‘Los Angeles School’ of urban studies. For
Soja, Scott and their affiliates, the growth of
service industries is part of the larger process
of (and discourse on) industrial urbanism. In
this view, services, especially intermediate
services, are functionally linked to manufac-
turing and allied industrial production and
exhibit important operating commonalities.
These are points that are likely to be readily
accepted by economic and urban geogra-
phers specialising in services, but many
would insist on an acknowledgement of con-
trasts between manufacturing and service in-
dustries with respect to location and
clustering propensity, technical and spatial
divisions of labour, differentiated sociologies
of production labour, consumption relations
and political and cultural values, among
other attributes. So the post-industrial debate
continues, situated on new grounds of con-
testation as urban conditions change, incor-
porating polemical as well as analytical
perspectives.
8. As Mike Savage has noted in an appreciation
of Walter Benjamin’s ‘urban thought’, Ben-
jamin sought “to repudiate epochal theories
of history (in which one period ‘replaces’
another)” and cautioned that “current ac-
counts of the rise of ‘postmodern’ cities need
to be treated carefully” (Savage, 2001,
p. 48).
1980 THOMAS A. HUTTON
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