Conflict of Interest at City Hall: Condo Tower Approved in Chinatown

On May 7th the Development Permit Board (DPB) approved the application of a 10 storey luxury development in Chinatown. The project, financed by Solterra Group of Companies, comprises 82 dwelling units above three levels of underground parking. This is the first condo project stimulated by the Vision-NPA gentrification plan for the neighbourhood. In spring of last year, Vision-NPA approved a blanket upzoning of land, which increased the value of 189 Keefer from $1 million to $2.9 million overnight. Through the so-called “Height Review” for the DTES, the predominantly low-income Chinese community and other low-income social groups are gradually being displaced by the incursion of market condos, high-end shops, and cultural amenities catering to a wealthier, predominantly white clientele. If a recent “snapshot” of emerging Chinatown by Scout Magazine is any indication, Chinatown will become the next Gastown.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

There was an added controversy at the 189 Keefer hearing, in the form of a serious conflict of interest. One of the members of DPB’s “Representatives of the Design Professions,” Foad Rafii (Architect) represented the Developer (Solterra) at the hearing. Rafii spoke on behalf of the applicant, and did not publicly disclose his conflict of interest. When a member of the public voiced his concerns, the Board Chair Vicki Potter and Foad Rafii remained silent, refusing to address the public’s claim.

This is the second time in a month that Foad Rafii has misused his post on the DPB. Two weeks ago, from his DPB seat Rafii spoke out energetically against community members who protested Pantages condos proposal. In retrospect, his decision regarding the Pantages condo project was tainted by his desire to see his own project approved the next week.

Christy Clark’s Pursuit of Inequality: The Attack on Public Education

Teachers across the Province went on strike yesterday and will continue for the next two days. With over 41,00 teachers walking out, the industrial action was one of the largest demonstrations in decades. Teachers withdrew services in protest of Bill-22 — provincial legislation against collective bargaining for salary, benefit improvements, class size and quality of education. The bill seeks to immediately force teachers back to work without a contract, but also undermine public education in the long-term.

Yesterday’s demonstrations followed on the heels of a powerful, diverse student walkout last Friday on the Vancouver Art Gallery lawns. Despite uncooperative rainy conditions, the student walkout saw an enthusiastic show of politicization by the province’s youth along diverse lines of class, race and ethnicity. The students made an overwhelming call for justice and equality for fellow students and teachers across the province who have been adversely affected by eleven years of neoliberal austerity measures, cuts to education, anti-union legislation, coupled with generous corporate tax cuts.

REVIEW | Photography between the panorama and the detail

Photography in Vancouver during the 1980s passed through an experimental phase that destabilized the technological determinism and established perspectives of image-making in the 20th century. Against the programmatic wishes of historians of the medium, photography was put in a position to resist the false dialectic imposed on it: neither a distinct, reified museum picture, nor a common, ubiquitous document placed carelessly in circulation. Revealing how the photograph and the practice of photography itself operated as a remnant of concrete social relations and political structures, as well as an extension of an advanced and experimental aesthetic culture, the medium was forced to lose its previous consistency. In this context, photography became preoccupied with expanding the field of the photographic itself through and within its own materiality, embracing its reproductive, serial and discursive qualities.

A fragment of this history is currently on display at the group exhibition c.1983 at North Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery. Artists included in the exhibition — Marian Penner Bancroft, Stan Douglas, Elizabeth Vander Zaag, Laiwan, Michelle Normoyle, Ellie Epp, Ken Lum, Kati Campbell, Arni Runar Haraldsson, (save for Ian Wallace) — answered the earlier international call for critique of the commodification of the art object through the expansion of the photographic image, a movement that found its fluid relevance in Vancouver’s nascent artist run-culture.

REVIEW | Kota Ezawa’s ‘Hand Vote’

A new outdoor installation has appeared at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s OFFSITE sculpture garden located outside the Shangri-La luxury hotel in Downtown Vancouver. Perched next to Georgia Street and easily viewable from a car window, Kota Ezawa’s Hand Vote (2012) is a 3-D cut-out of a 2-D image depicting a regular parliamentary meeting with hands raised in a ritual act of voting. In the brief write-up for the piece, the Vancouver Art Gallery has stated:

“In light of recent events in which demands for societal reform have become apparent both in Canada and abroad, Ezawa’s portrait of democracy could not be more timely.”

Prior to exploring how Hand Vote recapitulates other public works currently on show in Vancouver, we should pose the obvious question: what disavowed event is the VAG pointing to when speaking of “recent events”?

The Global Occupy movement and the Arab Spring are of course the events that come to mind. More specifically, we are reminded of the occupation of the VAG’s North grounds in the fall of 2011. The question is slightly thwarted, however, when we recognize that Occupy Together, and the Arab Spring before it, were not generated by vague calls for social reform. On this point we should be careful not to mince words: the popular movements of the past two years sought to strike a fatal blow to a system of extreme wealth and inequality. The movements in the Middle East, Europe and North America were precipitated by the desire for the wholesale transformation of society itself. To grasp Hand Vote therefore – or as Hegel would say, to seize the concept with our hands – we should investigate the temporal-specificity of the piece.