Vision Vancouver and city planners have recently launched a series of highly branded “ideas competitions” with design-heavy titles like re:THINK and re:CONNECT. While the stated purpose of these competitions has been to generate creative new ideas for the city’s greatest planning challenges, the reality is that these events represent staged spectacles that obscure Vancouver’s housing crisis. The story of re:THINK and re:CONNECT offers a textbook model for how to distract residents away from the the social injustices of extraordinary housing costs and incredible developer profits, displacing politics through the spectacle of competition.
The re:THINK housing competition encourages ordinary residents to submit and vote on ideas for “protecting and creating affordable housing in Vancouver,” while re:CONNECT called on the citizens of Vancouver to “join with local and international designers to ignite discussion and dream new possibilities for the future of the viaducts and the City’s broader Eastern Core.” By launching these flashy spectacles of competition, oriented primarily around designing our way out of the crisis (or ignoring the housing crisis completely in the case of re:CONNECT), Vision Vancouver is embracing the creative neoliberal language of community and citizen participation, while actually sidelining the fundamental socio-economic injustices of our developer-run city.