(originally published as "Grass" in Vancouver Matters, 2009)
Southwest Marine Drive marks a threshold in the City of Vancouver. To the north, Dunbar’s grid of single family homes and neighborhood shops roll over the heights; the pulse of traffic and everyday urban life keep time. To the south the scene shifts. Automobiles yield to horse and rider along the roadways. Immaculate 18-hole golf courses stretch out over much of the landscape. Many of the properties boast private tennis courts, pools, and pleasure boats. Early century cottages are being replaced by opulent and expansive estates which capitalize on some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. This is the Agricultural Land Reserve in Vancouver.
A local developer boasts that “Southlands will make you forget you are still in the city.” Southlands can just as easily make you forget that you are in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). Occupying ground that is zoned provincially and locally for agricultural use (Vancouver’s only RA-1 designation), the area is surprisingly, and almost completely, devoid of what might be considered traditional agricultural production. Livestock, vegetable fields, and modest farm homes have been replaced by equestrian clubs, fairways, and lavish mansions. Today, the community exists as an exclusive, semi-rural “leisurescape” -- a hybrid landscape that values urban leisure in an idyllic rural setting over a working agricultural landscape.
Recontextualizing the ALR
The ALR was established in 1973 as a special provincial land use zone designed to protect and preserve British Columbia’s diminishing supply of farmland. Lands designated under the Act included those deemed “capable and suitable” for agricultural use, land that was at the time under cultivation, and land zoned locally for farming. The intent of the Act was to preserve land vital to provincial food security while sustaining the agricultural sector in the province. In terms of protecting the overall agricultural land base, the Reserve is often cited as a remarkable success – the ALR’s original boundaries remain largely intact and thousands of acres of farmland remain dedicated to agricultural uses. However rising land prices, urban growth, and fluctuating global markets continue to pose serious challenges to the viability of much the province’s prime agricultural land along the Lower Mainland’s urban/rural edge.
Under increasing pressure from urban encroachment, the edge has become a site of opportunism. Land values at the urban edge vastly exceed those of adjacent ALR properties. This disparity is the driving force behind the hundreds of exemption claims fielded each year by the Agricultural Land Commission – the economic value of agricultural land increases exponentially when freed from the land use restrictions of the Reserve. Millions of dollars are at stake in each acre of land along this threshold. Where the line exists, it inspires creative interpretation by land owners and speculators eager to capitalize on the inherent value of their land. While the institution of the ALR is expressed as a permanent condition, the volatility of political whim and the high economic stakes involved ensure that the reality of the Reserve’s legal framework remains malleable and open to negotiation. Despite the strong presence of the ALR, the complex urban forces present at the edge sustain a perpetual tension.
Synthetic Landscapes
Though defined and codified in singular terms, agricultural land in Vancouver assumes complex and abstract forms at the urban/rural edge. Beyond serving as simply a space for cultivation and food production, the edge is comprised of multiple constituencies and interest groups that are invested in the future of this landscape. Though understood and imagined politically as a singular agrarian condition, the ALR edge has been strongly influenced by the urban domain. An emergent urbanism influenced by civic interests has woven its way into the fabric of the landscape along the ALR’s edge. Not fully suburban and not fully agrarian, Vancouver’s Southlands function as a hybrid landscape—a site for a “rural urbanism”. The typologies that result are representative of the different ways that the rural landscape is valued and codified by an urban society.
The Reserve itself exists as a political framework—a set of land use policies and guidelines that govern how ALR land can be used. Because this landscape is “imagined” in a regulatory sense, it is vulnerable to distortion—the exploitation of loopholes, political manipulation, and subversion of the rules are manifest in the physical fabric of the Reserve: dozens of “community institutions” (temples, churches, schools) have been constructed on ALR land at the edge; local urban teens exploit fallow parcels for social events; construction waste is smuggled to illicit micro-landfills hidden on farm parcels; water parks and go-kart tracks sit amidst active farm fields; driving range carts harvest golf balls, while farm machinery operates simultaneously on the other side of a screen netting.
Cultivating Potential
The result at Southlands is a heterotopic space in the city—a site of remarkable “otherness” and juxtaposition. Here, and elsewhere along the urban/rural edge, the ALR represents recreational, scenic, environmental, and economic opportunity. These interests operate both in conjunction and in conflict with agriculture to produce a contested landscape. The ALR in Vancouver has acquired a complexity that goes beyond its singular categorization. Exploring and understanding these anomalous conditions opens up a new set of possibilities along the edge. Neither strictly urban, nor strictly rural, the edge has assumed a multiplicitous character that defies conventional definitions and challenges existing notions of what is possible here. The edge has the potential to cultivate an exchange between a diverse and complex set of ecologies. By engaging and investing multiple interest groups in this landscape, its future existence becomes more secure by virtue of embedded advocacy. Change is inevitable, and productive, for any landscape; but the question of how change manifests itself at the ALR edge is what is at stake -- and is open to design.
