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In 1953, Bellingham's KVOS-TV aired its first broadcast--Queen Elizabeth II's coronation--to audiences in northwest Washington State and southwest British Columbia. KVOS was the second television station in Washington and the first in British Columbia. As the station--and the popularity of television--grew, KVOS turned a persistent focus to attracting television audiences in the Vancouver metropolitan region and Vancouver Island. The station established a subsidiary in Vancouver in 1960 to produce commercials for local Canadian advertisers. This subsidiary grew into a full-fledged film production studio, Canawest Film Productions, which produced commercials, industrial films and animation for clients on both sides of the border. For a brief period, KVOS and Canawest fostered a unique relationship among an American broadcaster, Canadian and American advertisers, and cross-border audiences. Canawest was shuttered in 1977 after the Canadian legislature passed Bill C-58, ending tax deductions for Canadian companies advertising on American TV stations. This paper gives insight into the cross-border design of KVOS as well as Canawest's role in producing audiovisual material in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, this paper reflects on the tensions between culture and economics in the face of financial incentive and policy intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to expand current thinking about rephotography and how it might focus on a specific geographic terrain, thereby validating research conducted from 2018 to 2020 in Vancouver, Canada. The research site is located in the False Creek Flats post-industrial district, a district currently undergoing urban regeneration while pursuing a major restructuring programme (to be completed in 2037). The programme is being undertaken by the City of Vancouver. This paper attempts to identify the transformational dynamics that characterise the urban area by drawing primarily on two visual sources: photographs taken in situ and research conducted in Vancouver's visual archives. After taking composition into account, these sources will play a key role in mounting a proposal that highlights narrative rephotography. The montages produced will then make it feasible to construct a narrative that runs counter to the official version: a city which has no past. The montages strive both to reintroduce a temporal arc that will subsume the almost-forgotten millennial history of the area and to depict one of its likely futures. Indeed, in contrast to the promising future set forth in the urban regeneration plan, another uchronia is, paradoxically, reconnecting with its aquatic past, as global heating accelerates rising water levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 30 years ago, the first Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) were formed to undermine the hegemonic heteronormativity of public educational institutions in North America. Despite the challenges that these student clubs pose to the heteronormativity of school spaces, the practices they employ have rarely been examined by geographers. This paper, therefore, expands upon the interdisciplinary literature on GSAs from within education and a smaller geographical literature on education and sexuality by examining the practices of suburban public high school GSAs on the peripheries of the Vancouver city-region in British Columbia, Canada. It argues that GSAs in suburban secondary public schools play valuable social supporting and activist roles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S) youth as spaces of "surplus visibility" – a means of challenging invisibility through the generation of excessive presence. Using empirical examples from two case study peripheral municipalities (Surrey and Burnaby) six dimensions of GSA actions are examined to illustrate how surplus visibility is produced (through administration, decoration, participation, sociability, reconnaissance, and activism) but also how its 'excesses' are regulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines relations between transnational activities and immigrant integration in Vancouver. From a large survey, associations are noted between a set of transnational practices and economic and socio-cultural indicators of integration in Canada. These associations depart considerably from comparable studies in the United States and the Netherlands, identifying transnationalism with recent migrants and poor socio-cultural integration, while relations are weak and inconsistent with economic integration. The most transnational profile in the Vancouver survey is shared by business immigrants originating from East Asia, and the second part of the paper comprises an ethnography of this group, interpreting how their spatial practices and identities as business people sans frontières place them at odds with the state's attempt to reproduce integrated national citizens. These general themes are examined in more detail in relation to their holding of global assets in potential non-compliance with Canadian tax law, and their sojourner habitus, in which serial mobility limits participation and identity with Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study interrogates ostensible differential deployment of an increasingly ubiquitous tool of policing in Canada – the Taser. Taser-related deaths are problematized as evidence of a teething new urban terrorism essentially against the downtrodden. The paper argues that a combination of intersecting factors: gender, low socio-economic status, mental illness, drug use, and ethnicity are fundamental to who gets tased by the police. The paper investigates the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekański at Vancouver airport as a quintessential ‘media event’. It highlights the concomitant disarticulation of the police as repositories of order and their re-articulation as insouciant villains. Dziekański's death, the paper contends, inter alia benefitted from the Canadian ‘cultural feeling rules’ in a manner that earlier recorded Taser-related fatalities did not. In addition, the paper argues that if the current trend continues, not only will the downtrodden continue to bear the brunt of Taser injuries and fatalities, but there may be scant public outcry accompanying such gory incidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context, our case study of two elementary schools observes that white middle-class parents choose a predominantly white school - whose students are non-ESL and have a second language choice of French - in a socially and ethnically mixed inner city neighbourhood, creating a stark imbalance in the student population of local neighbourhood schools. This paper examines parents' accounts of their choices, which they rationalise on the basis of linguistic competency and differentiation from multilingual others. We draw from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of language and symbolic power and Ghassan Hage's spatial theory of nationalist practice to understand the linguistic dimension of school choice rationalisation made by white middle-class parents. In the context of these insights, we argue that the way anglophone white middle-class parents choose their children's schools is intricately linked to active processes of reproducing a stratilingual society in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that the coding and ordering of sexuality and space through definitions of which sexual practices and which representations of sexuality are morally appropriate in public space can be usefully understood as a problem of governance. We argue that attempts to hide or make visible specific sexualities in public space are complicated and politically charged because, while written regulations are relatively cut-and-dried, their implementation, by planners, judges, et al., involves significant discretion and leads to contingent, contestable outcomes. Furthermore, the politics of governing sexual morality and public space is made more problematic when the place where a hegemonic norm of behaviour or morality is publically challenged is an iconic park that attracts intense media attention. The paper elaborates these arguments through two interrelated case studies: a debate over the appropriate location of an AIDS memorial in Stanley Park, Vancouver and the reaction to the killing of a gay man who cruised the park for sex. We conclude by linking our argument to recent statements about the future of geographies of sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowledge both the contingences and potentialities of categories like 'the state,' 'governance,' and 'public space' and also their structural tendencies and their ongoing association with sexual repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on several papers discussed during the 6th National Health Product Research Society (NHPRS) Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia on February 18-21, 2009 is presented. One paper explores on the role played by traditional knowledge, the role of appropriate regulatory oversight based on risk, developments in electronic review and the use of the emerging technologies. It mentions on papers that focus on nutragenomics, pharmacology and toxicology in health products.

This paper discusses the circulation of archaeological heritage through moving image practices associated with the Olympic Games. From the Athens Games of 1896 to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Olympic ‘mega-events’ (Roche 2000, 2003) continue to produce media narratives of place grounded in archaeological practices. I discuss the performativity of varied and distributed screen practices that extend and modify the archaeological agency of material culture in conditioning the production of place, space and past-ness. While public discourse may have downplayed the role of the city's heritage in the production of the Olympics, I suggest that archaeology is never far away from Olympic narrative frames. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of limited network sensor coverage caused by insufficient sample size of probe vehicles or inadequate numbers of fixed sensors. A framework is proposed to estimate link travel times using available data from neighbouring links. Two clues are used for real-time travel time estimation: link historical travel time data and online travel time data from neighbour links. In the absence of online travel time data from neighbour links, historical records only have to be relied upon. However, where the two types of data are available, a data fusion scheme can be applied to make use of the two clues. The proposed framework is validated using real-life data from the City of Vancouver, British Columbia. The estimation accuracy is found to be comparable to the existing literature. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of using neighbour links data as an additional source of information that might not have been extensively explored before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, under the mutually constitutive processes of neoliberal urbanization and globalization, Vancouver has radically transformed and become a serious contender for the title of 'world-class city'. Against the background of this socio-spatial force reconfiguring the city, I explore how the city's unique development of mini schools - small and selective public schools within larger urban public secondary schools - has been transforming the meanings, practices, projects and imaginaries of the city's communities. I conducted a multi-sited ethnography using an interdisciplinary methodological framework to critically examine how such transformation is carried out. My ethnography focused on the dismantling of long-standing connections between the school and the neighbourhood within the context of the emerging local education market, and how this process unfolds in young people's lives and self formation. This paper draws from Raymond Williams' socio-cultural theories, and Nikolas Rose's theory of the new styles of 'government through community'. I use these theories together in order to bring forward a nuanced understanding of the new projects of global city communities. I focus on how these new projects are manifested in young people's complex experiences of Vancouver's mini schools. The outcomes of this study will illuminate the ramifications of the education market on the new dynamics of intra-urban social disparity and polarization in global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise and rise of sustainability in urban and social policy circles has transformed the discursive terrain of urban politics. In 2009, Gunder and Hillier argued sustainability is now urban planning's central empty signifier, offering an overarching narrative around which practice can be oriented. This paper takes up the notion of sustainability as an empty/master-signifier, arguing that the recognition of its nominal status is central to understanding how it operates to produce ideological foundation. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with urban and social policy makers and practitioners in Vancouver, Canada, Zizek's 1989 critique of the cynical functioning of contemporary ideology is used to interpret the city's engagement with sustainability. Focusing on 'social sustainability' it is argued that sustainability has provided a quilting point that has enabled new social and urban policy-related partnerships and organizational agendas to be developed. However, this coherence remains unstable and plagued by questions of signification due to the radical negativity of the master-signifier, where efforts at definition and agreement are haunted by the non-presence of sustainability. It is argued that this framing of sustainability as ideological conduit in Vancouver helps explain the co-presence of transformative rhetoric and business-as-usual. Using Zizek's critique of cynical reason in contemporary ideology, interview data is drawn upon to show how many practitioners seek to distance themselves from sustainability, but at the same time continue to act it out anyway. In conclusion, the sobering politics of Zizek's critique of contemporary ideology are considered in the light of growing urban problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s was a global phenomenon that achieved significant educational change. More analysis of how it developed and had an impact on education can inform our understanding of the possibilities for change today. This paper explores how the women's movement changed schooling in Vancouver in the 1970s, using a framework based on the idea of building civic capacity. The movement arose from a global politics, coalesced locally around new ideas, and created new relationships and institutional forms that drove school reform. Although the particular institutional forms that were created did not last, the impact of changed ideas and a new politics of equity have persisted, albeit in contested forms. The metaphor of building civic capacity for educational change is useful in focusing attention on ideas and institutions, but must be understood as contingent, shifting and fragile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vancouver exemplifies the richness of the many processes that set the civic culture of large contemporary cities. This paper focuses on what drives the social and economic construction of Vancouver, pointing to the complex linkages that tie agents to their environment. It shows that, in Vancouver, power arises from strong popular control and local democratic and participatory values, where group interactions produce and co-produce community development. The Vancouver regime is open yet stable, socially progressive yet fiscally conservative and pro-development. It is a regime that upholds an activist, tolerant and entrepreneurial civic culture. It emerges from an on-going process where the openness of the regime is re-negotiated in each neighbourhood and around each policy arena leading to the emergence of a culture of ongoing participation where civic, neighbourhood, ethnic and business groups constantly re-invent the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research findings from an ethnographic study carried out with 24 low-income youths (ages 14-16) living on the economic fringes of urban inner-city Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our primary aims are: to expose the stratified subcultural articulations of citizenship as they are expressed, through language and symbol, by the young people within our study; and to demonstrate how critiques of (neo-)liberalism in political thought, when combined with a cultural sociology of youth, might alter our subcultural reading of young people's conceptions of citizenship under the dynamics of radical social change. Our ultimate goal is to develop a more nuanced sociological examination of the ways in which young people deploy and utilize the language of citizenship as part of their own cultural struggles, exacerbated in times of state retrenchment, to classify themselves and others as one method of achieving visibility and legitimacy in urban concentrations of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of recent Canadian case law on the constitutionality of legal controls on begging reveals the importance of an unacknowledged view of space and behaviour that I call the traffic code. The paper endeavours to take this code seriously, unpacking its logic and scope. In particular, it explores its legal effects, noting that it deflects rights-based arguments on behalf of the public poor. Its emphasis upon space, use and behaviour appears to be not only illiberal, but curiously aliberal, operating without reference to rights. It is suggested, however, that it may in fact rely upon some deeply liberal notions of rights and space. This, perhaps, allows for a rights-based critique of the traffic code. This, and other possibilities for challenges to the traffic code, are explored in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regionalization has been a feature of Canadian policing over the past thirty years, but policing arrangements in the Greater Vancouver Regional District remain largely decentralized and relatively fragmented. This paper considers why this is the case and in doing so supports the view that decisions about police amalgamations and regionalization are ultimately dependent upon political, rather than administrative, choices. The preference for police rationalization over regionalization in British Columbia (BC) is examined as a political compromise, which at the same time has produced a practical model for future developments in police regionalization in the province and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the ideology of modernism in a North American context and discusses how its various attributes are embodied in the Surrey City Centre development in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. In doing so, it makes use of Calthorpe and Fulton's tri‐partite framework of specialization, mass production and standardization as being characteristic of the ethos of the age. After analysing the various interventions that design professionals and civic agencies have made in the Surrey City Centre area, it concludes that modernist ideology has a tendency to foster placeless settings lacking in vitality, security and comfort and appeal for pedestrians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an investigation of the Portland Hotel Services Society (PHS) in Vancouver, British Columbia, and in particular, their ‘no-eviction policy’, this paper examines the effect of social housing policies on residents, analyzes the part played by cultural narrative or scripts and concludes with a discussion on the need for reframing critical social issues. The nuances of this policy and its effects on the residents' lived experiences afford a greater understanding of how a housing provider such as PHS reframes their mandate to allow their residents to live in dignity. The exploratory research questions governing this study investigates:‘Who are the hard to house and how can their needs be met?’ and ‘What role do housing management policies perform and how can these policies reflect this population's needs?’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Vancouver's system of urban design as public policy utilizing 12 principles derived from critiques of design review in the USA. These principles include community vision; the relationship of design, planning and zoning; substantive design principles; and due process in review. Vancouver's city-wide plan, neighbourhood visions and sub-area development plans provide the vision, while its cooperative planning, development levies and discretionary zoning system and guidelines support the pursuit of quality urban design. Its practices are based on generic and contextual design principles, while its processes are transparent, participative, backed by peer review, predictable and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vancouver Region is widely recognised as one North American jurisdiction where strong growth management plans and policies have been put in place in order to control urban sprawl. While many authors have lauded the region for its good planning intentions, there has been little in the way of assessment of actual performance. This paper attempts to identify some quantitative growth management goals that have been (officially and unofficially) espoused by planning authorities in the region, and to measure these against actual trends. The results are mixed: on the one hand, some key growth management goals adopted by the region are not ambitious compared with existing trends and even these goals are not being met. For instance, the supposedly compact scenario adopted by the region deviates hardly at all from existing growth trends, which regional planners had clearly identified as untenable and requiring drastic change. On the other hand, the region's goal of preserving extensive green areas has been achieved without being watered down during goal formulation or implementation. Whereas these findings may appear contradictory, they are not: conservation in the region has not compromised the potential for growth in the region—at least for the time being. The real test of regional growth management efforts will come in the near future when further expansion meets the 'green wall' on the periphery and NIMBY resistance against densification within existing urban areas. The study suggests that the current structure of regional planning, relying on a partnership between municipal and regional governments, has served the region fairly well in building support for the need for growth management and in elaborating growth management vision. However, there is serious doubt about the ability of this system to set ambitious growth management objectives and to see through the implementation of those objectives in the face of social forces attempting to preserve business-as-usual trends in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Designing or transforming urban areas into 'sustainable cities' is becoming an increasingly common vision. It is, however, an unrealizable vision without agreement on how to determine whether a sustainable city vision has been fulfilled. In this paper we define a provisional set of urban environmental sustainability metrics, chosen to cover the spectrum of issues related to urban areas, and to be drawn from data that are customarily available. We devise a display technique to communicate efficiently the results of a metrics evaluation to a variety of stakeholders. The approach is illustrated by applying the metrics set to Vancouver, Canada, an urban area that has expended considerable effort toward achieving its own environmental vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Vancouver has two overtly identified gay and lesbian areas: West-end, primarily perceived to be associated with men, and East-end, mostly identified with lesbians; thus, where the genderization of space and the sexualization of space converge, the urban lesbian and gay landscape is often gendered by spatial association. In reality, however, lesbian and gay enclaves exist outside these more popular locations and beyond the city peripheries and these two specific locations are not as neatly ordered as their mythical simplicity might suggest. This research explores the construction of lesbian spaces in metro Vancouver through extensive research which began during summer 1996, and the perceptions and expectations of lesbians living in both the East-end and the West-end of Vancouver will be examined. This introductory paper provides a discussion on the opposing views of lesbians in Vancouver expressed in the survey which explode commonly held myths and stereotypes of lesbians in the East-end and the West-end. In essence, lesbian residents hold opinions of the lesbians residing in the "other" community which have political and ideological implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In part because of the rapid global spread of English and other international languages, the majority of the world's students are attending school in a second or other language. Thus, there is a need to ensure that students from all countries can master an international language to a level that will permit them to contribute to academic research and publication. The rapid growth of national Internet networks and their integration into larger, international networks has made possible the creation of virtual graduate courses and graduate programmes for students around the globe. This paper describes how the author uses WebCT at the University of British Columbia to provide a highly interactive Internet course for international graduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional geography courses have declined in status and number at many North American universities. Yet it is regional courses which students with limited geographical education at the high school level may identify as typical geography, and thus regional courses may play a significant role in recruitment of geography majors. Regional courses on the students' country or state/province offer an excellent opportunity to showcase how geographic perspectives can enrich our understanding of the familiar, both in terms of place and discipline. This paper discusses the pivotal role a regional geography course has been given in a new university's geography curriculum, and the innovative structuring of the course so as to avoid some of the deficiencies of common instructional patterns which may deter some students from pursuing further geographic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the publication of the 'Children and War' position paper written for the Association for Childhood Education International by Norma R. Law, director of the Child Study Center in Vancouver. Concern about nuclear threat during the Cold War; Significant role of children in preventing war; Ways to educate children for peace.