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Strathcona. 3 A furore erupted as Chinatown residents found new allies in liberal
middle-class professionals, and with mounting opposition and the freeway plan
discredited, Council reluctantly backed down.
This unlikely victory was soon joined by a second (Kim and Lai 1982; Ley
et al. 1994). In 1968, the third and most sweeping phase of urban renewal
was announced, involving clearance of 15 blocks and displacement of another
3,000 people. In response Chinatown residents and their small but energetic
group of white allies - who included Michael Harcourt, a young lawyer later
to be Mayor of Vancouver and Premier of British Columbia - abandoned the
ineffectual benevolent associations and formed their own protest organiza-
tion, the Strathcona Property Owners' and Tenants' Association (SPOTA),
an organization in which immigrant and second generation women played
key leadership roles (Lee 2007). In light of the historic social and political
marginalization of Chinatown the events that followed were extraordinary.
A federal task force investigating urban renewal, reporting to the recently
elected Trudeau administration in Ottawa, visited Vancouver and led by the
minister met with Chinatown residents protesting the City's urban renewal
plan (Ley et al. 1994). With unprecedented speed, just over a week later
City Council was informed that the federal government would withdraw or
severely curtail funds for urban renewal; indeed a formal moratorium on
urban renewal across Canada followed a few months after. While the City
struggled to re-enact its urban renewal activities, SPOTA was advised by
federal government officials how to develop a strategy to negotiate with
intransigent members of the Vancouver Council. This plan included devel-
opment of an earlier SPOTA brief outlining an experimental rehabilitation
programme with government grant and loan subsidies. SPOTA invited the
three levels of government to meet to discuss the recommendations. The
newly appointed federal minister, Robert Andras, suggested a private meet-
ing with the president of SPOTA in August 1969 where he made a commit-
ment to the plan in advance of the tri-level government session. There, he
rejected the City's counter-proposal to re-establish urban renewal.
Finagling and bad faith by the City - that included springing a new free-
way plan on Chinatown-Strathcona later in 1969 - delayed progress, but
plans moved ahead constructively with the election of a reform city council
in 1972 that included Harcourt and other SPOTA supporters, and was
itself an incarnation of the liberal spirit of the times (Ley 1980). The same
year, 1971, as the federal declaration of multiculturalism, protection, not
destruction, was enunciated with the designation of the Chinatown Historic
Area by the provincial government. Completing the redirection of the three
levels of government, the city's participatory planning process configured a
new neighbourhood landscape, emphasizing renovation and enrichment in
contrast to the demolition-displacement model of 1960s urban renewal
(Figure 2.2). An unprecedented joint community-city working committee
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