Bonsai Vancouver
A great metaphor by Harmon Moon
Harmon Moon has a great metaphor: Vancouver's neighbourhoods are like bonsai. They're lovely but much too small, because we haven't allowed them to grow.
Harmon speaking at a public hearing, November 14
Vancouver is not a bonsai plant. Daily Hive, November 26.
The fight over the Broadway Plan is a familiar one to those who follow Vancouver politics and is emblematic of something I call “Bonsai Vancouver.”
Bonsai, if you’re not familiar, is a Japanese art form in which an artist takes a young sapling and, with a pair of shears, prunes it down to their desired size.
Leaves are plucked, branches are stripped, and buds are snipped until the sapling resembles an ancient tree, at one-tenth scale. Thus cropped, the bonsai is transferred to a shallow pot and put on display, to be appreciated as a living statue and conversation piece.
It’s remarkably reminiscent of how the City of Vancouver has treated its neighbourhoods over the years. At some point in the past century, Vancouver decided that the end goal was a perfectly manicured city. Vancouverites were promised access to a quiet, suburban low-rise house — white picket fence and all — with unobstructed views of our mountains, oceans, and forests.
Apartments were banned on over three-quarters of residential land, and restrictive view cones were instituted to limit the skyline, while larger buildings had floors slashed away for fear of their shadows darkening the sidewalks below.
The thing about bonsai, however, is that your sapling is a living thing — one that still wants to grow.
Bonsai artists must constantly trim their trees to prevent natural growth from ruining their deliberately cultivated aesthetic. So it is with Bonsai Vancouver, with the notable difference that this city wants to grow much bigger and faster than even the most ambitious tree.
