Vancouver will host an international “Cities Summit” in February aimed at creating sustainable business opportunities to take advantage of the growing urbanization of the world.
The conference, which Mayor Gregor Robertson promised in his inaugural speech Monday, will bring together international entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, major corporations and “forward-thinking mayors” who want to create businesses and jobs around the green economy, according to the Vancouver Economic Commission, which is organizing the summit.
The event, scheduled for Feb. 1-2, is being organized around the second anniversary of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and is a plank in Robertson’s efforts to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world by 2020.
“Every city in the world is looking at capturing opportunities in the green economy and applying innovation to building and rebuilding themselves,” he said. “Vancouver needs to be a player and capitalize on our Olympic exposure and premium brand to be relevant in attracting investment and jobs.”
Meanwhile, the Campus City Collaborative, or C-3, a collaboration of the city and six post-secondary institutions, is organizing two other springtime conferences.
Those events — a “green workforce education conference” held by the B.C. Institute of Technology and a research collaboration symposium organized by Simon Fraser University — are designed to bridge gaps between the knowledge universities have and the city’s need for sustainable solutions and information.
“There is a huge need to build bridges between governments, academia, business, the social benefit sector. Government is desperate for evidence-based policy,” said Moura Quayle, who with former premier Mike Harcourt co-chairs the C-3 initiative.
“One of the things we in institutions can bring is some new thinking strategies, how we think our way through some of these challenges.”
Together with C-3, the summit is the newest part of an agenda Robertson began in 2008 with a group of supporters to try to shift Vancouver’s traditional carbon-based economy toward a more sustainable one.
He’s also in a race with other mayors around the world to try to raise their cities’ profile on the international stage as places where sustainable solutions for growing cities can be developed. Robertson has in the past tried to lure venture capitalists and their money to Vancouver to take advantage of a small but growing green innovation sector.
During the Olympics, the city and other municipalities created the Metro Vancouver Commerce Business Program, which the Vancouver Economic Commission said generated $300 million in investment and created 2,500 jobs.
The Cities Summit is the next attempt to bring more investment into the region, Robertson said.
“The emerging theme of city-building is a huge opportunity for Vancouver to capitalize on the expertise we have in green building and clean technology that cities around the world are hungry for,” he said. “There is a transformation of infrastructure afoot to reduce carbon and waste and more efficiently use resources that Vancouver can be at the centre of.”
At the event, delegates from the cities of London, Copenhagen and Kansas City will outline their efforts to marry venture capital with innovative green projects.
The two-day event’s estimated cost of $300,000 will be recovered from attendance fees and sponsors. Robertson said taxpayers won’t be underwriting it although the city hopes to find technologies and business solutions there that can help the city directly.
However, Vancouver is paying two-thirds of the annual $160,000 cost of the C-3 program, with the six post-secondary institutions covering the rest. As part of the project, the city loaned the institutions a building underneath Cambie Bridge for the home of CityStudio, a program that connects students, faculty and city staff together on “real world” projects.
Those projects can be as simple as identifying gaps in city services or in the needs of citizens, according to Duane Elverum, a professor with the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Elverum and Janet Moore, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University's Centre for Dialogue co-founded CityStudio. Elverum said that in one project, students mapped all of the places a person could buy a fresh apple in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. That apple also signified where people could get fresh food. When plotted, the information showed "huge gaps" in where food supplies are located.
That information will be invaluable to the city in its effort to meet its pledge to increase food security by 50 per cent by 2020, he said.
“No one has ever been on the ground and asked ‘where can we buy fresh produce in the city.’ Where are the specific locations? We don’t know this. It may seem minor, but they have major repercussions.”
Quayle, a former deputy minister of advanced education in Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government, said it is these kinds of information projects that will help cities move away from a carbon-based economy.
“I basically thought as I was coming out of government, ‘Who are the people who are really going to be able to make change in a post-carbon context?’” she said. “It is going to be these young entrepreneurs, these young business students, who are going to get out there and turn business models on their heads.”
Quayle said with that in mind, architects, engineers, technology companies and cities all need to learn how to retool to reflect a new post-carbon reality.
The C-3 project will marry those needs between institutions and government. “For me it comes down to showing taxpayers we can collaborate in their best interest and we can bridge those gaps between our institutions and the city.”
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