Ship Point Plan - 2023 Edition
Here we are again…
Last week City Council was presented with an update to the Ship Point plan. I will get into details about what the presentation was about, but first a little history. I have written about Ship Point and the Inner Harbour Parking lots quite a few times before. You can read those articles here, here and here. My writing on them is still fairly recent though. These vast spaces on Victoria’s harbour-front have been a part of our collective city consciousness for decades. I am not sure if you can start anywhere except with the Reid proposal for the northern lots which came to a dramatic conclusion in 1974 when the provincial government put a freeze on the development in order to “preserve” the waterfront. That preservation has certainly worked with nothing having changed on the harbour lots or Ship Point in almost 50 years. Since then there have various ideas proposed every couple of years. Perhaps the most prominent in the media was the suggestion in the early 2000’s for a new performance hall.
Since then we hear rumblings of a new plan coming forward every couple of years, yet nothing comes of them. There have been quite a few plans done up by prominent architects. I had links in my 2017 article, but they all seem to have been removed in the last six years. The biggest recent push to create a plan for Ship Point began when the City undertook a large consultation process with public, working partners, and the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations in 2017. In 2018 the City released its plan and approved it. You can see that plan here. As you can tell from my previous two articles, I was not a huge fan of the plan and had significant (and seemingly well deserved) skepticism that anything would actually proceed. The plan was too focused on creating a park for use in the summer months, maintained swaths of parking in the winter and had a single building that really had no vision at all as to why it was there. A relook at the plan was definitely warranted and that brings us up to the presentation that came to council at the September 14 Committee of the Whole meeting.
You can watch the whole meeting here. I would recommend it if you are interested in either the Ship Point plan or just to see our City Council in action. There are three key things that came out of watching the meeting for me. First, the focus of the meeting was not on what the plan for the site will be. Staff brought up significant issues with the site, from potential contamination to the deterioration of the seawall and general instability of the underlying land. This was the reason it was coming before council, that staff feel that the focus needs to shift from the planning of what is on the site to ensuring the stability of the current site. The second focal point of the meeting was on the current, interim usage as it pertains to vehicle access. Several councilors raised concerns about the current usage as a parking lot; that the 2018 approved plan for the site maintained that parking for a large portion of the year; and that even during a site remediation there would still be parking as a primary use. A couple of additional motions were added by council to limit both the interim and long-term use of the land for parking and even vehicle access. This is a great change and something that I raised in both of my previous articles on the site. It should give staff the direction to ensure that as the site is fully planned any maintenance of the space for surface parking would be a mistake. The final thing that came out of the meeting was not actually really discussed by staff or council directly, but I think is actually the fundamental question that we need to be asking, ‘What is our vision for Ship Point?’
Strangely enough, I was grocery shopping the other day and listening to one of my favourite podcasts as I did, 99% Invisible. The current episode is actual a rebroadcast of a show from the podcast Cautionary Tales. This one in particular focused on the design and building of the Sydney Opera House. While the whole episode is worth a listen, the piece that resonated with me and that immediately brought me back to my thinking about Ship Point is that when you look at large infrastructure failures (and by failures I mean over budget or not achieving success, not falling down) it is usually because a simple question hasn’t been answered at the outset of the planning process. What do we want at that site and why? I don’t think we have even begun to think about this for Ship Point or the more northern harbour parking lots. What do we want there, what will it do for the city and why? To be clear I am not saying this as a stalling tactic to hope for something to come along and solve the question for us, but I do think that we can look around the harbour and get a cue as to where we should start our thought process.
Victoria’s Inner Harbour is the starting point for what drives people to want to come to Victoria for both good and bad. Good, because it is a beautiful and striking place, and bad, because it doesn’t tell a complete story of what our city is about. Still, what makes the Inner Harbour what it is, are giant monuments of architecture. If I were to be given a piece of land next to the Parliament Buildings, the Empress Hotel, the Steamship Terminal, the Royal BC Museum and the Belmont Building, my first thought wouldn’t be to compliment it with some concrete risers, some stairs and patches of grass. It would be to build something that both enhances the current space and identifies the city as it is now.
As I said in my previous articles, one of the concerns I had with the plan was building a pavilion building with no ideas for how it would be used. Now with the current planning process, whether even the meagre pavilion building will be built is in question. Apart from having a place to continue having concerts, some greenspace, the continuation of the harbour walkway, and no parking, there is no vision for what we are trying to do here.
As I said, I think we should be thinking about what we want out of this last premiere space on the Inner Harbour; a nice garden and path that doesn’t distract from the colonial architecture that has always brought people here, doesn’t feel right.
I have mentioned before that what I think we should be doing as a focal point for the site is working with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations to return a large portion of the Ship Point land to them to ultimately do what they would want with the site. I would love to see a large indigenous cultural centre that competes (even overshadows?) with the colonial architecture that is currently there. With such a prominent site, I am not sure there is a better place to help advance true reconciliation than by allowing those who have always lived on this land to promote their identity, even better that it is at the centre of the province’s capital.
That said, I would love to hear your visions for what this site could be. It is only with a strong vision that we will end up with something that we can all be proud of, rather than just another set of benches and grass near the water.
