About
The Vancouver Heritage Register (VHR) upgrade was approved by City Council on October 8 after a number of years of design. Started in 1986 as an inventory of heritage sites, there had never been a policy review of the VHR until the Heritage Action Plan starting at the beginning of 2014. Since 1986, there has been considerable change as well as new thinking in heritage approaches beyond the initial focus on mainly the preservation of buildings with architectural merit determined by heritage experts.
One significant influence on the update is the focus on Truth and Reconciliation and consultation with local Indigenous Nations. Specifically to how it applies to the VHR, that engagement yielded a truth-telling statement about the impact of the VHR on Indigenous heritage. The statement in part reads:
The City of Vancouver acknowledges and recognizes the continued harm of the Vancouver Heritage Register and is committed to reckoning with the history of heritage by-laws, policies, and programs that uphold and perpetuate colonial violence and erasure of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people on unceded territories.
The Vancouver Heritage Register today is a land-planning tool used to guide changes to primarily Eurocentric and colonial heritage buildings through the permit application process. When reading this policy, note that the places and resources listed reflect a very limited and biased understanding of history, and do not embrace the full understanding of cultural heritage and the many diverse experiences and perspectives of the past, present, and future.
The full statement is available here: https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/vancouver-heritage-register-vhr.aspx
The significant conversations over intangible heritage, cultural redress and the heritage of ethno-cultural communities since 2014 in Vancouver have also factored into the upgrade. The VHR now features a broader definition of heritage including cultural traditions, ways of life and lived experiences. Regarding methodology, the A, B, C ranking evaluation system is now gone. A property is either on or off the register.
Why on the Top10
In policy, the VHR has been used as the cornerstone of the City’s heritage program focusing on buildings and structures. The changing ideas and understandings of what heritage is and how it should be approached introduces important complexity and nuance to the City’s heritage policies. Intangible qualities of heritage, especially when they are not directly related to recognition of a building, are challenging to capture in a tool like the VHR. One example provided in the staff report is a business that people have meaningful connections to, which while usually in a building, is a separate entity from the building (for example, a business can move to another building). City staff have also identified the need for a new planning framework to support intangible heritage since the VHR cannot. While the original VHR and heritage program was more simple for policy to address, this broader conception of heritage that adds much more (needed) complexity to heritage, is difficult to capture in policy, and some aspects of it may be impossible to capture through regulation. There is an immediacy to frameworks that capture these types of issues that the VHR does not.
During this upgrade, City staff have taken the step to clarify that the VHR is for land use and focused on the recognition of buildings and structures.This is an important clarification. But there is also an important matter that concerns the association of being on the register with being a protected building. (Being on the register is often associated with being protected but in actuality, only a small percentage of properties are actually protected even though they are on the register.) For the many people who feel a strong connection to Vancouver’s heritage buildings and structures, what can be done by the register to protect the loss of significant buildings?
Additional Information
https://vancouversun.com/news/vancouver-heritage-buildings-register-cultural-diversity
We acknowledge the financial assistance of the Province of British Columbia
