“It’s still a working river.”
This concise statement, made by 79-year-old Elve Morrison neatly encapsulates what is sometimes forgotten about the Fraser River. As we redevelop and revalue waterfront land in Metro Vancouver, we are prone to discount the work that continues to be done there. At the same time, we are prone to forget that the “working waterfronts” of the past were not only industrial sites, but were also places of recreation, retail and residence.
Morrison lives at the site that was previously the heart of New Westminster’s working waterfront, and watches the Fraser River from her living room. She is one of several dozen residents of the Lower Mainland who have contributed oral history to a research project to document and discuss the New Westminster waterfront as a place of work from 1945 to the present. The project, Reclaiming the New Westminster Waterfront, is a partnership between SFU faculty and students, retired longshore workers, the New Westminster Museum and Archives, and others in the community.
The 1,375 kilometre long Fraser River is ecologically and economically vital to British Columbia. It has been a site of human occupation for at least 10,000 years, important for its biodiversity, as a meeting place and transportation corridor. The river also figures prominently in the colonial history of the province and in our modern aspirations for sustainability. Less well understood is the way that the river and riverfront as places of work offer connections to history while also supporting our sustainability goals.
Riverfront activity in New Westminster provides a microcosm of the changes that have occurred at waterfronts across Metro Vancouver and throughout the developed world. Once valued as industrial and transportation sites, we are now more likely to talk about “cleaning up the waterfront” in order to recover its esthetic and economic potential.
There is nothing sustainable about “cleaning up the waterfront” if this means devaluing work, eliminating diverse patterns of land use, and undermining the role of the river as a sustainable alternative to road-based transportation.
The approximately 15 kilometres of waterfront in New Westminster was notable for its shipbuilding, canneries, sawmills, and a seaport — activities we often imagine as dirty, dangerous, and part of the past. It is true that ocean-going cargo ships no longer call at New West (they do still moor just across the river at the Surrey-Fraser docks) and the riverfront that supported piers and warehouses is now dominated by more domestic activities.
But perceptions can be deceiving: there is still plenty of industrial work on the New Westminster waterfront, and tugs and barges still ply the river. The problem is that our current land use and transportation planning decisions are making it increasingly difficult for the river to fulfil its potential as a corridor for sustainable transportation. When we convert waterfront industrial land to residential and recreational uses, we push industry onto green fields and trucks onto the roads.
A comparison of 1945 and 2012 waterfront land use in New Westminster paints a fascinating picture. As we might expect, the proportion of properties that are residential has greatly increased. As well, the proportion of parcels used for manufacturing is down by a third and the proportion used for water-based goods movement has fallen precipitously.
But there are some real surprises. A smaller percentage of waterfront sites are devoted to retail, recreation, hotels and restaurants today than were in 1945. And exactly the same percentage of waterfront properties is used for road and rail transportation and warehousing now as six decades ago!
But here’s how our waterfront land use choices can contribute to or impede our sustainability goals: the mix has changed so that we have allowed road-based goods movement to increase, occupying spaces that were previously filled by rail, warehouses and water-based industries. Our land use and transportation decisions have lowered the immediate financial costs of road transportation at the long-term expense of air pollution, urban road congestion and sprawl.