Vancouver is Building a Coalition for Change
In a similar vein as SoCal’s recent Strong Towns (ST) regional meetup, Strong Towns Vancouver (now called VanPOP, Vancouverites for People-Oriented Places) organized a Vancouver Big Tent Urbanist event last Friday, 22 August 2025 in China Creek North Park. The idea of gathering leaders and active members from the 20+ urbanist groups in metropolitan Vancouver was inspired by ST Chicago’s Big Tent urbanist event in late 2024. Emboldened by awesome advice from the leaders of ST Chicago, VanPOP sponsored our first Big Tent event in Vancouver in March 2025. In addition to the other ST LCs in southwest British Columbia (ST Langley, DelPOP, and ST Nanaimo), VanPOP also invited our partner urbanist groups like Vision Zero Vancouver, Movement, Abundant Housing Van, and many others. We wanted to showcase all our collective efforts/successes/events and help more locals get involved in all our urbanist groups in whichever area interests them most (safe streets, transit, housing, etc.). Over 50 people attended and Vision Zero champion and by-election candidate, Lucy Maloney, gave a rousing speech over a noisy pub.
Since we received such positive feedback about our first Big Tent event in March, we decided to cast a wider net in August by hosting an encore Big Tent event in a park-like setting that could (a) allow much more capacity and (b) highlight the sunny warm summer weather of BC. So for our encore Big Tent event last week, ST Vancouver contacted more urbanist group leaders and almost 100 people attended! We facilitated intro speeches by spokespersons from each urbanist group, ending with rousing speeches Norm Van Eeden Petersman of DelPOP / Strong Towns, City of Vancouver Councillor Sean Orr, and Lucy Maloney (now City of Vancouver Councillor Lucy Maloney). Additionally, Patrick Johnstone, Mayor of New Westminster, and Uytae Lee, columnist and creator of the CBC series ‘Stories About Here’, both attended to show their support for Vancouver’s urban advocacy partnerships. The scheduled 2-hour event seamlessly extended into a casual 4-hour happy hour networking event well past sunset. We certainly agree that these kinds of meetups don’t just strengthen existing ST LCs, they also help new groups get started, strengthen the broader movement by knitting urbanist groups together, and help LCs collaborate on regional and statewide advocacy efforts.
More photos from the August urbanist event can be found here - Google Drive link