Craille Maguire Gillies reports from the recent Resilient Cities confab in Vancouver.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been hanging around environmentalists, urban planners, academics and other “change agents” lately, but the phrase “effect change” — often followed by a nebulous but inspiring call to action — seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

“We in this room have our hands on the levers to effect change,” Rob Abbott told the 600-odd ecological economists, environmentalists, urban planners, academics, politicians and the like who gathered recently at the Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities conference in Vancouver. Abbott, the moderator and official morale booster, continued: “We are a hinge point in history” and we need to “fully embrace the hands of transformation.”

Everyone in the audience was eager to embrace the hands of transformation. We congregated like ecological worshippers under the green-roofed chapel of the Vancouver Convention Centre, with the shipyards extending east like industrial props in an Edward Burtynsky photograph and the Coastal Mountains visible from across Burrard Inlet. We were ready to be inspired. We were ready to effect change!

Abbott introduced Gregor Robertson, the folksy, handsome mayor of Vancouver — a would-be Barack Obama of municipal politics in a city that is, like the U.S., looking to have its faith in itself restored. (His 2008 election campaign was called Change Everything.) Robertson was an organic farmer who started the fruit smoothie company Happy Planet. In any other city, he might make an unlikely candidate for mayor. Not in Vancouver.

He had come to Resilient Cities to preview his Action Plan 2020, an attempt to make Vancouver the greenest in North America within a decade. The plan proposes to:

- create 20,000 green jobs
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent from 2007 levels (something British Columbia as a whole has instituted)
- make all new construction carbon neutral
- start curbside compost pick-up
- reduce the carbon footprint of food production

When Robertson mentioned expanding Vancouver’s urban forest, applause rippled through the audience. “I don’t think every part of the city is going to be like Stanley Park, but you know what I mean,” he said.

Once a city’s cultural aspirations manifested in high-profile architectural masterpieces; now they aim to be beacons of ecological integrity. On the West Coast, there is a kind of competitive environmentalism between Portland and Vancouver. It’s a friendly contest though: Portland plans to be “the most resilient city”, while Vancouver aims for the title “greenest.” Robertson met later that day with Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, and a delegation of a dozen or so to talk about, among other things, a high-speed rail line between the two cities. In his speech at Resilient Cities, he described Vancouver’s 2020 plan as a 10-year decathlon.

The rhetoric at such events can seem as artificial as astro turf, trafficking in ambitious, wide-ranging goals but achieving little action. Cities are, however, the places where signs of climate change will be most tangible to the average westerner, where a country’s “resilience” or lack thereof will be most apparent. Cities will be the interpreters, the worker bees and, in many cases, the leaders of the climate change policies that trickle out of international political get-togethers like COP15 in Copenhagen next month. But maybe they are also signs of the emotional, as well as political, state of a place.

Robertson was off the next day to fly to Greece, where, along with B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, he would attend the lighting of the Olympic torch, a symbol of the city’s other great aspiration.