A community planner wants to build Nanaimo with and for citizens.
Tyler Brown is running for city council and held an official campaign launch on Thursday evening at Mon Petit Choux. Outside the café, the Commercial Street Night Market was bustling and Brown asked those inside to image a downtown Nanaimo that’s full of life, promotes interaction, and is accessible, pedestrian-friendly and well-serviced by transit.
“Imagine Nanaimo as the best mid-size city in British Columbia,” he said. “That simple but bold vision is the driving force of this campaign.”
Brown works for the Regional District of Nanaimo, formerly as a planner and currently as an intergovernmental liaison.
He runs the Our Street Nanaimo blog sharing ideas about urban planning, and organized the Jane’s Walk event earlier this year which sought to further some of those concepts.
“Through some of those projects, I’ve met amazing people, I’ve had so many conversations…” Brown said. “People seem really hungry for good urbanism.”
He’s been focused on what he calls incremental or tactical urbanism – short-term actions that can lead to long-term changes. A city that works for an eight year old and an 80 year old, he said, works for everybody.
“Every single person in Nanaimo is a builder,” Brown said. “We are all community builders and we are all city builders. It’s time we remember that.”
He’s gotten involved in the City of Nanaimo in other ways – he sits on the community planning committee and he’s a former chairman of the board of variance.
Outlining his platform at his campaign launch, Brown called for an inclusive and liveable city and said Nanaimo can’t turn its back on challenges such as reconciliation, climate change, homelessness and housing affordability.
On affordable housing, he said there are tools that can be utilized or better utilized by the city, mentioning new rental-specific zoning, density bonusing for developers and possibly smaller minimum lot sizes.
His platform also calls for open and ethical government. Brown said he’d prefer to focus on positives with his campaign, but alluded to the “turmoil” of the current council’s term and hopes the next council will view its role a little differently.
“Council should be a platform to empower citizens through collaboration within the city and to achieve meaningful results for residents. We haven’t been seeing that,” he said.
His campaign’s just started, but Brown said he’s enjoying it and he’s liked learning about people’s hopes for their city.
“It’s wonderful to get different perspectives,” said Brown. “It’s a really exciting time, because I think people really want Nanaimo to thrive and they really want this to be a place that they can live out their dreams and their life.”
To read interviews with other local government election candidates, click here.
editor@nanaimobulletin.com
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