A Hyperlocal Manifesto
Exploring Hyperlocal Publics through The Little Mountain Housing Project,
Social Video Advocacy and Web Documentary
By
David Vaisbord
MAA, Emily Carr University, 2012

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF APPLIED ARTS
in
Media Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2012

© David Vaisbord, 2012

Abstract
I launched The Little Mountain Project as a response to the eviction and
destruction of a social housing community in Vancouver, Canada. Utilizing hybrid digital
media practices, my work encourages citizens to meet and participate in democratic
processes. The main components of this new media exploration consist of a blog and
video archive, a multi-platform signage project, and a collaborative community web
history project. This paper documents the development of a methodology for an
innovative documentary practice – a hyperlocal web-based strategy – to empower a
counterpublic and to facilitate community dialogue around rapidly evolving civic
processes. I situate my practice within a critique of neoliberalism, the idea of the “public
sphere,” and the history of advocacy and activist filmmaking in Canada, in particular, the
National Film Board of Canada’s “Challenge for Change Program,”1 a ground-breaking
experiment in the use of film for the purpose of social activism. The Little Mountain
Project aims to explore new forms of social, political, and cultural production within
emergent practices enabled by web-based media, which propose new ways to facilitate
dialogue within the public sphere.

1

It must be mentioned that my initial impulse to re-invent my documentary practice was not inspired by the
Challenge for Change program, the concept of the public sphere, or the emergence of hyperlocal web
practices. It was through the process of research for a Masters of Applied Arts degree at the Emily Carr
University that I applied cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts to my emerging practice. Research
informed my practice, which as a result, evolved into a hyperlocal new media strategy employing hybrid
elements.

ii

Table of Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................................ii
Table of Contents ...............................................................................................................iii
List of Figures......................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................vi
1 Methodology....................................................................................................................1
1.1 A Local Documentary Manifesto Inspires a New Film.....................................1
1.2 The Six-Block Manifesto .................................................................................2
1.3 A New Documentary Paradigm.........................................................................4
2 Little Mountain, Social Housing, and Neoliberalism .....................................................6
2.1 Historical Memory.............................................................................................6
2.2 A Low Income Community Faces Destruction .................................................7
2.3 The Right to the City .........................................................................................8
3 The Evolution of a Hyperlocal Documentary Practice..................................................14
3.1 What is Hyperlocal? .......................................................................................16
3.2 The Hyperlocal and the Public Sphere ............................................................17
3.3 The Little Mountain Advisory Committee as Counterpublic..........................20
3.4 Questions About the Hyperlocal .....................................................................22
4 The Little Mountain Project: A Hybrid Strategy in the Public Sphere ........................24
4.1 The Blog and Archive .....................................................................................24
4.2 The Sign Project ..............................................................................................27
4.3 The Social History Web Project .....................................................................30

iii

5 Creating Publics through Documentary Film – An Historical Perspective...................33
5.1 The National Film Board’s Challenge for Change Program ...........................33
6 Summary........................................................................................................................40
7 Appendix 1 ....................................................................................................................40
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................46
Appendix I: Commentaries................................................................................................49

iv

List of Figures

Fig.1: The Six Block Documentary Manifesto...................................................................1
Fig.2: The launch of the blog page, littlemountainproject.com July 9, 2011...................16
Fig.3: Vimeo website, littlemountainproject.com, Meeting #1........................................25
Fig.4: Early mock-up of Panel Number One of The Sign Project....................................28
Fig.5: Google Earth “phantom live-site” circa 2009 ........................................................29
Fig.6: Mock-up of Little Mountain Social History Website ............................................30
Fig.7: Detail of Little Mountain Social History Website (concept) .................................31

v

Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank the tenants of the Little Mountain Housing
Project, and in particular Ingrid Steenhuisen, Sammy and Joan Chang, and Karin
Nicholetti who have tolerated me for the past 4 years. Their spirit and tenacity are an
inspiration. I would also like to thank the members of Little Mountain Advisory
Committee for their patience and acceptance of my process for the past two years. I am
motivated by their passion for their community and their city.
I am truly grateful for the assistance of my graduate supervisor, Henry Tsang who
has always supported my vision for this project and guided my journey through it. I
would also like to acknowledge the academic faculty of the Emily Carr University
Masters of Applied Arts Program who contributed to the success of The Little Mountain
Project, and in particular Fiona Bowie, who as my studio instructor for two terms, was a
unfailing source of constructive criticism. My editor, Janey Lew must also be
acknowledged as a source of valuable insight into the structure of my final thesis.
To my partner and wife, Sheril Gelmon, without whom any of this would have
been possible, my love and appreciation, and my children, Madeleine and Julian, who
suffered with patience for their father to get home from university.
Finally, a word to acknowledge the contribution of my parents, who encouraged
me to take on new challenges and explore my world.

vi

1. Methodology
1.1 A Local Documentary Manifesto Inspires a New Film
Six years ago, as my wife and I prepared for the birth of our second child, I made a
professional decision to change the direction of my documentary filmmaking practice. I wrote a
manifesto for myself, which I called the “Six-Block Manifesto.” This manifesto was based on a
number of factors. The first factor was a desire to stay close to my young family and be part of
the lives of my children; the second was a disenchantment with the declining business of
independent documentary filmmaking in Canada; the third was my conviction that within a
walkable radius from my home I could find compelling stories to tell, which would deepen the
relationship between myself and the place in which I live. In this chapter I will discuss the
gestation of this manifesto and how it led me to focus my attention on the Little Mountain
Housing Project in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Fig.1: The Six Block Documentary Manifesto. Satellite photograph of my neighbourhood
showing a six-block radius from my home.
1

1.2 The Six-Block Manifesto
In 2006 my daughter was four years old. My wife was pregnant with our second child, a
boy; I wanted to be in Vancouver for his birth and to be a supportive partner to my wife during
the first years of our son’s life. I wanted to spend less time traveling for work, and more time
working from home. Responding to this situation, I wrote a manifesto for myself called “The
Six-Block Manifesto.”
The Six-Block Manifesto:
I must look no further than a 6 block radius from my door to find subjects
for my films; I must own all of my production and post-production
equipment; I must shoot and edit all of my own material; I must not allow
a deficiency of financing to interrupt the production process, nor hinder
post-production processes; and I must always retain creative control.2
Meanwhile, in spite of the success of Dark Pines: A documentary investigation into the
Death of Tom Thomson,3 it seemed that the renaissance of Canadian independent documentary
filmmaking, which started in the 1990s, was at an end. Colleagues were closing their offices and
leaving the business, while the largest film production companies were flush with cash for series
production. What happened has been clearly documented in a publication titled Getting Real: An
Economic Profile of the Canadian Documentary Production Industry, a study published by the
Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) in 2011. It reveals that from 2006 to 2009,
documentary production in Canada dropped to its lowest level in six years,4 while lifestyle and

2

The Six Block Documentary Manifesto, David Vaisbord 2006
A film I directed and co-wrote with Ric Beairsto in 2005 with major financial support from BRAVO!
Television and Telefilm Canada. The film won a number of awards.
4
As overall production of all documentary formats (including reality TV) dropped from 13% to 20%, POV
documentary production in particular had its portion of all documentary funding reduced by a further 20%.
To exacerbate matters for producers outside of Ontario (for example, those like myself living in British
Columbia), statistics show a 17% increase in documentary production in Ontario, pointing to a greater
centralization of documentary production in and around head offices in Toronto (DOC).
3

2

reality programming sharply increased. In this period of time, corporate consolidation of the
market increased,5 some independent film and video funds vanished entirely,6 and all Canadian
broadcasters severely reduced the commissioning of POV7 documentaries and dropped their
license fees.8
Today, limited financial support for the POV documentary still exists; the ones that do
get produced tend to be ones which tell international stories. Here the “propaganda of the
obvious” (Rosler 33) is made manifest, in the sense that more value is placed on filmmaking that
takes place in foreign locales—and yet, there is a market logic to the pursuit of international
documentary subjects. As Canadian producer Peter Wintonic explained in a 2012 interview at the
Sundance Film Festival, funding for the POV documentary has dropped to the point that
Canadian producers need foreign buyers to take the lead roles in financing Canadian films
(Wintonic). While international co-productions may prove successful in the manufacture of
films such as Wintonic’s China Heavyweight, (a film about the emergence of professional
boxing in China), they unfortunately seldom produce many films about Canada for Canadians.
As a filmmaker who in the past had almost exclusively produced and directed POV
documentaries, the road ahead for me was clear enough. In order to continue working I would
have to leave independent filmmaking and seek employment in the reality TV industry; spend
5

Canwest purchased the Alliance Atlantis channels, CTV and Rogers acquired and split up the CHUM
conventional assets (A-channel, and City-TV, and OMNI, respectively), and CTVglobemedia separated
from BCE (DOC).
6
The Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund was terminated (DOC).
7
POV documentary: Documentaries told with a strong authorial voice or subjective point of
view that shapes the story line; also known as auteur documentaries because of their similarities to the
auteur film movement; also known as the feature documentary, the one-hour documentary, or one-off
documentary (DOC).
8
Broadcasters are no longer supporting POV documentaries; they have stopped commissioning them, or
have limited their exhibition windows. In 2009-10, many one-off strands were closed or put on hiatus,
including The Lens, Wild Docs, and Global Currents. Broadcaster license fees for single-episode projects
have also dropped to their lowest level in five years. In both English and French, the number of POV
documentaries funded by the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) has dropped to its lowest level in four years
(DOC).

3

large amounts of time and money (that I did not have) on foreign travel in search of documentary
subjects, or continue a Quixotic search for nearly non-existent financing for my Canadian film
subjects. None of those options held any appeal for me. Personally and professionally, it was
time to choose a radical new filmmaking approach, one that consisted of a personal engagement
with the humanist geography and social texture of the place where I live.

1.3 A New Documentary Paradigm
In 2008, two years after I wrote my manifesto, it came to my attention that the Little
Mountain Housing Project (herein referred to as “Little Mountain” or “the Housing Project”) was
in trouble. Built in 1954, Little Mountain was Vancouver’s first and most successful social
housing project. In March of 2007, the Provincial Government of British Columbia announced
that it was going to sell and demolish the Housing Project, and promptly began to relocate
tenants. The majority of the 245 residents acquiesced to the decision and voluntarily moved to
other social housing units run by their landlord, British Columbia Housing. Others, however, did
not move, and stayed in their suites. Community advocacy groups supported them and their fight
to “Save Little Mountain.” It was these residents and their supporters who I began to hear and
see appearing on radio and television programs throughout the spring of 2007.
Then, two friends who had grown up near Little Mountain called me to say how recent
events at the Housing Project were bothering them. They were concerned about the preservation
of the legacy of over fifty years of social housing at the site and encouraged me to make a
documentary about it. What they said made sense, so on September 8, 2008, I dropped my son
off at daycare and my daughter off at school, and I walked to the Little Mountain Housing
Project. It was a sunny day and the first time I had ever set foot in the 16-acre complex. A flock

4

of geese was occupying the great central lawn, and above their honking and sputtering I could
hear a young girl’s voice emanating from an open door. Her father was the first Little Mountain
resident with whom I spoke. He offered to tell me why he opposed BC Housing and why he was
not going to leave quietly. I asked if he could think of any residents who might be comfortable
appearing on camera and he suggested that I visit Ingrid Steenhuisen (See Chapter 2.2). Ms.
Steenhuisen became a central character in what I was certain would become an engaging,
enlightening, and inspiring character-based documentary.
My “Six-Block Manifesto” had been based on three factors: the first was personal (I
wanted to spend more time with my family); the second was professional (financial support for
Canadian documentary had made it impossible for me to maintain a professional POV
documentary practice in this country); and the third was artistic (I had a conviction that I could
find compelling stories to tell and films to make within a limited range of my home). The
Housing Project was situated within a six-block radius, and it soon became clear to me that The
Little Mountain Project would become the first documentary film that my “Six-Block
Manifesto” would inspire. I took my camera to the site and began to record my observations. The
first stories I recorded from the residents at Little Mountain were about the rich social history of
the community and its place within the history of social housing in Vancouver.

5

2. Little Mountain, Social Housing, and New Liberalism – A Brief History
2.1 Historical Memory
An historical amnesia has left most Vancouverites unaware of previous housing
crises in the past century of the city’s history. The drive for social housing in Vancouver
complemented the tradition of housing activism that already existed in the United
Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, the United States. Successful campaigns for social
housing followed the end of World War Two. In January 1946, homeless veterans threw
up a picket line around the old Hotel Vancouver at the juncture of Granville and Georgia
streets to protest a low-income housing shortage that had reached a crisis. Their protests
quickly escalated to a full occupation of the building, which would result in the hotel
becoming an emergency shelter for 1200 families over the next two years (Wade, Houses
144). Successful campaigns for social housing such as the “hotel coup” resulted in the
construction of the Little Mountain Housing Project in 1954 (Wade, Palace 309). The
Housing Project was the first public housing project in Vancouver and only the second of
its kind in Canada (the first being Regent Park in Toronto). The movement that produced
The Little Mountain Housing Project inspired the building of a number of other federallyfunded housing projects in Vancouver in later years. In this way, the social activists of
the 1940’s made far-reaching and lasting contributions to social housing and housing
advocacy in Vancouver. In The Death and Life of the Little Mountain Housing Project,
Thomas Thomson writes:
The Little Mountain Housing Project was a landmark accomplishment for
both the local and national housing movements. Little Mountain was one of
the first examples of all three levels of government coming together, cash in

6

hand, for the development of something crucially needed by the citizenry.
One simply cannot appreciate what is now being lost with the privatization
and demolition of Little Mountain without first understanding this history.
(Thomson 71)
Thomson, who spent part of his childhood growing up at Little Mountain, was as shocked
as the residents themselves when he heard that the provincial government was preparing
the sell the publicly owned land to a private developer.
2.2 A Low Income Community Faces Destruction
On June 19, 2006, a press release authored by the Canadian Government was sent
out to Canadian newspapers and television stations. The press release reported that the
Canada Mortgage and Housing Commission (CMHC) was devolving all responsibility
for publicly-held social housing properties across Canada to their respective provinces.
While the significance of this moment was lost on most Canadians, it was not lost on
Ingrid Steenhuisen—who today is the last remaining resident of the LMHP and one of the
most vocal members of the Advisory Council. The CMHC announcement came on
Steenhuisen’s forty-ninth birthday, while she was living in publicly-held social housing.
Steenhuisen, who had grown up in the Little Mountain Housing Project, had moved back
into Little Mountain in 2006 in order to provide assistance for her aging mother.
Steenhuisen was one of a set of triplets born into a low-income working class family in
the city of Vancouver on June 19, 1957. News of the triplet’s birth made the Steenhuisens
local celebrities, and community leaders took it upon themselves to help the family. As a
result of community efforts, Steenhuisen’s mother was able to move her two-month-old
triplets into the Little Mountain Housing Project in 1957. Steenhuisen describes growing

7

up in the Housing Project as a happy time, when the community, though severely limited
in financial means, was rich in social capital and, through mutual assistance, pulled
together in order to provide a safe, supportive, and high-spirited environment in which to
grow up (Thompson 122) .
Less than four months after the CMHC transfer, the BC Liberal Government’s
Ministry of Housing announced that obsolete housing built on underutilized public land
would be sold. Within a year of the government’s announcement, a Relocation Office
was opened at the Little Mountain Housing Project and all residents were invited to come
in for a free cup of coffee and to book their exits from the Housing Project as soon as
possible. I began my investigation into the happenings at Little Mountain around this
time, and Ingrid Steenhuisen was the first person who agreed to meet with me and speak
about it. We met at a neighbourhood coffee shop, and the depth of her historical and
political knowledge impressed me. She spoke with passion about her community and the
threat of neoliberalism, employing metaphors commonly used by urban theorists. She
told me that the sale of the Little Mountain Housing Project represented the reconquering
of perceived urban wastelands by gentrifying “settlers,” a process which began with the
removal of impoverished “natives”—of which she counted herself—from the land.

2.3 The Right to the City
There is a housing crisis in Vancouver. The percentage of homes sold above $1 million
has doubled in the past two years. In the first nine months of 2011, fully one in five homes sold

8

on the Vancouver market went for more than $1 million.9 That’s up from ten per cent in 2009
(Mendleson). A recent study published by the University of British Columbia examining census
data from 1970 to 2005, shows that dramatic changes are reshaping the city’s socio-economic
landscape. Vancouver, once solidly middle-class is emerging a city of extremes10 (Mendleson).
In many neighbourhoods the citizens of Vancouver are being pushed aside in favour of an
international business class who view the city as a safe haven for surplus capital. In every
neighbourhood, there are new and expensive houses sitting empty. Tower developments filled
with luxury condominiums, are built in order to be sold and to sit vacant in perpetuity. In
Vancouver’s lowest income neighbourhoods such as the Downtown Eastside, gentrification is
rapidly increasing the misery of an already impoverished class (Diewert; Drury), while at the
same time, news releases by government laud the building of new social housing units in the
same community (Cole). The political elites who rule the Province of B.C. and City of
Vancouver are seemingly incapable of seeking and implementing innovative or imaginative
solutions.
Neoliberalism is essentially an ideology that asserts that all civic and state
institutions - including all public amenities, essential services, public utilities and so on should be privatized and opened up to domestic or foreign ownership (Harvey 5). It
stands to reason, according to neoliberal philosophy, that public land holdings should be
9

Similar to Vancouver, the percentage of million-dollar homes sold in Toronto has doubled in the past two
years. But in Toronto, one in 20 homes sold for over $1 million in the first nine months of this year,
compared to one in five in Vancouver. (Mendleson)
10
From 1970 to 2005, the proportion of middle-income tracts, or neighbourhoods, in the metropolitan area
of Greater Vancouver fell significantly, from 71 per cent to 53 per cent. Meanwhile, the share of very low
and low-income neighbourhoods increased from 13 to 23 per cent, and high and very-high income tracts
jumped from 16 to 24 per cent. The shift has been even more pronounced in the City of Vancouver, where
the share of middle-income tracts was cut by more than half, from 65 to 31 per cent. Higher income
neighbourhoods doubled, from 16 per cent to 32 per cent, and lower income neighbourhoods jumped from
19 to 37 per cent. (Mendleson)

9

sold for profit. In this particular instance, it is the public lands used for social housing that
should be privatized. The logic of the BC Liberal Government’s Ministry of Housing is
that the privatization Little Mountain will help to solve the housing and homelessness
crisis not only in Vancouver, but in the rest of the province of British Columbia11.
Urban geographer and social theorist David Harvey has studied the roles of capital
and neoliberalism in the evolution of the urban environment. In his essay, “The Right to
the City,” Harvey writes that “The perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capitalsurplus production and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism” (Harvey 24). He
argues that surplus capital is driving the growth of cities in ways that are making them
less and less livable. Urbanization, Harvey writes, is a class phenomenon, since surpluses
have to be extracted from somewhere and from somebody. The Little Mountain Housing
Project, therefore, situated as it was on under-utilized, low-density land and occupied by
underprivileged people, was the perfect mark for the absorption of surplus capital. Here,
Harvey discusses the violent effects of surplus absorption:
Surplus absorption through urban transformation has an even darker aspect. It has
entailed repeated bouts of urban restructuring through ‘creative destruction’, which
nearly always has a class dimension since it is the poor, the underprivileged and
those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost from this
process. Violence is required to build the new urban world on the wreckage

11

The BC Government stated that fifty-percent of the profits from the sale of the land occupied by the
Little Mountain Housing Project would be put into social housing in Vancouver, and fifty percent of the
proceeds from the sale of the land would be put into social housing outside of Vancouver, across the
province of British Columbia. In addition, BC Housing stated that the same number of social housing units
that existed on the property prior to demolition would be rebuilt in the new development. In essence this
plan placed the burden of alleviating the social housing problems of the entire province on the citizens and
neighbourhoods of Vancouver. BC Housing also stated that it would not build any additional social housing
units on the site. It would only rebuild what existed prior to demolition, the roughly 250 units built in the
1950s.

10

of the old. (Harvey 33)
The logic of surplus absorption at the Little Mountain Housing Project was that
privatizing it would leverage dollars to pay for social housing elsewhere. The only
promise made to the former residents of the Housing Project was that their homes would
be rebuilt, one-for-one, on the new site by the year 2010.
As my research at the Little Mountain Housing Project continued, I observed and
recorded the community advocates12 who joined together with the remaining residents to protest
the evictions and demolition. This group of advocates and residents argued, first, that it was
wrong to privatize and gentrify publicly-owned lands given to the people of Canada for the
purpose of public housing13; second, they argued that without a concrete plan in place to rebuild
the social housing, it was unconscionable to destroy well-built and well-maintained housing
during a crisis; third, the group argued that new housing would take much longer to build than
the Provincial Government had estimated, and it was unlikely that evicted tenants would be
returned to brand new social housing suites according to the time line promised by the
government;14 fourth, the advocates and residents argued that the dislocation of residents from
their communities and support groups would cause great hardship for all, particularly the most
vulnerable; and finally, the group argued that the plan amounted to a social disaster, set in

12

These advocates consisted of members from CALM, Community Advocates for Little Mountain; RPSC,
the Riley Park South Cambie Visions Group; and other concerned citizens.
13
They argued that the developer’s stated intention - to build up to 2000 new market condominiums on the
site (a ten-fold density increase), while only replacing the roughly 250 units of social housing that were
there originally- represented a wholesale gentrification of the site. They argued that the land should remain
public. Sixteen acres in the centre of the city was an opportunity to find innovative solutions from around
the world - through a mix of non-market and market housing - that would help to alleviate the housing
crisis faced by the city.
14
BC Housing promised that reconstruction would take two years. The community, on the other hand,
argued that at least five years was necessary, probably more. To complete the suffering of the poor, the
delivery of new social housing, promised by 2010, will be delayed by at least a decade, since the first phase
of construction will not be complete until at least 2018. Most of the Housing Project’s evicted tenants were
moved out of by the end of 2008.

11

motion for the benefit of a multi-national developer eager to invest surplus capital into a bullish
Vancouver housing market. The group’s position was that taxation, not land liquidation, was the
best way to generate new money for social housing in B.C., and that reductions in British
Columbia corporate taxes were removing billions of dollars from government coffers. They
claimed that the billion-and-a-quarter dollars sitting idle in Property Endowment Funds exposed
the B.C. government’s true lack of concern for Vancouver’s housing crisis (Witt 8).
The arguments of the community made more sense to me than those presented by the
government, but beyond the specifics of their arguments, there was a large issue at stake. The
community was asking to be heard, to have a say in the city’s future. I felt an urge to be active in
this discussion. Harvey argues that:
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of
social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is
a right to change ourselves by changing the city. (Harvey 23)
The “right to the city,” however, is not, according to Harvey, a freely distributed privilege
of citizenship; it is, rather, something that must be fought for through the exercise of
collective power. Harvey reminds his readers that the “right to the city” is, “[a] common
rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the
exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization” (Harvey 23). He
argues that whoever controls the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus
absorption holds the right to the city, and that “[t]he democratization of that right, and the
construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the
dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if

12

they are to institute new modes of urbanization” (Harvey 39-40).
As the cost of living in Vancouver continues to increase and as development issues
become more contentious, the city’s citizens - not only those living on the margins but
also the middle class - feel increasingly dispossessed. Following Harvey, in order to
repossess their city, these citizens must exercise their collective power and engage in a
form of “democracy” that is more participatory than the act of checking a ballot every
four years. In order to do so, they must form “publics” and have their presence felt in the
“public sphere.” This formation of a public that then intervenes in the public sphere is
exactly what I observed at Little Mountain. Through collective efforts (that is, through
forming a “public”), community members took their message to a “public sphere” (the
commercial broadcasting system of radio and television), and it was through this process
of creating publicity that the general public learned about the events taking place at the
Little Mountain Housing Project in 2008. What I was observing inspired me to take a
closer look at my own documentary practice.
Throughout 2009, as I shot the events at the housing project, I underwent a personal
transformation. I changed from an individual who lived on a numbered street in the city
of Vancouver, to a member of a community who would become passionately interested in
its people, their welfare, and our community’s collective future. In addition, as I observed
and filmed events at Little Mountain through 2009, I became less interested in the
documentary form as an artistic endeavour and more interested in the documentary form
as a political tool—a tool that might be used to strengthen the collective power of my
community.

13

3. The Evolution of a Hyperlocal Documentary Practice
By the end of 2009 the dramatic arc of the events at the housing project was
complete, and I had a choice to make. The protest to “save Little Mountain” had failed;
the Little Mountain Housing Project was gone. There existed a documentary to be
finished - one about a small group of families at the Little Mountain Housing Project,
who, supported by a community and against all odds, fought for and saved one building
from demolition. There was, however, a new process evolving: one that could change not
only the length of my engagement with this story, but also the depth of my engagement
and my role in this community’s struggle. The former Housing Project had been vacated
and demolished, and yet there was no plan for the redevelopment of the property. There
are civic processes that are mandatory in the City of Vancouver, when large urban
redevelopments take place. One of the first is the convening of a public process through
which a community vision is developed. To do so, the City called for the creation of the
Little Mountain Advisory Group, a voluntarily-formed assembly of community members
who would consult with city planners, the architect, and the Holborn Group (the
developer), on the future redevelopment of the Little Mountain site. The thought occurred
to me that I could choose to delay the completion of the full-length documentary about
the families who had saved the last remaining building at the Housing Project in order to
continue the production process and record the meetings of the Little Mountain Advisory
Group. The question of whether to stop or to continue shooting caused me to re-evaluate
my engagement with the Little Mountain Project. Was my aim to produce a single
documentary film based on a year of observations or to continue my involvement with
the entire process at Little Mountain? Was my role better defined as an observer or active

14

participant? I chose the latter, even though it meant putting the completion of the feature
documentary on indefinite hold, and on February 3, 2010, I began to record the meetings
of the Little Mountain Advisory Group.
In the beginning I was not sure how I would use the footage I was accumulating,
but I began to think that the idea of saving the footage for use in a larger documentary
film, after the re-development process was over, did not suit my new political agenda. If
the footage was going to be of any political use to the community taking part in the
process (or other communities looking in on the process), the recordings of the meetings
would have to be put on the web as the process was taking place. However, it took me
over a year to gain the technical expertise necessary to launch a fully functioning blog
site. It was not until July 9, 2011--the twenty-third meeting of the Advisory Committee that I had the technical competency to live-stream a meeting through Vimeo15 and onto
the Wordpress blog that I had created, littlemountainproject.com.

15

Vimeo, similar to YouTube, is a video sharing website, that allows anyone to upload videos for
streaming on the web. At the time that the Little Mountain Blog/Archive was set up, YouTube had a time
limit of fifteen minutes per video, which made it inappropriate for web-streaming of Advisory Group
meetings, which often lasted up to two hours. Since Vimeo does not have a time limit, it was the better
choice for a video-streaming platform.

15

Fig. 2: The launch of the blog page, littlemountainproject.com, July 9, 2011.

3.1 What is Hyperlocal?
The differences between the terms local and hyperlocal, particularly in connection to
documentary filmmaking, must be addressed at this point. While “Six-Block Manifesto” did
engage a local methodology, it did not constitute a hyperlocal documentary practice until it was
connected to a dissemination, distribution or exhibition process that was based in the Internet. As
long as the filmmaking process was connected to the production of a conventional documentary
for standard release (on festival screens, through theatrical distribution, or on television), it
would have essentially remained local filmmaking. The documentary process for Little Mountain
Project only became hyperlocal when the community of the Housing Project and the community
who surrounded it, who were the subjects of the media production process, were identified as the

16

first and most important target audience for the completed film - and when I, as a filmmaker,
began communicating with them directly through the Internet.

3.2 The Hyperlocal and the Public Sphere
The goal of creating a hyperlocal website is to form a public that is both local and
virtual. Drawing principally upon the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and
Michael Warner, the terms public sphere, public and counterpublic will be explored as
well as how hyperlocal publics can participate in alternative media forms which open up
new avenues of communication and new democratic spaces.
Several researchers have attempted to define “hyperlocal.” Jan Schaffer defines the
hyperlocal as “citizen media,” and applies it to a wide range of activity taking place on-line. She
writes:
Citizens are using community sites to bring attention to critical issues or to have their say
on growth, crime, jobs, schools and the environment. They also stir up talk about
lifestyle, noise, traffic, and who sells decent produce. Their approach is more often
impressionistic than systematic, or what journalists would consider finished.
(Schaffer 13)
The idea of “having one’s say” or “stirring up talk” may seem somewhat banal, but the
engagement of citizens in conversation with one another about subjects of mutual interest,
whether they be of public or private concern, is the basis of a “public sphere.”
Media theorists today are inspired by the ways in which the Internet, and the resulting
capacity for an infinite expansion of public dialogue, may re-energize the project of democracy.
Philosophers and social scientists look to the emergent hyperlocal project and see within it the

17

germ of a revitalized public sphere. Every hyperlocal cyber-site forms a public, and each public
contributes to a new digital public sphere where “many-to-many” communications replace the
“one-to-many” communications typified by mass media and industrial journalism. By extension,
therefore, are we - those who participate in these online publics - not creating a new public
sphere, the size and complexity of which has never been imagined? Media theorist Gene
Youngblood states that “[c]onversation is the most powerful of human actions because through it
we construct the realities in which we live” (Youngblood 321-322). He argues that uncontrolled
conversation among the peoples of the world is the most powerful of human actions because it
enables humans to construct shared realities and that - through the Internet’s power to
disseminate uncontrolled, global human conversation – make it possible to imagine the
realization of humankind’s ultimate utopian dream: a global democratic public sphere
(Youngblood 322).
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argues that
democracy took shape during the 18th Century, when a new rising class of propertied men, who
debated on the subject of their private interests in meeting places such as coffee houses, salons
and table societies, began to form (Habermas 30). At that time, the private interests of the
bourgeoisie were as much about markets and capital as they were about Enlightenment values
such as the “rights of man” (Habermas 104). Habermas writes:
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private
people come together [sic] as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere
regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in
a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but
publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of

18

this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s
public use of their reason. (Habermas 27)
The bourgeois public sphere’s claim to power was the “rational-critical” debate where superior
ideas and arguments prevailed, challenging the principles upholding autocratic rule. Like-minded
individuals formed groups, or “publics,” around particular sets of ideas, shared their views
through “publicity,” and used the newly formed media of newspapers and journals to disseminate
their ideas. A free press was crucial to the process of rational-critical debate, and “Each person
was called upon to be a publicist, a scholar whose writings speak to his public, the world”
(Habermas 106). American literary scholar Michael Warner summarizes Habermas’ theory and
the necessary conditions for the formation of a public sphere, noting that:
The emergence of the public sphere coincided with the appearance of new media, new
markets, new forms of knowledge and new forms of bonds between strangers, which
characterized what is known as a public. (Warner CBC)
It is precisely the appearance of new forms of media, markets, knowledge and relationships
between strangers in the 18th Century which current theorists like Warner find so tantalizingly
similar to our networked 21st Century. Placing digital communications into the context of
Habermas’ 18th Century public sphere, philosopher and social scientist, James Bohman writes:
Certainly, globalization and other features of contemporary societies make it at least
possible to consider whether democracy is undergoing another great transformation, of
the order of the invention of representative democracy and its institutions of voting and
parliamentary assemblies in early modern European cities. (Bohman 248)
These new democratic spaces are engaging citizens in debate on the future of their cities. Thus,
in order to understand how The Little Mountain Project engages a hybrid public in different,

19

overlapping spheres, it is useful at this point to define what sort of public is formed by the Little
Mountain Advisory Committee in both its physical and online manifestations.

3.3 The Little Mountain Advisory Committee is a Counterpublic
How do we define the public that the Little Mountain Project addresses? Nancy
Fraser, in her paper “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,” offers some useful ways of defining publics. Fraser
defines sovereign parliaments as strong publics - those whose discourse encompasses
both “opinion-formation” and “decision-making.”16 Publics whose deliberative practices
consist exclusively in opinion-formation and do not also encompass decision-making, are
defined as weak publics (Fraser 75). The challenge for weak publics has always been
how they are able to seize for themselves a decision-making role in their own lives. That
challenge, according to Michael Warner, is the central field of antagonism in the modern
world: “between the summoning power of public address and the finite and carefully
controlled mechanisms for turning that address into meaningful activity…(that)…will
shape their own history” (Warner CBC).
Barred by mechanisms of exclusion from full participation in the public sphere,
Fraser argues that members of subordinated social groups [women, the working classes,
peoples of color, and gays and lesbians] have repeatedly found it advantageous to
constitute alternative publics. Fraser names these alternative publics subaltern
counterpublics “in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members
of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourse, which in turn permit

16

The first major structural transformation of the public sphere, as conceived by Habermas, was the
emergence of parliamentary sovereignty, and sovereign parliaments are strong publics. (Fraser 75)

20

them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interest, and needs”
(Fraser 67). Warner, in his book Publics and Counterpublics, argues against the use of
the term “subaltern counterpublic” because it is not at all clear that “all counterpublics are
composed of people otherwise dominated as subalterns” (Warner, Publics 57).
Nevertheless, Warner retains counterpublic as a useful term. For Warner, “A
counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion
and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and have a critical relation to
power” (Warner, Publics 56).
The Little Mountain Advisory Committee most relevant feature, I would argue, is
its defiant stance toward authority and power, which makes the term “counterpublic” the
most apt; however, there are nuances to the coalition’s persona owing to its hybrid
composition. The Advisory Committee is principally made up of two neighbourhood
groups, the majority of which are homeowners. The first group of homeowners – I will
refer to them as the general community group - are concerned about the scale and density
of the new project and its impact on their neighbourhood, their views, tower shadows,
and property values. The second group of homeowners – I will refer to them as the
housing advocacy group - though they share the concerns of the first, are deeply
concerned about housing issues in Vancouver. Some have taken an active role in
community visioning organizations, forming groups such as the Riley Park South Cambie
Visions Group (RPSC) and CALM (Community Advocates for Little Mountain), which
responded directly to the evictions at the Housing Project. There is a third community
group which is significantly under-represented in the advisory committee – the former
residents of the Housing Project. Although this community once comprised almost two

21

hundred and fifty families, the relocation process scattered this community across
Vancouver’s Lower Mainland, and very few have the time and personal transportation
necessary to attend regularly. As a result, the only consistent representative of this illtreated community is Ingrid Steenhuisen, one of the last remaining tenants in the last
remaining building at Little Mountain - a representation that is far too small to have much
political impact.
There are in effect, three sub-groups within this counterpublic which have
coalesced into the Little Mountain Advisory Committee, and at times there are tensions
within the group around several issues.17 At the time of the writing this thesis, the
committee has managed to find a level of consensus, but consensus is not assured as the
process moves toward conclusion. Within this matrix, my work supports a wide range of
interests in the process, including those of the City of Vancouver Planning Department,
the architect, the developer and the community,18 though my personal bias leans toward
those of the housing advocacy group.

3.4 Questions about the Hyperlocal
Is the creation of a “public” today too easy? Philosopher Daren Barney wonders if the
proliferation of communications technologies has a politicizing or depolitizing effect on the
public sphere, when, for instance, posting a video of something curious on the Internet can get
10,000 hits (Barney CBC). Is a flash mob political because it breaks convention, or does it

17

For example issues of public property (whether it is right to sell public land for private development),
social housing (numbers of replacement social housing or affordable housing units to be built), heritage
value (whether or not to save the last building on the site) and overall density.
18
Through casual conversation before and after Advisory Committee meetings, city staff and the project
architect who have confirmed that the video records have been very useful for review purposes. Joo Kim
Tiah, the head of the Holborn Group has read my blog and has spoken to me about it.

22

depoliticize politics by satisfying an appetite for public engagement without engaging in real
politics? If so much of life is made public, does “publicity” lose its value? Barney answers with
guarded optimism that, in the appropriation of this technology and in the practice with it, so
many people are engaging in digital networks in unforeseen ways—to circulate content and
intellectual property, and to communicate their political awareness of the world—that what they
are doing must be understood as politically significant, motivated and intentioned (Barney CBC).

23

4. A Hybrid Strategy within the Public Sphere
The Little Mountain Project employs a hybrid strategy consisting of three elements: a
Blog/Archive; a Sign Project; and a Social History Web Project. The first element was launched
in July 2011; the second element will be launched in May 2012; and the third element will go online soon after the Sign Project’s launch.

4.1 The Blog and Archive
The Blog/Archive was the first element of the hyperlocal website,
littlemountainproject.com to go public, and is the core element of the hyperlocal documentary
strategy described in this thesis. As previously discussed, my methodology did not constitute a
hyperlocal documentary practice until it was connected to a dissemination, distribution or
exhibition process that was based on the Web. My decision to stream the rushes (the contents of
the Advisory Committee meetings) back to the committee and the community prior to any
theatrical or festival film release, was a deliberate strategy aimed at informing the process,
increasing transparency, and facilitating citizen involvement.
Every meeting of the Little Mountain Community Advisory Committee is recorded and
posted to the blog, and in this way the community and general public are invited to watch
participatory democracy in action. Every video is accompanied by a short written entry which
situates each meeting within the series and highlights details of particular significance. I
purposefully reveal my personal bias through the written entries, but the content of each
complete meeting is unassailably truthful and unbiased. The meetings are recorded, uploaded to
the web, and streamed in their entirety. At littlemountainproject.com audiences/viewers watch

24

unedited footage, and are encouraged to make up their own minds about the process. Some
videos are accompanied by an optional “highlights” clip of two to ten minutes in length. These
clips may be played by visitors to the site who want a quick overview of a particular meeting;
however, as editors make choices, and choices are based on personal bias, these videos reflect
my point of view. As author of the blog, I sign off each entry with the signatures such as “Selfappointed filmmaker in residence” or “neighbour,” stressing my dual status as both media-maker
and member of the community.

Fig. 3: Vimeo website, littlemountainproject.com, -- Meeting #1.

The Blog/Archive plays a part in the diversification of democratic discourse in
Vancouver by contributing to a city-sponsored, community consultation process at Little
Mountain. In a recent CBC Ideas program on “The Origins of Modern Public,” Paul Yachnin,

25

argues that by subjecting a process such as the Advisory Committee meetings to democratic
publicity, there is something more to be gained. He states that:
[S]elf-consciousness is part of what public life is about. It is not only
doing something that is public. It’s about knowing that what you are doing
can leak. An orientation toward futurity. That it can live beyond this
moment and live beyond your lifetime. (Yachnin CBC)
The participants tell me that the recording process has deepened their commitment to the
consultation process itself. Were it not for the recording process, the entire historical
record would be a matter of hearsay, and their participation in it would largely disappear.
Their participation is thus validated by the level transparency that the camera brings to
the process. There is also some optimism that the element of public scrutiny provided by
the camera will have the effect of encouraging (or shaming) Vancouver City Council into
embracing a truly open, inclusive and participatory process.
As a discussion tool, the site accepts observations by viewers on the content of the
meetings, and encourages reflection on the history of the process and its current direction.
Commentaries written on the littlemountainproject.com blogsite can be viewed in
Appendix I. As an informational and organizational tool, the blog disseminates
information on meeting dates and times, encourages participation by the community-atlarge in landmark events such as the Open Houses - which have been witnessing record
attendance levels. To date, twenty-six meetings have been recorded. While a dozen
meetings and Open Houses have been published to the Archive, many still remain to be
uploaded. The blog does not limit itself exclusively to Advisory Committee material, but
also occasionally posts videos related to issues of social and affordable housing in

26

Vancouver.19 Vimeo site records indicate that Advisory Committee recordings have been
played nearly one thousand five hundred times since the launch of the site.
4.2 The Sign Project
The Little Mountain Sign Project supports the core political aims of the Little Mountain
Project, to engage and focus the community on the dialogical process. Walking from sign-tosign connects tour participants to an active process in the urban realm. Through an embodied
experience, there are opportunities to reflect upon the scale of the former housing project, the
bleak landscape beyond the fence that separates them from the now empty lot, and their physical
relationship to the urban landscape. Here is an opportunity to examine what remains of the
Housing Project, its history, its legacy, and its future, with encouragement to join the discussions
of the Advisory Committee in person, or through littlemountainproject.com. The Sign Project is
a link between two systems of observation, between the physical act of walking, and the physical
act of surfing the web, and the synergy between the two.
The Sign Project is a self-guided walking tour around the former housing project,
following information on four outdoor panels erected on the North, South, East and West sides
of the building site. Each sign illustrates one stage in the Little Mountain’s history: the first
outlines political actions which led to the Housing Project’s construction; the second recollects
community life during the Housing Project’s heyday; the third describes the politics and protest
surrounding the Housing Project’s destruction; and the fourth discusses the future of the site,
bearing in mind the work of the Little Mountain Advisory Committee, the challenges presented

19

Such as the mayoralty debate of 2011 between incumbent Gregor Robertson and Susan Anton, or a
recent speech by Naomi Klein on re-development issues in Vancouver’s downtown east side.

27

by Vancouver’s housing crisis, and the redevelopment opportunities presented by the size and
location of the Little Mountain site.

Fig. 4: Early mock-up of Panel Number One of The Sign Project.

The images to appear on the sign-posts will be colour-printed onto four-foot by four-foot
weather-resistant, heavy-duty, corrugated plastic product known as “Coroplast.” There will be
photos, text, and QR codes that appear at the bottom of each sign. The QR codes20 create direct
links to video streaming from the Little Mountain Project website, making each sign an

20

QR codes (an abbreviation for Quick Response) are a form of barcode, which when scanned by a smart
phone, creates a direct it to link to a URL.

28

exhibition platform for a tour participant. Thumbnail images placed next to each QR code (the
same size as the QR code itself – not shown in Fig. 4) will illustrate the content of each video.
Additional QR codes on the site will link audiences back to the hyperlocal website littlemountainproject.com. Videos will include interviews and film footage connected to the
thematic content of each sign. The sign project takes as a given that there are members of the
community and the general public who regularly walk, cycle, or drive past the site without
understanding its significance. Figure Number 4, for example, tells the story recalled in the
“Historical Memory” section of this thesis, about the World War Two veterans who picketed and
occupied the former Hotel Vancouver in order to bring attention to a post-war housing crisis in
Vancouver.

Fig. 5: Google Earth “phantom live-site” circa 2009.

29

Another QR code on each sign will link tour participants to Little Mountain’s “phantom
live-site.” The phantom live-site is a 360-degree “Google Street-View” of the Housing Project
that was photographed by Google in 2009. The Street-View images show the housing complex
not in real-time, but as it was prior to the demolition. The phantom live-site not only travels
around the complete perimeter of the former housing complex, but also penetrates to the interior
of the complex using the streets which still exist, but now lead nowhere.

Fig.6: Mock-up of Little Mountain Social History Website.

30

4.3 The Social History Web Project
The Social History Web Project is a component of the littlemountain.com project that
carries forward social, historical and ethical issues presented in the sign project in a virtual
format. It is a collaborative project between myself, and current Little Mountain resident, Ingrid
Steenhuisen. The Social History Web Project virtually recreates the Little Mountain Housing
Project, serving as a portal to stories of families who grew up together in a collaborative
community. Thus, The Social History Web Project celebrates the contributions of residents of
the Little Mountain Housing project to the fabric of the city. The Social History Project is a place
for families to share memories with one another and to build an on-line community. The Social
History Project is also an integral part of the hyperlocal website as it encourages dialogue on the
future of social and affordable housing in Vancouver.

Fig. 7: Detail of Little Mountain Social History Website (concept) showing virtual housing block
and six story-bubbles situated around it.

31

Currently under construction, the Social History site will invite participation by former
residents of the Housing Project to present and share their stories, photos, videos and
commentaries. The site will be designed and produced by graduate students of Emily Carr
University, and operated by current resident, Ingrid Steenhuisen, who will maintain the site.

32

5. Creating Publics through Documentary Film – An Historical Perspective
5.1 The National Film Board’s Challenge for Change (CFC) Program
In this section, I draw parallels between my work in the Little Mountain Project to
the Challenge for Change (CFC) program in order revisit some extraordinary efforts in
using film to build community. Very few historical examples of documentary practice
come close to the CFC experiment in terms of “breadth and historical vitality or . . .its
unique, exemplary record of collaboration among state bureaucrats, artists, community
activists, grassroots media organizers, and spectators” (Winton 424). Ezra Winton and
Jason Garrison succinctly summarize the goals and achievements of the CFC program in
the following way:
Proactive Canadian policy-makers in the 1960’s tried to achieve social
transformation through the Challenge for Change /Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN)
program, imbuing documentary cinema with radical participatory impulses, at the
levels of both production and distribution, creating “a revolution in community
organizing and development of communications which continues to this day.”
(Winton 405)
The Little Mountain Project is similar to the CFC in the manner in which it supports a
grassroots counterpublic, in order to intensify ongoing political process, through the
filmmaking process.
Colin Low was the director of the first CFC project shot on Fogo Island, Newfoundland.
The Fogo Island film series consisting of 29 films. Due to severe economic decline Fogo
Island faced a bleak future. When Low brought 16mm film and NFB crews into the Fogo
settlements, the Federal Government of Canada was planning to resettle the entire island

33

population to the mainland. Low filmed interviews with different members of each
community, screened the rushes back to the community for approval, then to other
communities on the island. In such a way, Low created a series of “vérité observational
or feedback documents” (Marchessault 358). Low theorized that “the media could be
made to function as a collective mirror, enabling communities to view themselves,
discover their strengths and bring their ideas to better order” (Marchessault 358). In such
a way, community communications were strengthened, and so were the processes
involving the building of consensus and advocacy around particular issues (Marchessault
358).
In 1969, employing a similar but more radical process, filmmakers Dorothy Todd
Hénault and Bonnie Shier Klein cut the NFB directors and producers entirely out of the
picture, preferring to act instead as media educators and facilitators. Hénault and Klein
used new video tape recording (VTR) portapack technology, which was so simple to use
that community members learned how to use it in a very short space of time.
In “In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report,” Hénault and Klein write that they
recognized the value and impact of video portapak technology in the rapidly evolving
CFC experiment:
Very few people have access to the media of communications in our society.
[However, the] video tape recording project in VTR St-Jacques is an attempt to
extend to its logical conclusion, the conviction that people should participate in
shaping their own lives, which means among other things directing and
manipulating the tools of modern communications necessary to gaining and
exercising that participation. (Hénault 24-25)

34

When viewed on closed circuit television in the impoverished Montreal neighbourhood
of St. Jacques, the community “recognizing their common problems…began to talk about
joint solutions. It proved an important and effective method of promoting social change”
(http://www.nfb.ca/film/vtr_st_Jacques).
The end result of CFC films is that communities changed. It is not clear if the
CFC impact on communities was correlative or causative. But, as both Low, and Hénault
and Klein note, CFC interventions intensified (or complemented) community action,
supporting processes of engagement already in place. Low notes that when the
filmmakers first entered Fogo, the Federal Government had determined that a structured
withdrawal from the island was in order, and that fourteen years after he entered the
community to produce his CFC project, Fogo Island was one of the healthier
communities in Newfoundland (Low 18). Low, however, did not take full credit for the
success of the Fogo Island process. As he argues, the filmmakers did not create the
community meeting processes. Instead, they:
[I]ntensified them. When we arrived Fogo was on the verge of action in a number
of areas . . . by communicating the action trends and by exposing the problems,
the consensus was enlarged and intensified. [The Fogo Process] was critically
linked to a sustained program of community development efforts of the university
and government. (Low qtd. in Wiesner 90)
The same could be said for the more citizen-directed processes inscribed by Hénault and
Klein. The St. Jacques neighbourhood in Montreal was already politically active, prior to
and during the video-making process. As Hénault notes:

35

No amount of video can replace a good community organizer, no amount of video
can make fuzzy thinking turn into clear social and political analysis… The
important thing to remember is that the media are tools in the social process. They
are not the social process in itself. (Hénault qtd. in Weisner 81-82)
Both examples of the CFC experiment strengthened counterpublics, which successfully
organized and engaged in political action. Variations on this process were repeated in
over 200 CFC films and videos.
The Little Mountain Project exists in a technological world that is vastly different
than the one occupied by the CFC in the 1960s. There are a number of questions raised
by the CFC that are no longer relevant to a hyperlocal web project. Scott MacKenzie, in
Société Nouvelle: the Alternative Public Sphere, raises these questions about the CFC:
What kinds of communities are formed through the processes of image making?
What role, in the end, do images play in this process? Can the community survive
outside of the highly constructed context of image-making production?
(McKenzie 334)
McKenzie finds the answers to these questions to be “not as uplifting as one would have hoped”
(MacKenzie 334). The kinds of communities formed by the CFC process were fragile, in that the
majority of them could not survive the withdrawal of government funding. Once the imagemaking technologies, (cameras and crew etc.) and the distribution and exhibition infrastructures
(screens and venues such as union halls and community centres) paid for by the National Film
Board disappeared, the communities disappeared along with them. MacKenzie notes that:
Community groups and filmmakers alike should have seen images as a starting point, to
bring people together, to debate, and to engage in democratic action. Eventually, the

36

image should have fallen away, once the space that the group needed was secured. Yet, to
a great extent, this did not happen. Once these images were gone, so were the groups;
there was no other infrastructure to maintain the publicness of these alternative publics.
(MacKenzie 335)
In contrast to the CFC films and filmmakers, there is no danger that The Little Mountain
Project will abruptly or tragically cease to exist in the middle of production, owing to a sudden
lack of government or corporate sponsorship. Through film, video, and new media technologies,
the power to document the world and to distribute moving images to viewers has fallen into the
hands of the citizenry. Questions about the “survival of the community” quite simply miss the
point, since the Little Mountain on-line community will exist as long as the web site has
relevance to the community and this is as it should be. New hyperlocal publics will come into
existence as new challenges and community needs arise. The democratic public sphere as an
emergent form through new media is flexible, adaptable, and most significantly, free (when it
choses to be) from government and corporate interest.21
The CFC was an experiment revised the filmmaking process by taking the
filmmaking “artist” out of the filmmaking program, and it is fair to say that the tension
between the filmmaker as artist and the filmmaker as community facilitator does exist in
The Little Mountain Project. The community habitually refers to me as the
“videographer.” On the surface, that title appears to be a significant demotion in status
from that of “director,” a title which I have assumed on previous film productions.
Nevertheless, the concept of a director controlling the actions of the Little Mountain
Advisory Committee would be absurd , as my role is to support the community process,
not to direct it. The resolution to the dilemma, however, was discovered during the
21

Web masters can chose at their discretion to accept or reject corporate sponsorship for their sites.

37

existence of the CFC, when directors/facilitators followed up the participatory process by
editing a full-length documentary film, from the raw footage – always with deference to
the wishes of the community, and with their input.. For example, projects such as VTR St.
Jacques were never viewed outside of a community context, others were completed as
theatrical documentaries, and traveled nationally and internationally as ambassadors of
under-represented Canadian communities, such as the Mohawk nation in You Are on
Indian Land (1969) (http://www.nfb.ca/film/you_are_on_indian_land).
In the case of The Little Mountain Project, the valorization of process, above
product, does not necessarily exclude the creation of a final “product” - a complete, fulllength documentary film. The developmental process of The Little Mountain Project is
evolutionary: the Blog and Archive followed the initiation of the recording process; the
Sign Project followed the Blog and Archive; the Social History Web Project followed the
Sign Project. What comes next? Possibly a full-scale web documentary, perhaps a fullscale documentary film produced for conventional exhibition format, or another sitespecific media or installation project. All of the options, in fact, enhance one another. I do
not deny the enormous power of documentary cinema to bring audiences to social,
political, historical, or environmental awareness. What The Little Mountain Project
reveals is that the process itself, of gathering images for a larger documentary project, can
be particularly important. Processes can become products, and the results that manifest in
the course of making documentary processes public can contribute to the outcomes of
documentary films. It depends, certainly, on whether the filmmaker sees him or herself as
an advocate or observer. Within an advocacy context, the Challenge for Change Program
is an inspiration. The Little Mountain Project gleans from the experiment of the CFC

38

seeds of ideas, about the use of film technologies to enhance democratic participation,
which have found a new time and a new place more than forty years after the program’s
termination.

39

6. Summary: What is the Little Mountain Project?
The Little Mountain Project was not conceived with myopic digital enthusiasm. It may
not change the world, but it will lead to insights into how communities interact with politicallymotivated hyperlocal web sites. No one involved in the project expected instant recognition to
follow the first flash of new activist media uploaded to the Internet. The project was seen from
the start as a long-term endeavour, one having a possible duration of several years. This is not
the fast web, where literally anyone with a phone-cam can shoot, edit and upload a film in one
day, get 10,000 hits and call themselves a filmmaker; instead, it offers innovation in creating the
slow web. Eight months after its launch, littlemountainproject.com is starting to gather public
attention from other internet media sites, such as Open File Vancouver (vancouver.openfile.ca)
and City Hall Watch (cityhallwatch.ca). What’s more, the strategy appears to be paying off: the
hyperlink, littlemountainproject.com, is at the top of most Google search lists, and videos in the
archive have seen nearly one thousand five hundred plays.
The Little Mountain Project is grassroots political filmmaking that supports a
community initiative. In contradistinction with the totalizing power of mainstream
industrial media, it focuses attention on the collective values of a small group. It seeks a
dialogue with a local audience, not a mass audience. By shifting its attention away from
industrial broadcast and commercial-theatre systems of production and distribution, the
Little Mountain Project explores ways of supporting democratic processes through the
use of new media. There remains much more to consider in terms of hyperlocal strategy,
particularly on the subject of dissemination. Would it be possible, for instance, to draw
the conversation about Little Mountain (through possible collaboration with other
communities or counterpublics) into the purview of a wider, possibly national, social

40

housing debate? At this point in the process, the project is still unfolding, but it can
quickly respond to shifts and changes from within and without, as it continues on the
journey of making itself public.

41

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APPENDIX 1: COMMENTARIES
Submitted on 2011/07/10 at 6:51 pm
Great work David. I can’t wait to see how things progress after
the 2 open houses. Should be interesting. I must say though, in
all honesty. I’m getting pretty sick of waiting to move back
home. I really wish these (…), would hurry up and get on with it!
See you at the next meeting.
Andrew
Submitted on 2011/07/15 at 7:09 pm
Great site David. This allows me to get to the meetings that I’m
not able to get to! Looking forward to more videos in the future
and to digging more deeply into your site.
C. Pfeifer
Submitted on 2011/07/20 at 2:03 pm
Hi David,
Thanks for this. I went to the link you provided to fill out the
form on-line, but found that I couldn’t. My choices and
comments weren’t coming through on the PDF. Any advice?
Good for you for creating this important blog.
For me the principles for Little Mountain redevelopment are
clear:1. There must be at least double the number of social
housing units in the redevelopment as there were at Little
Mountain before its destruction. That is, between 450 and 500
units of social housing at a minimum. Many of those units
should be for families. There is a crisis of homelessness in this
city that needs to be dealt with now.2. The rest of the units
should be affordable rental for families, seniors and young
people. Affordable means the rents cannot be more than 1/3 of
family income. That family income calculation needs to be tied
to the average family income of Vancouver residents. The last
thing Vancouver needs is hundreds more million dollar+
condos. We need affordable housing for working class and
middle class families.3. The deal with Holborn, which privatizes
a large area of prime land that belongs to the people of British
Columbia, needs to be scrapped. There is no reason to sell off
the land. If government wants to derive a financial benefit from
this asset that belongs to all of us, leasing part of the site for
rental housing is a much better way to go and will provide
income to the people of the province for as long as the leases

49

last. In addition, privatizing the site means development
decisions in the future will be made to satisfy private rather
than community priorities and needs.4. Any redevelopment
needs to be consistent with the character of the community and
the priorities set out by community members in the city’s
Visioning Process which hundreds of residents have participated
in over many years.
The consultation process puts us as residents in a very difficult
position, because the key questions are never asked and critical
information is never shared. I have attended a number of the
public meetings and every time I do I ask the same questions:
What is the development going to be? How much is going to be
social housing and how much will be affordable for families?
There’s never a clear answer. Personally I am prepared to
support some greater density (as long as it’s consistent with the
guidelines from the Visioning Process and consistent with the
character of the neighbourhood) if that increased density is
social housing and affordable family housing, not hundreds of
million dollar condos. But none of that information is
forthcoming. It appears that the plan is simply to replace the
224 social housing units that were destroyed – with 10
additional social housing units but no additional floor space.
Instead of a discussion about what will be built in the
redevelopment (how much social housing, how much affordable
rental, how many million dollar condos) we are asked to tell
them where to put trees and bike paths.
It appears to me that the deal is stalled anyway. Holborn made
its deal with the provincial government when condo prices were
going through the roof. Rich Coleman decide that he’s rather be
a property speculator that a Minister taking care of the housing
and homelessness crises. The result of all that is the destruction
of a successful community, the needless displacement of
hundreds of people, and a huge vacant lot which is likely to stay
vacant for many more years.
David Chudnovsky

Submitted on 2011/07/28 at 8:34 am
Hello David. Thanks for all your work and documentaries. Ties
everything together very well and, to me, shows the futility and
sham status of ‘public consultation’.
I think I can already predict the process, and it’s sad it’s so
predictable. Holborn will go to the City with its proposals‘sandbagged’ to include two 14-19 storey towers (already a
given in the media). Then, under fake pressure will give way to

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8-14 storeys as a compromise (common negotiation method).
By then the City can claim they had a ‘robust public consultation
process’ (quoted from the response to opposition to another
recent rezoning meeting for some other project). This process is
simply the last few years’ worth of open houses, where they
simply tell you almost nothing. I already see the news media
and some politicians saying the process is now being ‘held up
by the public review process’.
The City is obviously going for way more density- mostly along
the Canada Line (three new >200 foot towers at Marine), and
everywhere else it can. Probably needed, but also probably for
profit for the likes of Holborn, maybe a mix of the two.
Whatever the reason, they will double and quadruple height
rezoning everywhere they approve a project and not give the
public any real say/input. Although they can claim they did
since they held so many open houses which were essentially PR
campaigns. I agree that we do need to go more dense, maybe
50% higher or even double the height (up to 8 storeys for Little
Mountain’s case) in some buildings. But 19 storeys? Fourteen
storeys?
In the end, if the public actually does hold up any project, they
will just blame them for being anti-social housing, or, withhold
‘amenities’ as in ‘if you don’t let me build higher, then I can’t
give you that (water feature, bike lane, day care, etc.)
Anyway- just my rant. Keep up the great blog. I will point
people to it for sure since it’s the best summary/tracking site of
this process. I’m a bit amazed at how many people are unaware
of the process to date. I tell my neighbours that this site will
include 10-14 storey buildings and they all reply ‘they’re not
allowed to do that’.
Thanks
D. Simpson
Submitted on 2011/07/31 at 1:05 pm
David,
Again, thanks for this excellent service you are doing for our
community.
I was out of town so couldn’t attend the meeting, but Ned made
a critical point. There is an attempt by both Holborn and BC
Housing to blackmail the community into accepting a huge
increase in density. And that huge increase in density will be
million dollar condos, not affordable housing for families. They
pretend that the sale price for the land (which nobody except
them knows) must pay for supportive housing on the sites
around the city in addition to the replacement units at Little
Mountain. But at least two things make that threat

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unacceptable.
First, as Ned reminded everyone, Coleman has said that he will
fund the supportive housing sites even if the Little Mountain
deal doesn’t go through. Second, why should the Little
Mountain community (and the residents of the city) pay in
increased density for the fact that Holborn and BC Housing
made a stupid and unsustainable deal in 2008?
Developers take risks. That’s the justification for their (often
ridiculously high) profits. Holborn took a risk when they made
the deal to buy the Little Mountain site and now they want us to
pay for the fact that their risk didn’t work out. It’s exactly the
same as the bailout of the banks two years ago when the
economy was in crisis. It’s not our responsibility to bail Holborn
out just because they took risks they shouldn’t have. That’s
their responsibility.
Ben Johnson from the city tried to say all of that in his
explanation of the numbers – although he was much more
circumspect and polite than I am. I think city council and the
mayor need to provide more leadership on this issue. Of course
they need to be respectful of the province, and of course they
have to work with Coleman and BC Housing. And of course
Coleman must be threatening them that he will withdraw
funding for projects that the city needs for supportive housing.
Still, there’s need for the city to be much more proactive in both
advocating for the Little Mountain community and advocating
for much needed social and affordable housing for families,
seniors and young people.
The answer here is to start over again. We need a community
process that starts from the question: What do we want Little
Mountain redevelopment to look like? We can’t start from the
question: How much density do we need to accept in order for
Holborn to be happy with their profit margin?
David, do you know when the next public meeting will be held? I
think there should be a major mobilization to get people to
attend and refuse to be bullied.
David Chudnovsky
Submitted on 2011/08/05 at 1:15 pm
I had an interesting experience the other day before attending a
friend’sdinner party at a condo in the Olympic Village. I
explored the shorelinejust west of their building, where there is
an experimental garden. In thisgarden at the water’s edge they
are growing veggies in recycled things,like pallets, burlap sacks,
various found objects. It is quite a complete contrast to the
Olympic Village condos. It made me think that that is what is
missing in these large high-end developments – there is no

52

sense of some sort of organic tactile relationship with place and
community. I think people were trying to get at some of these
ideas in the first design process at LittleMountain.I don’t know
enough about the design and economics of these large
urbandevelopments but I wonder if there is a way to create a
more vibrantcommunity and allow for a more creative,
interactive, tactile relationship toplace. If not, I think (from what
I see in the architect’s recent drawings) thedevelopment at the
Little Mountain site could easily turn out to be a repeatof what
exists at the Olympic Village.
Deb
Submitted on 2011/08/05 at 5:31 pm
Your documentation of the little mountain project is fascinating
and so important. You have captured the co-design process
accurately. Co-design artists work hard to be the hand for the
mind’s eye of the participants. I observe that the citizens feel an
ownership of the images they created. Thank you for continuing
to remind people of the designs that emerged that day.
Susan

Submitted on 2012/02/09 at 12:59 pm
Thanks again David for all your documentary work here- great
compilation and timeline of this entire process.
I attended the Jan 28th open house (and previous ones), and
managed to talk with James Cheng for about 10 minutes. He
told me a few interesting things:
-The much higher density and building heights have nothing to
do with profit.-The community input/process to date indicated
we all wanted these densities/heights.-Arbutus Walk type of
densities and heights were never feasible or in the picture.
So just a few things that we get mis- or disinformed about
regularly, in my opinion.
There seems to be a common comment from those who
attended these and previous open houses. Yes- go higher than
4 storeys if it helps. Yes- put in 4-6 or even 8 storey buildings.
If all the density increases helps pay for more social housing
(here and elsewhere) and the developer gets their profit then go
ahead.
The previous open houses, with multiple proposal models from
1.45FSR to 3.25FSR, seemed to indicate they would go down the
middle at something like 2.5FSR and 4-8 storeys. In fact, the

53

feedback compiled on the City’s website shows that most were
in favor of 4 storeys only, some 4-6, some 6-8, but little above
that. Also, most respondents indicated that, beyond FSR of 2.5,
many of the Principles for building variety, neighbourhood
transition, views, and sun/shadowing are not met. In spite of
this, Holborn comes with an even more dense proposal and
claims this is what the people asked for.
City of Vancouver feedback source:
http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/littlemountain/public/
Little%20Mountain%20%20Open%20House%20Feedback%20Summary%20%20data%20graphs%20-%20July%202011.pdf
Well, the first point about this not being about profit should be
a red flag. On that note, the sale price of this transaction (yet to
be completed) should be made public, since it will involve major
rezoning, and, is the only way to check the figures, which is
what Ned Jacobs’ group is tasked with doing.
I ask that people follow this site (http://vaisbord.com/blog),
and check out Ned Jacobs’ and Michael Gellar’s blogs/updates
from time to time. I think these 3 sources will be the only open
and objective sources of information.
Thanks- and keep up the great work!
PS: And thanks for showing video of the architect trying to
blame this community process on delaying the social housing
tenants’ return to their homes. That delay was created by
tearing down the buildings prematurely, not by the review
process. And the community adamantly wanted this tear down
stopped- again documented by your site.
D. Simpson

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