Environment
Behind Sam Sullivan's Urban Agenda
By John Burns published Jun 14, 2012
As mayor, Sam Sullivan made density the agenda at City Hall. Today he’s more committed than ever to shaping Vancouver’s future
When Sam Sullivan was in his early 30s, he called up a fellow he knew, an engineer named Paul Cermak. This is what Sullivan did back then-we're talking a dozen years before he won the mayor's chair, before controversial initiatives like EcoDensity and Project Civil City, before the high of flying the Maple Leaf in Turin and the low of being routed by Peter Ladner. He'd invite a bright light to lunch, talk a little, listen a lot, then drop some impossible challenge. Then he'd sit back and, with a widening of the eyes, ask when he might expect results. Actually, he's still doing it.
That day, he was musing with Cermak about mobility. Sullivan, a quadriplegic with no feeling in his legs and only limited use of his biceps and wrists, had pioneered a way to pilot a sailboat and an ultralight aircraft. Now he wanted to hike. He'd already tasked a group of engineers with adapting a golf cart to access the wilderness, but he figured Cermak could gin up something more eco-friendly. The two had worked together on various home-based adaptations: shortcuts that allowed Sullivan to feed and dress himself, and to open his apartment blinds. Recalling the lunch, Cermak told the filmmaker Ali Mehdi, "Sam put a few lines on a napkin and asked me if I could build it." The squiggle, he recalled, looked like a Chinese rickshaw, so that's what he built: a rugged two-wheel recumbent lawn chair on which Sullivan was pushed and pulled into Manning Provincial Park. Mehdi's Access Challenge is the story of that TrailRider outing, and though they didn't reach the summit (the team hauling the contraption was unprepared for the labour required of mud-slick trails), it shows how a Sullivan lunch can start casually, then morph into something unexpected-a doodle growing into an engineering accomplishment that has taken quadriplegics up Mt. Kilimanjaro and to the base camp at Mount Everest.
Watching Sullivan power through the salal puts a new spin on the intervening decades. Of course he's persistent (maybe his bullishness predates the accident or maybe it crystallized during his recovery-Sullivan's not wasting a lot of daylight worrying either way). Of course he's good at troop-rallying. What's surprising is to see him removed from his habitat. "See the person, not the chair"-that's the cry of the disabled. But it's not the chair that defines Sam Sullivan. It's what the chair needs. He's a city boy, a creature of curb cuts and full-access buses (legacies of his public service years) and ramps and elevators. He's most at ease where barriers are few, where human ingenuity is paramount. It's no wonder he champions cities, that he works so hard to grow them bigger, higher, denser.
After his defeat in 2008, Sullivan took a year off. With his partner Lynn Zanatta, a girlfriend from high school he reunited with during his run for mayor, he withdrew into the private life he'd put on hold for 15 years. No politics. No media. Even in the dark time, though, a fellow's going to take a lunch, and when he returned to the spotlight, the two of them had funding for a new Global Civic Policy Society, a think-tank, says its website, dedicated to "research and reflection on civil society, local government, and citizenship."
The society is the latest in a string of Sullivan incubators. Over the years, he's founded a half-dozen nonprofits, from a disabled-sailing group to the Vancouver Adapted Music Society. (A keyboardist in his teens, he'd just bought a keyboard and was gigging around town when he broke his neck skiing.) The Sam Sullivan Foundation that supports these groups has raised $20 million to date.
From broken bodies he's turned his interest to broken cities. In his view, Vancouver needs more density-a lot more. Let's become a real city, he says, rather than a collection of shiny-brochure "villages" and single-family-home suburbs. It's better for the environment-he cites a recent World Bank study that compares a section of Toronto, where each resident creates 1.3 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, with nearby Whitby, where it's 10 times that.
