Dear SCARP community and friends,
It is with tremendous sadness that we let you know of the passing of Nathan Edelson. Nathan was an adjunct professor here at SCARP for many years, where he touched many of us and inspired more in causes dear to him.
He also has given to the larger Vancouver community as Vancouver's "former top city planner for the Downtown Eastside", among much else.
SCARP Professor Emerita Leonie Sandercock has written this tribute:
-SCARP Emerita Leonie Sandercock
No truer words were ever spoken than when the CBC news obituary described Nathan Edelson as a ‘local hero’. He has been at the top of my pantheon of community planning heroes since I first got to know him over two decades ago, shortly after moving to Vancouver to teach in the School of Community & Regional Planning at UBC.
A mutual friend had suggested I reach out to Nathan once I arrived in Vancouver, and it only took a couple of evenings of sharing food and stories with he and his late wife Norma-Jean McLaren to convince me that both of them needed to be sharing their accumulated wisdom with our students.
Initially I invited Norma-Jean as a guest speaker in my new ‘Intercultural Planning’ course. Such was her impact in the classroom that pretty soon she and I were co-teaching the entire course. Then when I got a course buy-out, Nathan and Norma-Jean took over the course for almost a decade, to the immense benefit of a whole generation of students. I also regularly invited Nathan to speak to my ‘Intro to Planning History and Theory’ core course, recognizing how the practical wisdom that shone through his ‘war stories’ illuminated better than any theoretical text the crucial relationship between theory and practice.
Nathan was very taken with some of my late husband John Friedmann’s writings about ‘social learning’, which led to him developing his own two semester course for our Masters students, a Social Learning studio, in which he connected students with community partners and guided them in a brilliant ‘learning by doing’ experience.
What made Nathan so compelling as a teacher was his commitment to those same core values that made him so inspirational as a planner: his approach to planning as community building, rather than city building; his caring for people and places and the connections between them; his focus on neighbourhoods and neighbourliness; and perhaps above all, the way he fought for those who, for whatever reason, were marginalized by the systems that have so much control over our lives.
To fight that fight so well and for so long, took a special ingredient rare among practicing planners, even or perhaps especially among those committed to social justice. That special ingredient was political savvy.
Nathan had figured out, from necessity, how to act strategically. Political regimes, progressive or otherwise, come and go, but Nathan showed us how planners working in city and state planning agencies can and do still try to influence which urban/environmental issues get addressed, and how. Committed as he was to the fairness and quality of life in this particular place, Vancouver, Nathan figured out how to operate in unfavorable as well as more favorable political environments. I interviewed him about this for an article I wrote for the Journal of the American Planning Association back in 2004, when Nathan was the senior planner for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote:
What was simply ‘common sense’ to Nathan, I might describe as practical wisdom of the kind so valued by Aristotle in his writings about public life. How many of us have a clue about how to teach that? That’s what was so brilliant, captivating, and inspirational about Nathan as a teacher, and so endearing about him as a human being. The entire community of planning educators and practitioners has been influenced for the better because of his work and his way of being.
SCARP was very fortunate to count him as one of our own, and a whole generational cohort of planners are out in the world now implementing his teachings. He lives on, not just in our hearts but hopefully in what we do every day.
Leonie Sandercock
Professor Emerita, FRSC.
In a statement to CBC, Larry Beasley, who also has been an adjunct professor at SCARP, said:
As we start our new year, new faces have arrived, ready to take on the challenges and quest of our time. We are all privileged to have benefited from Nathan Edelson, one of the transformative spirits that helped make us who we are today. Even so, there are many at SCARP who knew him directly, and at times like this, it is okay to experience many different feelings at these endings and losses. We encourage you to seek support from friends, family, and members of your community, at SCARP and beyond. Any member of UBC also has resources for support if they need someone to talk to, and we invite you to seek them out if it will help.