Because it’s interesting … especially if you’re a Smith-Wang.
More details from Maps on the Web.
Source: NetCredit
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When we think of our city as a whole, it is important that it sustains a strong sense of identity for the diversity of people who live here.
The recent City of Vancouver Arts and Culture Plan proposes actions for the incorporation of new approaches to both intangible and tangible heritage. For the purposes of ongoing cultural vitality, redress and equity, it also proposes integration of intangible heritage into the City’s existing heritage program which up to now has mainly focused on the preservation of buildings.
Our final talk for 2019 will look at the opportunity for how a new City-wide plan might carve out a larger role for heritage and integrate current heritage thinking into a wide range of the City’s social aims.
Michael Gordon – Former Senior Downtown Planner, City of Vancouver, Vancouver Heritage Commissioner
A year ago, City Council appointed Michael to the Vancouver Heritage Commission. Until 2018, he was Senior Downtown Planner for the City of Vancouver primarily focused on planning in the downtown peninsula and the West End.
Elijah Sabadlan – Heritage Consultant & Conservation Specialist
Elijah views heritage architecture as palimpsest in the continuing evolution of urban environments. As a Heritage Consultant with Donald Luxton & Associates, he provides heritage design and technical advice to the project team, from planning to construction.
Carmel Tanaka – Founder, Cross Cultural Strathcona Walking Tour
Carmel Tanaka was born to an Israeli mother and a Japanese Canadian father. Carmel’s pro-diversity stance and open door policy stem from valuing both sides of her heritage, which she describes as “Jewpanese”. This base provides Carmel with the ability to sensitively manage and effectively mediate challenging projects involving multi-generational intersectional groups with mixed political, religious and social opinions.
Kamala Todd – Indigenous Arts and Culture Planner, City of Vancouver
Kamala Todd is a Metis-Cree mother, community planner, filmmaker, curator, and educator born and raised in the beautiful lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Skwxwú7mesh-speaking people, aka Vancouver. She is the author of “This Many-storied Land”, in In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation (2016), and Truth-Telling: Indigenous perspectives on working with Municipal Governments (2017) for Vancouver Park Board.
Thursday, November 28
7-9 pm
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (SFU Woodwards): 149 West Hastings Street
Free, donations appreciated. Reservations here.
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“I really think this is a real gift to the city,” said Stewart. “Everything we can do to make this project be successful is at the top of my list.”
Be careful. If Senakw, the Squamish Burrard Bridge project, is a gift to the city, other proponents will come bearing gifts for similar considerations.
From Expo 86 to the 2010 Olympics, the City has seen almost a dozen megaprojects appear on the skyline – developer-driven, comprehensively designed and built, beginning with Concord Pacific in the late eighties. All through the nineties, megaprojects sprouted – from Coal Harbour to Collingwood Village to Fraser Lands.
They all had to meet standards for complete communities, based originally on what we had learned when the City created the South Shore of False Creek, followed by Granville Island. If a developer came to the City with a megaproject proposal, they came with a plan that met the council-approved megaproject standards.
The City extracted huge wealth from the value it created through those zoning approvals. Lots of parkland and seawall extensions, in addition to the basic infrastructure – pipes, cables and roads. As well: social amenities and necessities – schools, community centres, child care as a priority; housing percents for families with children, for social equity. There were design standards: for cycling, for sustainability, for the arts. And more. That’s what we meant by ‘complete communities’ – and you can go walk around in the results.
Developers paid for all this through direct provision of the benefits, like a child-care centre, or through ‘contributions’ – those CACs you hear about without quite understanding how they work.
In the case of Senakw, it could be the other way around.
Ginger Gosnell-Myers (Vancouver’s first aboriginal relations manager) said Senakw will give future Vancouverites the chance to live in the city and it’s up to the city to respond to concerns about infrastructure and capacity.
Stewart say he is up to the challenge, including working with the park board, the school board and the province to ensure community services are available when the neighbourhood’s new residents arrive.
At 10- to 12,000 residents, there is no way Senakw could meet some of the established standards. Concord Pacific had to provide 2.75 acres of park for every thousand residents. Senakw would need more than twice the area of its entire 11-acre site. While it’s not yet clear what Senakw will provide, it isn’t obligated. Nor is it yet clear (or even negotiated), but the City looks like it’s committing itself to providing significant amenities and necessities – accepting density and paying for impacts.
So if the development itself – the thousands of market rental apartments – is the gift, then why would the City not be open to receiving more gifts from other developers. Yes, Senakw is unique given its status as a reserve, so developers wouldn’t expect the same deal. They’d just expect the amenity bar to be lowered.
How the relationship develops and negotiations occur is what reconciliation is seriously about – a relationship based on mutual interests levered for maximum value. One of the values of the City is the building of complete communities. Squamish would point to their own history for examples. It shouldn’t be hard to come to a consensus.
Squamish has an interest in a successful development in every respect. The city has to demonstrate respect. Together, they’re negotiating our collective interests.
This is the reality of reconciliation. It’s not about gifts, or reparations. It’s about building the latest version of a complete community, together.
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Steve Nicholls, former Director of Planning for the District of West Vancouver, will speak on municipal planning and the development of West Vancouver when he served as Senior Planner and as Director of Planning, Lands and Permits from 1979 to 2009.
During this time, West Vancouver pioneered in forging advanced policies in community planning, area planning and density transfer, green belt and creek preservation, and waterfront and parks acquisition,
A look at West Vancouver as it was, as it is, and as it can be, from a planning perspective.
Wednesday, November 20
7:30 pm
Marine Room, West Vancouver Seniors Activity Centre.
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Competing meanings have been attached to heritage. Some feel heritage has broadened too far while others feel strongly that heritage needs to continually re-examine its concepts. This comes at a time when there is increasing questioning of the usefulness of heritage due to its traditional focus on preservation. In this third installment of Shaping Vancouver, we will examine the disruption taking place in heritage and the challenges it faces in remaining relevant.
• There is a growing interest in heritage as a living system of relationships between people and place;
• There is an understood need for greater attention to cultural diversity and how different cultural groups value heritage (e.g. First Nations, women, LGBTQ);
• Classical heritage concepts around building preservation alone do not address contemporary societal needs and issues; resolution of these needs requires broader and more interdisciplinary approaches
Locally, the heritage field in general is just starting to consider these broader ideas.
These panelists to share their insights about their local places:
Angie Bain– Researcher with the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, Director with Heritage BC
Paul Gravett– Executive Director, Heritage BC
Aneesha Grewal- Vice-Chair Punjabi Market Regeneration Collective
Robert Lemon– Architect, Former Senior Heritage Planner for the City of Vancouver
Tuesday, November 5
7-9 PM
Free, donations appreciated
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (SFU Woodwards): 149 West Hastings Street
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You won’t likely find “The Grand Bargain” in a planning text, even though it explains in a phrase the de facto understanding that has shaped many of the places where Canadians live.
The bargain looks like this:
This is North York* between the Sheppard and Finch subway stations – a one-block-deep corridor of high-density mixed-use development on either side of Yonge Street.
Go another block further and there is a cliff-face drop in scale, where single-family suburbia begins under a canopy of street trees.
Post-war Toronto and its suburban cities decided to accommodate density (those concrete towers especially) where there was primarily commercial and industrial zoning. With the opening of the Yonge Street subway in 1954, the station areas made ideal locations, especially where there was already a streetcar village.
To deal with community blowback at the sudden change in scale and alienating architecture, especially if the bulldozing of existing residential neighbourhoods might be required, planners and councils struck a compact: we won’t touch a blade of grass in your single-family zones. Your status will be maintained.
Hence the Grand Bargain: high-rise density, low-scale suburbia, little in between. Massive change for one, almost none for the other, and spot rezonings thereafter.
On the other side of the country, something similar was going in Burnaby. In the fifties, the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board produced a vision – ‘cities in a sea of green‘ – and provided the guidelines to go with it, notably where to consider apartment zoning. David Pereira details the evolution of Burnaby’s commitment to the regional vision and its apartment zones, renamed town centres, in the 1960s.
That bargain when built out looks like this:
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Sun columnist Alan Fotheringham characterized Vancouver in the 1960s as a “Village on the Edge of the Rain Forest” – and apparently one of the house photographers was a character named Vlad.
Durning came across his Facebook page, where he’s been posting his work from, yup, a half century ago, when the main street of Vancouver looked like this:
I’ll leave it to John Atkin to nail the exact date, but you can see this was taken, about 1970, when Pacific Centre was under construction, Royal Centre hadn’t even started, and Georgia just west of Burrard still had one-storey storefronts.
So what’s going on?
SPEC, the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, had been formed in 1969, and they’re having a protest march through downtown on the way to Stanley Park:
So much has changed. Except the issue that SPEC was demonstrating about.
Lots more great captures from that time on Vlad’s site here – Seize the Time – where there’s not much about him, even his last time. Just his photos.
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Shaping Vancouver 2019: What’s the Use of Heritage?
Conversation #2: What do we do about neighbourhoods?
Some argue that “neighbourhood character” must be maintained to preserve the diversity of the city. Others note however that “neighbourhood character” frequently serves as an instrument of exclusion, making people feel unwelcome and marginalizing them.
Neighbourhoods that do not evolve risk stagnation, while neighbourhoods that change too rapidly erase the attributes that make them unique.
Are there then qualities of neighbourhoods that should be cultivated or protected? As Vancouver faces a housing crisis, how do we go about discussing neighbourhood change?
Four panelists share their insights about their local places:
Richard Evans – Chair of RePlan, a committee of the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association
Scot Hein – adjunct professor in the Master of Urban Design program at UBC, previously the senior urban designer with the City of Vancouver
Jada-Gabrielle Pape – facilitator and consultant with Courage Consulting
Jennifer Maiko Bradshaw – renter, pro-housing activist and director of Abundant Housing Vancouver
Wednesday, October 9
7-9 PM
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (SFU Woodwards) – 149 West Hastings Street
Free, donations appreciated.
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This clip from a local news station in New York City is labelled as “the city before gentrification.” What now provokes nostaligia wasn’t all that great if you actually had to live in a city of rapid decline – and this illustrates how sad it was. And now funny.
Worth listening to just for the accents and attitudes of the New Yawkers.
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Josh Kepkay is a realtor, and now a podcaster – an opportunity, of course, to increase his profile while having conversations with “thought leaders, personalities and interesting people in the Vancouver Real Estate world with a story to share.”
As someone who always enjoys a little thought leading, I took him up on his invitation. And here’s the result:
Click on the second podcast on the list: “What the future holds with Gordon Price”.
And yes, we go well outside the topic of the local real-estate market. Of special interest to those interested in the strategies of city council in the ’80s and ’90s (as well as backstories on the West End) for lessons that might apply to the city’s future.
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