Vancouver fashion at zero degrees:
Calling on our long-time relationship with outdoor recreation, we know how to dress well when the temperature is on either side of zero.
We accommodate a mild coldness, kind of like our temperament, and perfect for the puffy jackets we wear all winter long for every occasion.
Notice the black-and beige combo on everyone. With the well proportioned backpacks. And a spot of colour.
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In Vancouver, Everyone is Brown, including Whites and Asians.
You’ve seen this before:
It’s a 1975 sketch of “Cities in a Sea of Green” – the phrase that captured the intent of the original Livable Region Plan. In Burnaby, they took it literally (see more in ‘Cities of the Future‘).
Brentwood is SkyTrain scale, amped up. The combo of towers tightly clustered around a rapid-transit station, connected to a shopping centre and community services, also strikes me as Asian scale – characteristic of station areas in Singapore and Hong Kong, where the planning and design go back to the housing booms of post-war modernism. These are the urban environments in which so many of us grew up before coming to Vancouver, and to whom the projects are now marketed.
This is West Pacific.
The towers, in particular, take us to new heights – not to everyone’s taste, but very much part of the Grand Bargain. (For an analysis and prediction of the impact of Brentwood, here’s what I said back in 2014: “Brentwood growth could help maintain quality of life: Price”
As detailed on David Pereira’s blog, the architecture of Brentwood Town Centre also goes back to 1960s with its initial highrises and mall (and, oh yeah, used car lots). Today, ‘Amazing Brentwood’ takes the cliche of the moment – stacked and angled glass boxes – to climb the slope to the north of the station and animate the many thousands of square meters.
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A satirical celebration of the 99 B-Line by Punjabi singer Amrit Bains that could only have come out of Vancouver.
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Here’s a guest post from friend-of-the-blog Peter Ladner:
I recently got my most retweets ever, for agreeing with Patrick Condon and Scott Hein’s call in The Tyee to convert half the land in the City of Vancouver’s municipal golf courses into much-needed housing, and turn the other half into real parks.
Yup
Time for Vancouver to Turn Its Golf Courses into Homes via @TheTyee https://t.co/c3idp8ffRs— Peter Ladner (@pladner) October 30, 2019
Mmm, that warm feeling of people flooding in to agree with me! Like! Like! Like!
Then I read the pushback comments. Then I changed my mind.
I now agree with those who say we need to save the golf-course green space, that we have plenty of other space for more housing all over town in the single-family zones. I realized part of my enthusiasm for the golf course conversion was the prospect of converting those golf greens into more accessible and varied public parks.
I mention this because “changing minds” (advocacy, campaigning, rallying, persuading, writing op-eds, sloganeering…) is such a large part of what so many of us do these days. But it’s all push and no followup. Outing and celebrating our own mind changes is seldom practised. It’s not easy to do. But only we can do it.
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