In other areas however, the boundary is pockmarked by odd and incongruous land uses: big-box religion, surrounded by acres of occasionally used parking, is acceptable in the ALR; the placeless fake landscapes of golf courses – one of the worst offenders of chemical pollution – are permitted. Monster homes, often built cheaply and without any vernacular context, effectively suburbanize the ALR. There is a great irony in the acceptability of land use types that contradict the intentions of the policy, erode the viability of the agricultural resource and ultimately make the Thin Green Line meaningless.

Rather than making a futile attempt to reinforce this boundary, our proposal is to find opportunities to integrate seemingly incompatible agricultural uses on the other side of the line, to seek out the lost space in suburban sprawl that pushes up against the ALR, and propose a reciprocal response to the interlopers in the agrarian landscape. We propose to study the boundary as it exists in Richmond where the latent opportunities to interlope into lost space are abundant, and where the opportunity to demonstrate possible compatibilities (in a place where agrarian traditions meet the new phenomenon of Asian cuisine) and a new landscape vernacular is most potent. Our hopes are that the edge of the ALR becomes a transect, not a boundary, and begins to influence the built form and character of urban development deeper within the urban areas of our cities.

Design objectives

-generate economically-viable, agricultural operations within the urban form
-foster a sense of place and cultural identity rooted in an everyday agricultural landscape
-provide space for phytoremediation in areas contiguous to food growing operations

Questions

-what incentives can we offer developers to build viable and place-specific agricultural land in exchange for bonus density?
-how do we redesign streets, boulevards or linear parks to be emblematic of the everyday, edible, urban landscape?
-why shouldn’t the public realm be considered an economic asset rather than a maintenance cost?

Unhindered by the usual restraints of time, the Georgia Grind will be a unique infrastructure, ever expanding and spiralling upward into and above the skyline of Vancouver. Created upon the ruins of a failed express way, it will be a symbol of achievement and hope for Vancouver, a man-made mountainous pathway for all to exercise or drive upward together while enjoying the majestic view of the north shore and the natural landscape beyond.

In my earlier posts, I wanted to observe aspects of the existing legislative system that limit architecture’s agency or at least fail to enhance its relationship to the public good. I wrote about the Tariff’s admission of architecture’s weakness in the face of the economy; that the AIBC’s mandate advocates for protection of the public good, not its advancement; and that the density bonus program operates horizontally within existing class structures as opposed to vertically across them.

Beginning this post, I am left with the feeling. Indeed, so, what else is new?

Certainly none of this so far. Joshua Prince Ramus spoke about Architecture’s diminished roll in his 2010 TED Talk and SHoP Architects book Out of Practice has similar concerns. Their answer, one
common in the profession, is a deeper engagement with production and industry. In principle, a good idea, however, in proposing an marketplace solution, in a way, they beg the question: they assume
the truth of the marketplace as the appropriate frame through which to evaluate their work.

Such proposals lend truth to the lie that architecture should define itself in terms of economics. Lisa Rochon’s recent article The business case for beautiful libraries illustrates this point nicely. At what point did architecture cede so much authority as to sound like it were making a case for itself in a night school MBA program?

That the public good and aims of the marketplace are fundamentally opposed and that we insist on the mistake of framing issues in terms of economics is obvious. But the central problem remains: at no point in setting out the Tariff or interpreting the Act and Zoning Bylaws do we challenge that structure.

I see two approaches. The first, cousin to JPR and SHoP’s advocacy of deeper engagement with production and industry, is to accept the marketplace’s dominance and codify the provision of support (through advocacy, assistance, or service, for example) in the Act, the Zoning Bylaws, and the Tariff.

What form might those take?

On the one hand they might adjust the bonus density program
such that still further density (something this city will surely need) in exchange for dedicated contributions to neighbourhoods in decline. Or how about adjusting the Tariff and requiring builders to contribute directly to a fund that could partially cover pro bono work taken on by architects?

Both would be easy to implement, require not a lot of money, and if administered appropriately, could do a great deal of good. As solutions go, however, they are the structural solutions of a systems manager.

The harder solution is a change in the culture of architectural practice, and this was made a little more clear to me while watching the recent Buildex Architectural Keynote roundtable, Architecture, Who Cares? when Michael Green lamented our disengagement from public and Peter Cardew recalled that decades ago, Vancouver’s City Council comprised architects, lawyers, and doctors.

Why do those two things matter here? Because architecture’s disengagement from the public realm has reduced its importance in the collective conscious of the city. The result is that architecture’s chief advocate – the public – has little cause to champion great iconic work, let alone the prospect architecture aiding the disenfranchised and the dispossessed through small but generous works.

That the start of our solution to architecture’s limited agency might lie in an improved engagement with the public should not come as much of a surprise: from conversations come understanding, enjoyment, and ultimately love. It is only through a richer understanding of architecture that the public will be able to see its use as transformative, both on a grand civic scale, but also – as I’ve said – on a smaller scale where the need for architecture in its most primary sense – structure – is perhaps greatest.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Not a chance, not in Vancouver at least. Of the 36 cities in North America with populations over two million, Vancouver has the most days with measurable precipitation. It rains more of the time here, than anywhere else on the continent. And meteorological data suggests it will get even wetter. Annual rainfall has increased by approximately six inches since 1960 and it’s widely expected that this trend will continue well into the future. Don’t put away the galoshes anytime soon.

While Vancouver’s sogginess unquestionably offers delights – magnificent fecundity, snow-capped mountain pleasures, succulent air – it also literally dampens critical aspects of urban life. On days without rain, Vancouver sidewalks pulse with an energy that is to be expected of its exceptional density, however, the same streets are comparably quiet when it’s raining. In other words, they’re rather quiet most of the time. This most basic and banal fact, that of rain, is perhaps the single biggest variable of a vibrant, public urbanity here. Yet architecture and urban form have done little in response. Instead of retreating to isolated, disjointed, and private interiors with perpetually soggy feet, how might a new Rain City Urbanism operate?

Sheltering the Collective

Extreme weather has provided the impetus for specific urban formations in many cities throughout history. In Canada, Montreal’s ‘Underground City’ (one of the world’s largest subterranean complexes) and Calgary’s ‘Plus 15’ (the planet’s most extensive pedestrian skywalk network) are, whatever one might think about their qualities as conditional public spaces, radical weather-based systems that effectively shelter citizens from the elements by means of large scale collective territories. In comparison to such places as Montreal and Calgary, Vancouver’s relative warmth and general absence of powerful storms are designated ‘mild’ – qualitatively and quantitatively distant from the extremes of elsewhere. The equation of dangerous weather with extreme whether that therefore necessitates profound spatial responses, has reduced the extent to which Vancouverites recognize the extremity of their own situation and the need for a comprehensive response here.

To see what our history might have been and to glimpse what we could become, it is useful to consider Bologna, Italy. With its thirty-eight kilometres of porticoes – covered public sidewalks – Bologna’s urban fabric offers continuous protection from the elements in a manner that is unqualifiedly public and with significant impacts on city life. Made compulsory by a 1288 law that’s still in effect, the porticoes provide an enlivened interstitial zone between public and private that is both sheltered circulation and covered outdoor space for a variety of uses, such as dining, entertainment, and even workshop production.

In sunlight starved Vancouver, perhaps the solidity of Bologna’s masonry porticoes is too heavy, too dark? The typical contemporary solution is the ubiquitous glass canopy – giving both light and shelter. However, Vancouver’s patchwork of glass canopies offers inconsistent coverage while at the same time being always dirty and leaf-strewn; an inevitable shabbiness that problematizing the very transparency of the glass. What if, instead, we pursued something as continuous and comprehensive as Bologna’s porticoes yet radically immaterial? In the late 1950s Yves Klein, the French conceptualist, explored ‘Air Architecture,’ a series of investigations and proposals for buildings made solely of the four elements (air, water, fire, and earth) in their pure form. As Holland Cotter reports in The New York Times, “out of this came the concept of shelters formed from envelopes of moving air, providing protection from rain – which could be blown away before it landed.” Could Bologna’s porticoes hybridize with Klein’s roofs of air? Offering a new urbanity in which air canopies modulate air velocity to produce desired atmospheric conditions in which natural light is plentiful, umbrellas are anachronisms, and citizens are transported from solitary dampness to animated collectives.

The Artificial Aesthetics of Rain

The surfaces of the built environment appear differently, of course, in different weather conditions. Rainwater typically renders surfaces darker, a shift in tonality that’s further amplified by the subdued light attributes of a rainy day. The potential for colour and light within the built environment to respond positively to weather conditions was more deeply embedded in past versions of Vancouver than the present. That 1960s Vancouver was described as ‘the neon capital of Canada’ has much to do with the city’s climate. Historian John Atkin says: “It rains a lot here, and neon and rain are the two sexiest things. You know, neon looks good in the rain.” The move away from neon represents an ideological shift to a more Arcadian vision of the natural city cleansed from the decadent perversions of artificiality. This fundamentalist stance unsympathetically overwrites potential positive combinations in which the natural and the artificial synthesize to heightened benefit.

Perhaps a contemporary avatar of neon Vancouver is a new form of colour urbanism that comes into being only when needed? When it’s raining, the colour of buildings could transform and blossom into bright colours, offering a dazzling counterpoint to months of gloom. When it’s sunny this artificial surface colouring could fade away, foregrounding the ocean, forest, and sky. How could this be done? A new generation of hydrochromic surfaces – that change colour when wet – have recently been developed and are beginning to be deployed in various forms. For instance, the British design house, SquidLondon, has a series of umbrellas, shower curtains, and rain capes that shift from black and white to a brilliant display of colour when wet. While hydrochromic surfaces have yet to find a place in the built environment, it would be fitting that Vancouver, a city with an abundance of water, would be an early innovator in their architectural use and in doing so realize a contingent interplay between natural and artificial phenomena in which each compensates for the deficiencies of the other. May all the rain drops fall!

Parsing character in context, in Vancouver planning documents of various stripes, character equals image. Vancouver is not unique in this regard, but may suffer disproportionately from equating image to substance, given the common interpretation of beautiful North Shore mountains as a beautiful city, or the glut of window-walled towers as an exemplary city. With its fixation on image, character includes attributes such as roof pitch, building height, siding type, entrance orientation, and proximity to property lines. And almost incontrovertibly, those attributes are proposed to be consistent along a block, or enough like one another not to raise any eyebrows.

In this narrow reading, the meaning of character collapses in on itself. Resurrecting the substance of character in response requires re-examining the essence of the term. When character is represented in such a limited manner, the urban fabric reproduced from that graphic and textual code is equally limited. Documenting typical residential and commercial blocks in Vancouver, and truly observing their qualities, reveals this limitation. While buildings or clusters of buildings might have value or meaning wrought by their contents, very little of the urban fabric is worth reproducing on its own merits.

However, other disciplines, such as literature and theatre, offer clues, as does common usage, where character is defined by distinction and difference. It is nearly impossible to construe the comment “he’s a real character,” as pointing to anything other than uniqueness and idiosyncrasy, and likely deep ones. Yet in urban design and planning, character has become a proxy for bland equivalence with a limited range of supposedly animating features, such as a strong cornice, contrasting siding, or prominent entryways.

Alternatively, if a character of distinction were embraced, that which is already built and that which is proposed to be built might come into their own, recognized for their own traits in contrast to those of their neighbours. Substantive contrast would urge inhabitants to really notice, understand and appreciate existing elements, overcoming the tendency to obscure the urban fabric of varying times and motives in relentlessly ‘similar’ surroundings. And substantive difference in new construction, serving contemporary motives, could make its own particular contribution, articulating that the future can be more than grudgingly different from the past. As pockets of exception proliferate in a regularized system, they would each provide relief from the other, alternately allowing each other to be noted for their character.

If the role of character as set piece could first be redefined to preference distinction rather than consistency, character could then be defined beyond set piece, three and four dimensionally. First steps would involve observing beyond the conventional planning diagram of a “desirable” streetscape, and projecting beyond the conventional “artist’s rendering” of an easily digestible, blue sky/green swale mixed-use development. Zeroing in on a neighbourhood, a block, or a street and observing what’s really there, in front, behind, on the sides, under, and above, according to categories more relevant to an operative urbanism than roof pitch and building height, would be one place to start. Observing the spatial relationship between multiple buildings on a lot and between lots, economic relationships between adjacent uses, infrastructural relationships between buildings and open space, or relationships between projections capable of providing cover from the rain while capturing that rain, could lay the groundwork for a more nuanced and textured notion of character. This character could rise to the task of generating urban performance rather than replicating urban scenery.

Redefining character in four-dimensional performance terms would be hard-pressed to gain traction outside of an overhaul to the functional zoning, and increasingly common spot zoning, that blankets Vancouver. This is a much larger project, but one worth pursuing if the city is going to become the beacon of exemplary urbanism it already purports to be. And this project could be strongly informed by a pointed conversation interrogating the long-standing concept of character. If this conversation gained momentum in service of a systemic overhaul, leading to surveying, mapping and eventually policy-making, it might in the meantime provide the grounds for minor, yet meaningful, incursions into the status quo as it becomes legitimate to ask the question, “What are we talking about when we talk about character?”

Vancouverism 2.0 should attempt to reflect the perspective of its citizens. Through mobile photo capture and sharing, Vancouverites and visitors document their perspectives on the city every day. Massive amounts of geo-referenced data are gathered, and the data depicts a unique image of Vancouver. Through this project we have sought to explore geotagged photo data to consider how we can make the best use of this information for improving the planning and design of our city.

About the maps

The points shown on the maps represent photographs that have been geotagged on Flickr and Picasa between 2002 and 2010, with the majority taken between 2008 and 2010. Geotags were either generated automatically using the GPS receiver in the camera or phone, or manually by whomever uploaded the photos.

The LOCAL vs TOURIST distinction was based on the photo-taking habits of the photographer. Photos were assumed to be by LOCALS if the photographer took other pictures in Vancouver over a period of a month or more. Photos were assumed be taken by TOURISTS if the photographer seemed to be a local of a different city, and if they took pictures in Vancouver for a period of less than a month.

In February 2009, Flickr reported that about 3% of the photos on their servers were geotagged. Thus, we can assume that the photos shown on these maps represent about 3% of the total photos taken in Vancouver during this time span.

Observations

In this project we have begun to explore methods of using a socio-spatial geotag dataset to evaluate how people interact with public space in the city, and to understand what areas draw the most locals and tourists. Observing the distribution of photos taken across Vancouver reveals an “experience map” of the city created by residents and visitors.

Some interesting patterns emerge when analyzing the maps and comparing the “density” of photos taken by locals and by visitors. It is interesting to observe, for example, the commonality of “landmarks” that are well-loved by both tourists and locals alike. We also observe a high density of photos around Robson Square, leading us to question whether there could be a better-defined central public gathering space there.

The collection of such spatial data is growing exponentially. What should we be doing with this information and what does it tell us? As this data becomes available in greater resolutions it will be interesting to see the life of public spaces at a more detailed scale. Where do people sit? What are the patterns of movement? When compared against other spatial data sources and plotted over time other patterns will start to emerge.

Are the patterns identified by locals and tourists consistent with your image of Vancouver? What experiences are visitors to Vancouver missing? What does this information tell you about how Vancouver is used? Through this exploration we hope to raise discussion about the best use of socio-spatial information to help the public, politicians, designers, and planners make better decisions regarding the planning and design of our city.

Credits

The base map for these diagrams was created by Eric Fisher (www.flickr.com/ walkingsf) in June 2010 and expressly shared with us for this project. Eric Fisher obtained the geotag information for his base map from open source Flickr and Picasa API data, which spanned 2002 to 2010.

The base maps for city parks, parcels, and shoreline utilizes open data obtained from the City of Vancouver VanMap open data catalogue.

Transit information was obtained from Translink.

Neighbourhood outlines were derived from a combination of sources, including the city’s various Business Improvement Associations (BIAs), the City of Vancouver’s official neighbourhoods map, the Downtown South planning study, and our common knowledge about approximate neighbourhood boundaries.

Change Ahead

The starting point of our inquiry is:
As neighbourhoods grow and change, how can design support and enhance the tangible and intangible qualities of place that people have come to value?

Around the globe urban migration is on the rise and will have specific local impacts. In Vancouver, it is anticipated that approximately 56,500 more dwelling units of various sizes will be required to accommodate 130,000 more residents over the next 30 years. Vacant tracts of land for additional housing are no longer available and new residential development will more often occur by densifying existing neighbourhoods.

Public dialogue, in regards to densification, is heavily focused on the form and height of proposed new developments. Less attention has been given to understanding what makes a neighborhood feel like a neighbourhood and; what creates a connection between people and the place they live?

Local Qualities

Resident feedback suggests, in addition to major public facilities such as parks, schools, community centres and branch libraries, residents may also value design projects or interventions that support local businesses and expand opportunities for social interaction.

To understand what people value about their neighbourhood, we referred to a mapping project for Grandview Woodlands and Douglas Park in Vancouver. YouMap Vancouver was conducted in 2008 by the Vancouver City Planning Commission and SmartGrowth Advisory Services. Residents participated in on-site workshops, neighbourhood walks and on-line mapping exercises to identify neighbourhood assets, strengths, weaknesses and needs.

Key findings of the project included:

“Community interaction is a key feature or benefit of neighbourhood elements that are considered an amenity. Whether spaces and places are publicly or privately provided, the opportunities they provide for community interaction were often cited as their primary amenity, regardless of their specific function (restaurant, library).”

“(neighbourhood amenities) combine both facilities and services provided by the City, and also by a neighbourhood-oriented private sector. Any perceived risks to the neighbourhood-oriented private sector can be seen as a threat as great as the potential closure of a public amenity”

LocalSocial Concept

LocalSocial seeks to amply and consolidate existing civic programs, infrastructure and spatial conditions to create micro-hubs of social and economic activity. The implementation of these ideas does not rely on full-scale redevelopment of neighbourhoods. Rather the proposal works within the existing urban fabric and also can accommodate future growth.

Mobile Businesses & Services

When older neighbourhoods undergo significant development, small local businesses are often priced out of the area due to higher retail rents.To encourage the retention and development of new small businesses, we propose the City expand the food cart program to include businesses and services. These neighbourhood-oriented mobile businesses could include retail shops for clothing, books, or local produce, or repair services for bicycles, small appliances or electronic items. Mobile services could also provide interim public services. For example until a neighbourhood library is built, a bookmobile could temporary provide partial library services.

Outdoor Open Space

We propose encouraging the provision of outdoor open space through changes in zoning regulations that would support wider building set backs, and by creating pedestrian zones where small streets or alleys intersect with busy commercial arterial roads. Locating mobile businesses adjacent to these outdoor open spaces would allow for increased foot traffic around the businesses and help animate the space.

Power and Water Supply

Currently most food carts and temporary outdoor events rely on gas generators for power. To reduce the noise and air pollution, we propose combining the parking meter with a BC Hydro smart meter and a power outlet. Businesses or organizations with an account could swipe a card and access power on a pay- as-you-go basis. A similar metered device could also provide access to water.

Typical Sites

Neighbourhood
-LocalSocial is intended for established neighbourhoods which will undergo significant changes in the next thirty years.
-Connect open spaces with existing street networks (i.e. no dead end plazas).

Street
-LocalSocial is intended to be located on commercial strips. Often commercial zones are perceived as the “heart” of a community and are the ideal place to situate microhubs for neighbourhood activity.
-To accommodate mobile business in parking lanes, locate LocalSocial sites on wide roads.

Block
-Create LocalSocial sites where a lane or small street intersects with a commercial street. If adjacent lots are amalgamated and developed, seek increased sideyard setbacks to increase the area of the open space.
-Create mid-block pedestrian passageways between larger new developments that connect the commercial street through to the rear alley or the next block. Widen part of the passage to create an urban plaza.