Finding a place to sit on Robson Street can be tricky, especially when the sidewalks are overflowing with people. With the lines of buildings fixed, it can be a challenge to find space for public seating. Yet just off to the side is underutilized space waiting to be recognised as an opportunity for community design. People enjoy walking along Robson to be seen while out for a stroll, some never knowing that one block down Bute is a quiet park block tucked into the West End's network of traffic calming. The West End mini-parks are paved traffic calmers, often with plantings, serving as meeting or resting hubs.

Imagine arriving to work at a downtown historic building, where your workspace has high ceilings, brick walls, and huge windows. You can meet with clients or have informal discussions with colleagues working in industries as diverse as software development, photography and green building; the rest of the time you work at your own desk or a hot desk space. Need to develop new marketing strategies for your fledgling business or learn strategies to foster social change? Just sign up for one of the many workshops offered at the office. HiVE Vancouver is an innovative shared workspace that fosters individuals and organizations in the sustainability and creative sectors. It’s part of a growing trend worldwide: technological developments have made working in virtual space common, and doing consulting work for multiple clients has become a widespread practice as organizations try to keep their costs down. But for small start-ups, non-profits and individual consultants, trying to find affordable office space has become increasingly difficult. Shared spaces mean shared amenities (like meeting rooms, phones and kitchens), a real plus for those that can’t spring for the overhead costs of their own offices. HiVE members have a choice of a dedicated workspace (starting at $475/month) or a hot desk space (monthly plans range from $25/month for five hours to $350/month for unlimited hours). As a non-profit, HiVE uses its member fees to lease and improve the space. But the HiVe is about more than just sharing space: members are “a community of change-makers” who thrive on collaboration, fun, diversity and social responsibility. HiVE Vancouver modeled itself after Toronto's Centre for Social Innovation, which opened in 2004 with the idea that collaboration on the complex problems facing society could produce better solutions. The Centre's founders merged the ideas of co-location (different organizations merely sharing space), community hubs (shared spaces providing direct services to their members such as job training and workshops) and social innovation. Toronto's Centre is an affiliate of the Hub Network, a social enterprise working across 30 cities and 5 continents.

When Spacing made its formal debut in Vancouver this June, the city's new urban generation was able to make good use of the bar on one side of the room and the city's transportation planning team on the other. The unusual juxtaposition worked all the better because the city's engineers and planners were there to talk about the same thing everyone else was: building a transportation system to enable the kind of city we want to live in. That discussion continues until the end of the month with preliminary public consultation, including a survey, for Vancouver's new long-range transportation plan. Brent Toderian, Director of City Planning, spoke of moving "beyond how people move in space, to how people can 'be' in space," summing up the latest step forward that Transportation 2040 seems to represent. Vancouver has developed quite the reputation for its brand of city-building, but it took a legendary planning effort and a realignment of priorities to produce the city we enjoy today. It also took a leap of faith.

[caption id="attachment_11826" align="alignleft" width="290" caption="Image courtesy of the UBC LARC502B class"][/caption] This is the second part of a series - in tandem with In Focus: The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts photo essay - looking at the past, present and future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts. By Brian Gould and Erick Villagomez, re:place Magazine

[caption id="attachment_11901" align="alignleft" width="290" caption="Image of Urban Pulse proposal for Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts. Courtesy of UBC's LARC502B Landscape Architecture studio class."][/caption] This is the third and final part of a series - in tandem with In Focus photo essays - looking at the past, present and future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts. By Brian Gould and Erick Villagomez, re:place Magazine