[caption id="attachment_9641" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Walking the streets of Marpole. Photo courtesy of Ren Thomas."][/caption] [Editor's Note: We are happy to present the first of a three InDepth Features covering a trio of special Jane's Walk neighbourhood tours around Marpole, Grandview-Woodland, and the West End. These were organized as a unique partnership between the City of Vancouver, Museum of Vancouver and Spacing Vancouver, in light of the ongoing Community Plan process currently happening in each important district. This will be followed by podcasts of the tour, if you missed the Walks, and a final dialogue event on June 19th. Stay tuned for more information.] This year, the City of Vancouver will be starting community plans for three neighbourhoods: Marpole, the West End and Grandview-Woodlands. In addition to the usual open houses and community meetings, the City has been using its new Public Engagement Division (within its Communications Department) in innovative outreach. On May 6th the City, Museum of Vancouver, and Spacing Vancouver partnered with local residents and designers to hold walking tours of the three neighbourhoods as part of Jane’s Walk. The Marpole walk was hosted by landscape architect and urban designer Margot Long, and local resident Jo-Anne Pringle. Lil Ronalds, the City planner working on the Marpole plan, and City Councillors Heather Deal and George Affleck also attended. [caption id="attachment_9643" align="alignright" width="360" caption="Some of the residential streets within Marpole have significant tree canopies. Photo courtesy of Ren Thomas."][/caption] One of the oldest neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Marpole is economically and socially diverse. Primarily a residential neighbourhood, it is bounded by 59th Avenue, Ontario Street, the Fraser River and Granville Street. This massive area is intersected by several major arterials—including Oak Street, 70th Avenue, and Marine Drive—which contribute commercial and industrial land uses, but have also led to physical and social barriers within the neighbourhood. The legacy of streetcar routes and a branch rail line from Steveston to Vancouver are also evident in the existing land use and street patterns: the Metro Theatre being the last reminder of a thriving commercial hub generated by the interurban rail line.

  “When have you had your most engaged life experience?” asked Janet Moore and Duane Elverum. A rapt audience sat in silence for ten seconds. “No one ever says they had their most engaged experience in a classroom, or at a computer,” Elverum said. “Typically it's when they've been connecting their passion with their work, often it's outside, they're often sharing a struggle with others, working with people to accomplish something they couldn't otherwise.” Two years ago Moore, Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University's Centre for Dialogue, and Elverum, Assistant Professor in design at Emily Carr University, asked this question at a Vancouver Design Nerd Jam in Vancouver. They envisioned a collaboration between the City of Vancouver and postsecondary students, allowing students to work on long-term real-world projects. The idea quickly gained traction at the City, which had just launched its Greenest City 2020 Action Plan. Greenest City Planner Lindsay Cole asked Moore and Elverum to present their idea to the Mayor's panel. With strong support from the Greenest City team, CityStudio was launched in September 2011.

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.

Editors: Andrew L. Dannenberg, Howard Frumkin, and Richard J. Jackson (Island Press, 2011) Real estate agents are known for using many tricks to sell a house.  But perhaps no line could ever be as enticing as ‘live here and you will live longer’.  This is the principle on which the book Making Healthy Places is based – that it is possible to plan and design communities which improve the health of residents.  Conversely, it is possible, and some would say easier, to plan and design communities which actively worsen the health of residents. This link between city planning and public health is nothing new and was particularly prominent during the Victorian age when many urban planning interventions aimed to tackle the worsening health conditions of industrialized cities and towns.  Ebenezer Howard's famous Garden City Movement set out to create a utopian settlement where the clean air and water could overcome the health concerns of the time.  And more recently the urban renewal projects of the 1960s were often couched in terms of eliminating overcrowding and the associated negative health conditions of city dwellers.

[caption id="attachment_3484" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Thank you to Pakalakamino on Flickr for the source photo. "][/caption] A plethora of perambulating peripatetics and other pedestrians descended on Vancouver at the beginning of October to madly rush through 200 presentations from twenty countries in just three short days. It overlapped both CanU, which I wrote about last week, and a Spacing Vancouver contributors meeting at the same time, and my head has only just stopped spinning from the experience. By the second night, as I struggled valiantly with an avalanche of bright pink balloons alongside Spacing's national editor and local podcaster (true story - photo from another group), I felt the pressure of wanting to attend every single session close in with a rosy, claustrophobic haze. The simultaneously happy and sad reality was that it was simply impossible for anyone to take in all the interdisciplinary opportunities on offer - if it were, I'd still be there, two weeks later, trying to get my fill. Presentations in the breakout sessions ranged from the vague-but-feel-good advocacy victory video to data heavy analysis, and the variety was very much appreciated, if it did make for some tough choices. Note to cycling advocates looking forward to Velo-City 2012: practice your power-walking and learn to be in multiple places at once!

[caption id="attachment_3265" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="   Source photos are from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool."][/caption] If this article is the first you've heard of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, you're not alone. Its board is a veritable who's who of the field, however, boasting centuries of experience in the public and private sectors - Vancouver's Director of City Planning, Brent Toderian, serves as President and Toronto's Director of Urban Design, Robert Freedman, is Chair. Its relatively low profile is a conscious choice as it builds up its organizational capacity before broadening its base; last weekend's meeting in Vancouver was only its third annual gathering, and the agenda revolved around finalizing a draft charter and setting up working committees. The group is, at this point, essentially invite-only, though they happily opened their doors to Spacing Media. Several keynotes and a variety of panel sessions started off the conference like many others. Among the highlights were Gordon Price's scathing analysis of the suburban predicament - motordom, it seems, is now his preferred term - and Pamela Blais' critique of the misdirected financial incentives that created that result - perverse cities, or pervurbia for short, in her parlance. The weekends' main attraction for Spacing was, however, the insider's view of this nascent alliance of urbanist giants.

Following the UN declaration in 2008 that the majority of people now live in cities, there has been an explosion of city-themed commentary in magazines, newspapers and books.  The Economist and The Walrus have both run notable urban-themed issues and now Scientific American has followed the lead and dedicated the September 2011 issue to cities.  These media outlets have capitalized on the broad scope that city analysis permits - allowing musings on geography, sociology, architecture and governance to name a few.  There is also a realization, stressed in the Scientific American feature, that cities are the future. Not too long ago cities were characterized by urban decay, riots and white flight to the suburbs, whereas they can now embody economic powerhouses that drive innovation.  City commentary also focuses on the growing 'green' agenda, where by virtue of having a smaller carbon footprint urban dwellers can provide lessons for responding to climate change.  It is in this context that Scientific American praises the positive role of cities and calls for public policy to provide greater support to our growing cities.  Though the magazine provides 11 separate articles, I focus on a couple of the key themes below.

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