Project BUG next step

Project BUG, organized by Grandview Woodland Food Connection moved into the next design stage today.  Flickr set of photos here.  Students examined the data gathered from the community input.  All the co-design drawings were rated by the community:  Students, parents, teachers and community members had an opportunity to vote on their desired features.  Erin, from SCARP, facilitated a session where groups of students walked through the site and marked their ideas on a plan.  The purpose of the session was to synthesize all the ideas into a plan for the three garden sites.  Dolores Altin, a landscape architect from Evergreen Learning Grounds,  gave students a presentation on food security and garden design.  She showed examples of school food gardens in BC, and emphasized that design of a space is an on-going process.  Followup to this, (update, Oct 2011): The Build party occurred  Fall of 2011

all the features of the drawing were rated "I love it, go for it", "needs more designing" or "this belongs elsewhere".  Today, students considered the features that received a high rating from the community.

Dolores discussing priorities for the design

students learn strategies for overcoming bureaucratic hurdles

Erin displaying the plan for the site

Erin demonstrates a shadow study for the garden site

Stanley facilitates discussion of design ideas in one group during the site walk: "Ask yourself what would you be doing here?"

UBC SCARP community engagement and "neighbourliness"

This video summarizes a design event focused on co-designing the future of the Britannia Centre. Facilitated by Maged Sembel's classes from UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning.  In part, it features the co-design work of Stanley King. 

Note the richness of citizen ideas as partcipants express a desire for an integrated  neighbourhood of  diversity, creativity, and affordable living.  Co-design images emerge showing pedestrian spaces for every age group, and activities relating to art, food security and community. 

At the end of the video, a cameo of Ray Spaxman, former director of planning for the City of Vancouver, and a champion of "neighbourliness":

"Ray Spaxman was recruited as city planner by Vancouver's leadership in 1973, when the public was in full flight from the excesses of modernism and out-of-control development.  Only a decade and a half previously, the tallest building in the West End was the Sylvia Hotel. ("Dine in the Sky" said the sign on the roof.) And not many people thought several hundred concrete slabs had really improved our urban ambience all that much.  

Spaxman was responsible for changing the way planning and development was done in this city -- and he summed it up in one word: "neighbourliness." A building had to be respectful of its neighbours, and of the citizens on the street.  

Buildings, in other words, had to be more than sculptural objects on vacant plazas -- "pigs in space," as some planners call them. It didn't matter how "iconic" a building was if it selfishly ignored the urban environment in which it dwelt."

        

 -- Gordon Price, "It Takes One Icon to Know Another", Vancouver Sun, Web.


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