False Creek South: It's near perfect, and it's mine - Vancouver Sun article by Daphne Bramham

Forty years ago, Stanley facilitated the community engagement for many neighbourhoods in Vancouver.  Two of these places were formerly devoted to cars:  Robson Square used to be a huge parking lot, and False Creek was a "car graveyard".  His data revealed that ordinary citizens preferred to turn these areas into car-free spaces.   Daphne Bramham interviews Stanley in the Vancouver Sun:


"It’s hard to believe that not that long ago serious consideration was given to filling in False Creek and paving it over with homes and roads.  Architect Stanley King was among the first to challenge that idea and to imagine a residential community with a public market as its centrepiece built along the creek’s south shore on derelict industrial land..."Read more: False Creek South: It's near perfect, and it's mine - Vancouver Sun article by Daphne Branham

Co-design Demo at the Viva Vancouver Street Party

There will be Brazilian martial arts, dance food and... co-design! Click on the image below to get the schedule.  photos of event here.

crowdsourcing

I attended the lecture on Crowdsourced Cities conducted by SFU.  Lukas Biewald of Crowdflower explained the background and trends in crowdsourcing, Darin Dinsmore of Crowdbrite showed how an international competition led to innovation in design., and Colleen Hardwick of PlaceSpeak demonstrated the use of pioneering software for location-based community consultation.

Each speaker spoke of their innovative use of the computer to reach people to collect many human judgements on planning issue. The large numbers of opinions, and the speedy gathering of them, were seen as advantages over traditional methods of public design dialogue.

Plan-It Earth, planned by youth for youth

200 people were in attendance at Plan -it Earth 2011 on April 15th.  This event enabled 120 youth to draw, write and describe their sustainable region.  Planned by a core group of five dedicated youth and an action team of about 30 students, all from Churchill, Prince of Wales, St. Pats and Kitsilano Secondaries. Participants came from throughout Vancouver, and we warmly welcomed the presence of Windermere Secondary and Magee Secondary youth leadership groups. Students from David Lloyd George Elementary attended the Children's program.  Plan-it earth was a collaboration of Vancouver youth with a passion for the environment.  This event was hosted once again by Prince of Wales Secondary.  Thanks  PW admin team!

We are very grateful for support from Bruce Ford and Vanessa Lee (Metro Vancouver); from Amanda Mitchell (the City of Vancouver); from Kevin Millsip, (sustainability coordinator, VSB)  and Stanley King from the Co-Design Group who donated facilitation services.  We accepted funding, with thanks from  Architecture Canada: The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Vancouver Foundation Youth Philanthropy Council, and the Vancouver School Board through Kevin Millsip's project eco-logo contest.

Tesicca, youth co-design artist, plan-it earth core team

day in the life of a sustainable region

day in the life graffiti wall

Stanley King, The Co-Design Group, and Architecture Canada (RAIC) representative

thoughts on David Owen's Lecture: Why Manhattan is the Greenest City in North America

Co-design attended David Owen's lecture in Vancouver.  A summary of Owen's ideas can be found in his blog here, and in the New Yorker article here.  Owen argues that dense urban centres are an effective alternative to sprawl for preserving farmland and ecological habitats.  And  "living smaller, closer, driving less" reduces our carbon footprint.  While this is true, I'm not convinced that density on the scale of NYC is a green solution.   

If high-density urban centres preserve earth's wilderness and farmland by virtue of avoidance, then this solution might be even more green than NYC:  

Moon base Alpha

Density is an efficient solution but is it ecological?  Ecological systems are self supporting. Take into consideration the following factors: living plants and animals forming the food source, waste absorbed by the landscape;  inhabitant's psychological need for light and green space...  If we now draw a radius from NYC , what would be the extent of the circle?

Training youth co-design artists for Plan-it Earth

Youth from five different Vancouver Schools are training to be co-design artists for the Plan-it Earth conference on April 15th.  Planned by youth, for youth, registration started last week. Today's training session was at Granville Island.  They learned:  how to draw people in a one and two point perspective;  marker techniques on vellum paper; and how to draw foliage quickly.  First steps in learning co-design dialogue techniques from Stanley King.

Stanley knows the art of gentle crit

youth led planning conference for our sustainable region

Plan-it Earth 2011:  Vancouver youth from Prince of Wales Secondary, Churchill, Kits, St. Pats are organizing this youth conference again to draw describe, film their sustainable region and present it to city planners.   it will be similar to Plan-it Earth 2010.   The co-design drawings from Plan-it Earth 2010 were displayed at last fall's Talk Green To Us public event at Woodwards.

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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The Urban Tsunami

Gapminder's mild mannered Hans Rosling, demonstrates the  scary world trend towards urbanization. It's pretty hard to miss in his unveiling of the "truth through statistics". Can we, as a species, design ourselves out of needing more than one earth?   The ecological challenges due to urbanization requires  an unprecedented collaborative effort from architects, engineers, landscape architects -  a charrette of epic proportions.  It's also an educational challenge for teachers to prepare our youth for the future.
The design solution lies not in buildings, energy efficient cars, gadgets, but the redesign and re-imagining of a life.

Jan Gehl Lecture

Stanley attended the Jan Gehl lecture and found a great connection to co-design. 

His theme was the long lack of human scale and life in the architectural and planning design processes, how architects since the 60’s have been anti-people (as a newly graduated architect he had to change because his girl friend, later his wife, was a psychologist and asked him, “Why do architects hate people?”) Planners, he said, have for years been sweet on the car and now must be sweet on people, and particularly, sweet on cyclists.

He said they now have a problem of bicycle congestion in Copenhagen and must push bike-lanes into more car-lanes. Research shows that for every kilometre bicycled the city gains 25c, and for every kilometre car travelled the city loses 10c. And when New York Times Square went pedestrian the merchants around increased turn-over by 71%. Great stuff.
 - Stan


See a video of Jan Gehl here: select the photo below: