Ray Spaxman heartily recommends this visionary work by the students of UBC’s Urban Studio in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Partly because “it’s important that we have a variety of ideas about what this city might be in 50 years time.” And partly because “the City seems unwilling to develop its own ideas.” Ouch.
I love this stuff, and so glad the students are producing these images. Will there be a poster-session somewhere, or displays of these visions in the streets this summer? Today’s children of SUV-drivers need to be shown how beautiful streetcars and stormwater preparations can look.
This is such a wonderful project, and the images are fantastic! It gives me great hope for a future that isn’t completely auto-centric. @Reverend Twowheeler – I agree, I’d love to see (and persuade friends and family to go see) some boards/posters of the final result.
The project looks interesting!
I’m not sure who Ray Spaxman is, but he clearly hasn’t seen this web site: http://vancouver.ca/projects.htm .
@ Agustin:
A bit on Ray Spaxman:
He’s our city’s former director of planning (1973 to 1989) and was in charge when the freeway plan was thankfully rejected by the TEAM administration. He now runs a planning consultancy and signed a letter with Larry Beasley and others this week to oppose proposed building height increases in the Downtown Eastside. There is also a street named in his honour in the Southeast False Creek/ Olympic Village development.
I’m sure others, including Mr. Price, could add much, much more.
Thanks!
It is certainly an interesting exercise with nice rendering (and illustration like burning streetcar under Burrard bridge) . I have read this sentence about Kingsway
“A low mix and number of businesses here
does not allow locals to work locally forcing
people to travel elsewhere for work.”
which in my opinion is summing up the main omission of the study.
What makes a city economically efficient (and attractive) ?
and then, how to conciliate the sustainability goal and economic efficiency/attractiveness?
That said, I appreciate the work of the students which provide an interesting viewpoint.
Voony’s point is good and I’d love to read any papers or see projects that present that image.
In my mind, Vancouver’s 2050 fruit is high-speed-railed up from California where the sun shines enough, with water piped back down; veg for Vancouver is still grown in the burbs and some in the city on rooftops and in parks; electricity is still zapped down from the north of the province; biogas for winter heating comes from our digested foodscraps and poop.
Foreign currency could still be earned for the province through digging up ingredients for electronics (maybe to manufactured here by clever robots: our labor’s unlikely to ever be cheap enough to do that), through writing software and licensing hardware innovations (cleantech for example).
Otherwise a lot of the economy could be local service swapping. Teaching for plumbing; for haircuts for electrical work. It needn’t be direct bartering/swapping, but presumably sustainability begets uberlocalism.
(Not sure I like or agree with that final paragraph, I’m just putting it out there for controversy. As I say, please point me to more authoritative discussion on this.)
Of course, predicting the economic mix of 2050 today is as foolish as predicting the economy of 2000 in 1960.