Brent Toderian, our City Planner, is great at circulating items of interest, some of which he writes and posts. Let me share a few:
Brent does a nice summary of the re:CONNECT competition for Planetizen: “And the Winners are…”: re:CONNECT Stand-outs Announced! – and includes a lot of helpful illustrations. Here’s also the Vancouver Courier’s coverage.
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The video of Toderian’s speech on November 28 to the Urban Development Institute on issues relating to affordability, city planning, CACs, architecture and housing supply.
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Unfortunately you have to follow along with the slide show reproduced here – but in truth you’ll get a pretty good sense of the major points by checking out the sequence of images.
He does mention in his talk that the City is not, as rumoured, pulling back from laneway housing. Indeed, it’s encouraging more of ’em. Brent sends along this piece from Canadian Architect by Matthew Soules:
It would seem then that the greatest potential of laneway housing is not so much in the realm of densification, but rather to offer a heightened metropolitan experience to largely suburban areas of the city that are resistant to change. The foregrounding of the lane could offer an experiential thickening of the city at large.
From this vantage point, the first crop of laneway housing doesn’t offer as much as it could. How future projects enrich the lane by truly treating it as a front through direct engagement so that the space of the lane fully enters the foreground of the city remains the as-of-yet unrealized potential of Vancouver’s by-law.
Every time I read pronouncements from the movers and shakers in the city political and bureaucratic landscape, I wonder, do these people even know that the city of Vancouver extends east of Main street and south of Broadway? The majority of residents don’t actually reside in the downtown peninsula or False Creek – how about putting a bit of energy and money into making the city livable for those of us who can’t afford to live inside the increasingly walled-off yuppie centre? We actually pay taxes too, it would be nice to see those dollars occasionally spent in our neighbourhoods too.
remarkably enough, the picture featuring this post is used with basically the same caption in both the Brent Toderian article and my post.
You will have recognized in my post a a rather sarcatsic tone, but the gentle reader will have eventually more difficulties to recognize the very subtle sense of humor from Toderian:
obviously this picture speaks more of the Geoff Meggs’ court than of the strength of the entry:
Negating the viaducts structure in a Magritte style treatment with a Magritte sky is to scream: : “I don’t want to see those mighty Viaducts! give me something else to see”…
Message reinforced by the graffiti’s, more especially the apropos chosen Bansky’s graffiti
Notice that the text of this entry (72) is mentioning the connection of Chinatown and Gastown with FalseCreek: it is the only winning entry mentioning that…It was not necessarily giving the convincing keys to achieve that, but as amply demonstrated by the choice of the winners, “re:connect” was the least of the concern of the Geoff Meggs’ court