Those are the words of Jim Green, who, along with Larry Beasley, is giving Globe columnist Hadani Ditmars a tour of the land affected by the Viaducts – and a description of their proposal for its transformation. Hadani sent along a teaser for tomorrow’s piece in The Globe – but you can get it here right now.
Mr. Beasley and Mr. Green teamed up with architect Norm Hotson and landscape architect Margot Long and entered the city’s design competition that welcomed all proposals from re-purposing to total elimination. They applied for funding from Concord Pacific to do a comprehensive proposal and recently won the jury and people’s
choice award for their plan.
Touring with these two veterans of the civic scene, one has the impression that their plan for opening up the area would literally unlock the very heart of the city – and connect key arterial neighbourhoods that would otherwise remain isolated.
I don’t like being cynical but this is one of those – “plans in the works funded by the major developer in the area that won an unofficial competition over 100s of options that is now being sold to us by the Globe and Mail and other persons-not-named”.
There is no alternate – it’s being planned behind-the-scenes – before the DTES Local Area Plan is in place or the Social Impact Study is completed or a new Director of Planning is on board or even the Mayor’s Task force on affordable housing has given a report.
It’s a fait accompli and I wonder why I’m cynical.
Add me to the list of self-claimed urbanists that think the current council has it’s mind made up and is looking at this issue at the micro level and ignoring the macro level completely. The viaducts can be working with and around just like Granville Island, the BIG proposal for the North end of the Granville bridge, the parks board office under the South end of Cambie st bridge, the playground under the north end… There are so many uses that can be accommodated under them while also building around them but they are not being looked at. Heck just look to the West and see Rogers Arena, the Aquilini proposals, the Costco/Spectrum complex. Options exist.
yes, there is lot of way to accommodate the viaducts ( see for example http://voony.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/a-viaduct-in-paris/ ), and Aquilini proposal demonstrates it is not impeding development, but the developers want more from city hall, and Vision is here to please heir agenda.:
The Beasley/Green proposal illustrated above build even more barriers and destroy remaining connection (the transforming of Dunsmuir in a typical suburban cul de sac being not of the least), all that toward the privatization of the Seawall to the benefit of few real estate investors.
either we proceed forward with this Vancouver resort vision,or we decide that Vancouver is foremost a city and must be first vibrant, creative, economically sustainable, alive….and accessible!
Green is right: it is “Vancouver’s defining moment”…
May Vancouverite wake-up!
And how is this proposal going to get around the newly implemented view cones from Olympic Plaza? Anything built in the area will have to be decidedly low-rise.
See pics here:
http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110120/documents/penv5.pdf
Good link “Guest”: Unless, the competition jury was blatantly incompetent; what can’t be ruled out; it couldn’t have ignored this view cone policy (the competition brief was expressly stressing the respect of it). Instead, the jury to express its deepest contempt of this policy, has chosen to reward the submission “f…” it.
Nice link, Voony and good points. The viaduct removal topic was raised near the end of my term on the Vancouver Planning Commission (in 2008). The general consensus then was build under/over them. We were pushing adaptive reuse as our mandate. The staff report on the viaducts says they have another 45 years of life in them. Just imagine the waste if we knocked them down and hauled the rubble out to a landfill.
Back to the drawing board, I say.
I find the Viaducts very useful. The skateboard park underneath is well used and has drastically reduced the damage from skateboard tricks being done on buildings. The bike lane on the Dunsmuir viaduct is amazing.
Now, there presently are some “ugly” things under parts of them but they don’t have to be there or they can be there but be made nicer looking.
While I’m interested in many of the things that cities in North America are now doing to make them more people oriented, and I support that, in this case the Viaducts are pretty nice to have. And why not have a legacy of the past? In the future when highways are no longer made within cities anywhere, we’ll have an example to show people what they were like.