Generations of planners met at the Canadian Institute of Planners conference last week. You may not know all of them who are captured below, but as a Vancouverite, you live in the city they helped shape.
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Left to right: Michael White, Ken Denike, Larry Beasley, Ann McAfee, Ken Cameron
[Thanks to Ken Denike and Ken Cameron.]
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UPDATE: Novae Res Urbis just published their summary of the CIP conference session with Larry Beasley and Ann McAfee (the first time the two co-directors of Planning had appeared together since retirement), discussing Vancouverism:
A focus on design, clear urban principles, community engagement and its ability to create wealth are what makes Vancouverism work in other cities around the world, Vancouver’s former co-directors of planning said last week. … they have been “like Johnny Appleseed, going around the world spreading Vancouverism,” which has worked better in some places than in others.
They have found that applying Vancouverism elsewhere involves guidelines and circumstances, rather than simply transplanting the tower-podium and other things that have worked here.
“I find there is a lot of crazy exporting of — quote unquote —Vancouverism,” Beasley said. “There is a town in China that has Vancouver in it. It looks like it, smells like it, tastes like it, but no one likes it because there’s nothing in it Chinese people would like. “In Dubai there’s an area that has what they call the False Creek waterfront, except it isn’t. What’s often worried me about the conversation, and I’ve seen all kinds of people making presentations, is this tendency to want to take solutions that worked in Vancouver and were proven with their robustness and just try to deliver them whole cloth somewhere else.
“It doesn’t work. It never works.” Beasley said he thinks the principles work. “but it means that you have to walk through with people, discuss with people, have a creative process with people on their terms and their culture and their way, what happens with the principles — how many of them are relevant, what’s the priority of those principles, which change from place to place all the time.
Much more at NRU Vancouver – info here.
