ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA is hosting VIENNA – VANCOUVER: URBAN TECHNOLOGIES – SMART CITIES
Panel Discussion & Networking Event
Angelika Winkler, Deputy Director of the Urban Planning and Development Department of the City of Vienna and a delegation of Austrian companies from the sustainable urban development industry.
Ms. Winkler will be giving a presentation: Vienna – a question of quality of life
Date: October 22, 2013
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Segal Graduate Building, Simon Fraser University
500 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC
Map: www.sfu.ca/mecs/segal+school/location.html
Kindly rsvp by Thursday, October 17 to Helene Perndl at vancouver@advantageaustria.org
Just left them. They are a nice small group but not in planning/urban design. More cabke car transportation! Cheers
Too bad they didn’t convince anyone to put in the SFU cable car then!
Did anyone go see this? I think Vienna has a lot of good models to show Vancouver, would Vancouver be interested.
Such as no highrises ? Sachertorte and Apfelkuchen ? Trams ? Balanced budgets ?
The issue with European cities is that they are all 500+ years old, built well before cars, designed for walking people with the odd horse and horsecarts to transport goods. North America on the other hand was built with the elevator and the car in mind. Tough / very slow to rebuild now to European levels of non-elevator 5-6 story buildings and narrow walkable streets. London, for example had so much traffic between Kings Cross and Paddington train stations that a subway was built in 1863, over 150+ years ago when Vancouver barely existed (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Railway )
Such as a city which acts as a developer, and so despite being an attractive and green and #1 city, located by the water, next to mountains, with all the superlatives Vancouver could hope for, still is also able to be an affordable city. Also, much of the city certainly isn’t 500 years old. Most of every European city isn’t 500 years old. You know this Thomas.
It strikes me that there isn’t much difference between 3-4 story Kits and 5-6 story in much of Vienna, that part of Kits used to be single family zone, so change was able to happen, it just stopped in the 70s.