Ray Spaxman received 25 responses to his email and PT post on “The Telus Case.”
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Two comments resonated with me particularly as good ones for future debates. One suggested that we should beware our pursuit of guidelines and regs for it may contribute to what some people see as blandness. Another said that we should not get too comfortable with Vancouver for it lacks a true sense of city scale urban design and the creation of place like mature city’s have.
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Response. Every time I go down Seymour or Richards I feel incensed when I see these ugly “boxes” hanging over the street blocking views, sunlight, space – public space – in fact it sort of stuns me. How could this be approved with any sense of public interest? So thank you Ray, for presenting your views on this.
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Response. I’ve had another look at the Telus overhang,and reserve judgement till the development is completed and landscaped..
Response. Looking at the City’s zoning map, there are well north of 500 CD-1 Comprehensive Development Zone sites, and counting. In fact the former DD area of the downtown peninsula is getting close to 50 percent purple (CD-1), and it’s more than 50 percent CD-1 if you include all the waterfront areas, but excluding the West End and heritage districts. Soon ‘purple’ will be the dominant zone, each one representing an opportunistic, site-specific development deal. So much for comprehensive planning.
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Response. All good questions, Ray. Unfortunately, the three people most in a position to answer most of them will never respond publicly – the developer, the architect and the lead planner.
BTW, I recently saw a similar projection of private space over the sidewalk (only) in Edmonton, and the staff member involved was quite proud of it.
Also, I notice in our “sister” cities to the south of us that much more limited private projections like bay windows, cornices and even balconies are allowed to encroach over public space. This includes Seattle, Portland and of course, San Francisco. I support these building attributes, which used to be part of Vancouver’s building DNA, way back in the day.
WRT the Telus case, I am quite nervous about the precedent of this massive intervention into public space, without any discernible public benefit or use. And yes, further shading our already dark downtown streets forever is not a desirable prospect to me.
Cheers, and thanks for carrying on the good fight
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Response. Zowie – you are on a roll! Excellent points Ray. You have a workshop agenda with your 10 points
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Response. This history is important for us to review and to compare the context of the change that took place at that time with the context of change that is taking place today, the further change that perhaps is overdue but not taking place, and that longer term change– change that we must manage but can only be effective in doing so if we have some consensus.
One of your points made me pause and really think. You said: “it is always more attractive to be confident, convinced and convincing, than to be reflective about about complexity and uncertainty”. We do need reflection about the complexity and uncertainty of understanding and managing future change.
I fear we lack an appropriate forum and/or process for that reflection. Unfortunately, the new social media aren’t good channels/tools for deeper reflection. They facilitate people taking and advancing positions, instead of helping identify interests and finding common ground.
I wish our local academic institutions played a more influential and relevant role in this.
Thank you for your efforts to stimulate us to think and discuss in an informed way these important considerations.
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Response. After reading your latest AYC on Safdie and Ole Scheeren and other urban design topics, I would like to put in my two cents worth as I had the first hand opportunity to experience these and other mega projects in Singapore.
First of all, while I have utmost respect for the skills of these talented architects, I find it totally ironic to read the words and then experience the buildings. Their words and buildings just don’t jive.
I purposely stayed at Safdie’s Marina Sands complex in Singapore (three tall skyscrapers caped with a giant swimming pool on top), I failed to understand how he could complain about the state of our skyscrapers and privatization of public spaces is creating cities that are “not worthy of our civilization” then go on to build that completely private mega project.
I also visited Ole Scheeren’s Interlace project. It looked exciting in the published renderings, but in reality, it is very alienating and overbearing because it is gated and privatized for the privileged few. There is another one called Reflections by Daniel Libeskind in the same category. (Please Google Daniel Libeskind Reflections Singapore.)
For all the talk about public spaces, these are all heavily guarded and gated, completely self centred without regard to connectivity. The public is not allowed without special permission. I am sure you have seen the photo composite by OMA (I believe under the direction of Ole Scheeren) showing that iconic buildings alone does not make a city or even a good skyline. Image attached. Shanghai Pudong and Dubai are living examples.
I have always been a fan of “Architecture without Architects”, expand that, how about “Cities without Planners”? Most of the cities and towns that we all admire are not designed under a single grand plan or by a single Planner. They evolved through time.
Perhaps the real problem is that for the first time in history, we can no longer fully manage/comprehend the scale of our technological innovations. Everything is possible, instantaneous and mega. Every civilization before us have technological limitations, be it wood or stone. Because of that, they maintain a human scale. A Roman city is scaled up from dimensioned masonry, Japanese and Chinese cities are scaled up from dimensioned timber.
We now have materials that have no modular scale and we can build to almost any size and height. We build graph paper cities determined by utilities, automobiles, and commerce.
Great works of art are by artists, not by legislation or regulations. Maybe there will never be a perfect set of “planning tools”. Perhaps we should hope for perfect “planners.”
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Response So here is how I see it. Now we don’t need to take over City Hall. We can create community around our common interests as a community.
We can’t function without the internet so we might as well learn how to function with it, and learn how to use this communication system in our theatre of the new world to communicate and create connections and community with one another to create the kind of community we want to be part of and the kind of city we want to live in.
We create our experience and our experience creates us. We create our environment and our environment creates us. We create with our experience, consciously or unconsciously. It is how we evolve.
We can create a community around interests we have community or agreement on and we can create as a community around ideas and creative enterprise that contribute to interests we have in common as individuals, as communities, and as a community.
We can not afford to leave our future in the hands of a handful of decision makers. This may, or may not, have worked for us in the past but it is not going to work for us for our future.
Life is a creative experience. Life is a creative experience wherever random chance finds us and wherever conscious or unconscious choice has taken us. We create with our experience.
What have we learned from our creative experience of life, – our interaction with our experience, – our reaction to our experiences, – our responses to our experiences, – our contribution to creating our experience, – and to our appreciation of our experiences. What can we learn about creating with our experience, – creating with our nature, – creating with our culture? What can we learn that could contribute to accelerating our creative and cultural evolution as a community?
What can we learn about and from one another about our creative experience, and from creating our experiences with one another, – creating as a community?
What can we learn about creating community around creating a future for our common resources, – and our creative resources?
What can we learn about our ability to create community around our interest in creating community, – and creating a community that works for everyone?
What can we learn about creating an environment to improve our ability to create community and what contributes to our ability to create community and what militates against our ability to create community?
Where do we want to focus our creative attention, our creative energy, our creative resources, and our creative enterprise?
Learning how to create community is where I would invest.
And learning how we create community around ideas which contribute to our common interests as a community, – and around opportunities for creative community enterprise.
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Response. (Only one person tried to deal wit the set of questions I had posed. I copy the questions and his responses.)
Here are some of the issues it has raised.
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1. Is it acceptable to you that the public realm, such as the public street right of ways, that accommodate our main municipal services, provide access for commercial, transit and private vehicles and people moving to and from a variety of destinations, provide space between increasingly dense building forms, and sun light and air circulation, and provide visual connections so we can recognise where we are and what is around us when we are in the public realm, and sometimes longer views of water or mountains – be interrupted by private development? (ABSOLUTELY NOT….this is the major problem Ray, but we both know, it is not just private development, but the “power” and influence of a company like Telus. ….just adds a couple stories for heavens sake. Every time I drive down Seymour or Richards, there is that BLOB sticking out in the street……..this is, in my humble view, a VERY DANGEROUS PRECEDENT!!)
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2. Is it a good precedent that has now been established by the City that any developer can ask the city to expand his development footprint to include the public realm? Presumably fairness in public policy would now be a consideration? .... YES
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3. Does the city have publicly discussed policies or guidelines that will guide the future use of street overhangs?
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4. Is it reasonable for other owners on Richards and Seymour, and perhaps other streets, to seek projections over the street? …YES, PRECEDENT IS ALREADY MADE!
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5. What price did the City establish for the air rights on Seymour and Richards? Perhaps these two major projections are for community use? .(ARE YOU KIDDING… NOT … THE SEYMOUR STREET SECTION…FLOORS ARE MEZZANINES)
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6. What say or rights ought adjacent neighbours to have when the public right of way they share in law is utilized in this way?…..(UH … LIKE NONE!!)
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7. Are continuous street frontages a valuable characteristic of our enjoyment of the city? (FOR SURE….VIEW CORRIDORS ARE ESTABLISHED BY PROPERTY LINES … NOT … BY NEGOTIATION!)
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8. Just as the highest stand-out building in town ought to express some special community function and pride, should similar criteria be set for buildings that stick out into the street? What sort of criteria would that be? Perhaps the City in anticipation of this issue already developed such criteria? DELETE SUCH CRITERIA!!)
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9. In our city, especially with its special climate, what consideration should be given to encroachments on access to sun and daylight?.(NONE)
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10. Ten issues should be enough to continue the discussion,. So the tenth one is one I have raised before. This is another of the increasingly ubiquitous Comprehensive Development zones. They are created to vary the normal zoning provisions on a site to establish much higher densities for the developer and significant Community Amenity Contributions to the city.
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Do we know where the next one will occur. Is there a policy that proposes where they would be so that everyone knows what to expect? Do we know what criteria is used to assess them? (Ray……………….I’d really like to know the REAL STORY on the decision to allow this frightful precedent … will we ever know… the CEO is a very wonderful and bright guy, obviously powerful enough to sway a really WEAK PLANNING DEPARTMENT! … EVERY TIME I SEE THESE “extensions” I AM TOTALLY OFFENDED!! And where the hell is the AIBC on this??)
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(I must say this last Response was my favourite.)
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You can imagine where Vancouver might fit in here.
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In terms of their physical presence, “projections” over streets are nothing new.
One merely has to look up the block to see the Bay Parkade bridge over Seymour Street.
Driving around Calgary, you’re sure to see many bridges as part of its Plus 15 system.
There’s also one across Richards at Harbour Centre.
There used to be one across the Telus block alley, but it was removed with demolition of the parkade.
And remember the massively wide bridge from the old Woodward’s to its former parkade? – its now replaced with a thinner version.
THE DIFFERENCE, of course, is that, even though those bridges serve private interests (typically connecting stores to parkades), they are largely publicly accessible – whereas the Telus boardrooms are not (even if you can spy into them).
If you accept the physical presence of the structure above the street
– is it only a question of public versus private interests?
There are many instances where the public right of way has been leased to private interests.
Restaurants in parks may come to mind, but they offer their services to the public.
The most obvious is for telecommunications conduits and facilities, as well as other utilities like Central Heat Distribution’s steam pipes, under city streets.
Likewise, many office and shopping complexes such as Pacific Centre and Vancouver Centre have revenue generating retail space located under City streets.
But again, those uses have [arguably] a public benefit.
Are there other uses of public lands [occupation of public space] for exclusively private purposes?
Guest – I am not aware of any similarly large and purely private encroachment – to use a technical term – into the public right of way as the Telus one.
PS – forgot to mention one of the biggest – the Law Courts hovering over Smithe St.
– but those arguments are largely aesthetic – the same issues associated with elevated, versus at-grade or underground rapid transit.
“those arguments” referring to the physical existence of structures hovering over streets – the Law Courts and transit, of course, fall into the public benefits side of things.
As someone in the development industry, I have been consistently flabbergasted that the City permitted these. In my experience, trying to negotiate a small encroachment for a canopy or bay window with the City has been the equivalent of pulling teeth. This? I’m almost speechless. And yes, bad precedent, bad urban design.
Any idea what’s up on Richards Street where a concrete staircase from the office tower has been built that narrows the sidewalk to a couple of feet?
See pics here:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=6893916&postcount=1687
and here:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=6895252&postcount=1698