One more from the series ‘stories about London which could also be about Vancouver:’
… The speaker from Architects for Social Housing (ASH) at the Urgent Imaginations summit a couple weeks ago spoke really well about the topics below – also the fact that normally when redeveloping social housing areas, the entire place is demolished (just like Little Mountain) and then many of the residents aren’t really able to come back (either can’t afford to, or don’t want to move twice).
One of her proposals was a sensitive inclusion of more density so that new could exist alongside old – which I can’t help but think would work well in Vancouver too.
“And yet regeneration proponents have a point: last year we built just 35% of the housing London actually needed. To ignore the opportunity from public sector land would be immoral. No private sector landbanker comes remotely close. …
“It is time for a planning revolution to bring public influence over what we build back under effective democratic control. A series of beautiful co-designed, populist estate regenerations to conventional streets would be wiser, better, and longer lasting than their predecessors. They can house all current residents and often as many again. Planning power needs to be taken back from property funds and city officials and returned, where it belongs, to the rest of us.”
