Actually, with Cathedral Place, Park Place and Art Phillips Park at Burrard SkyTrain station, not so little.
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As ceremonial streets, each of Burrard Street and West Georgia Street have been planned with plazas alternating down each side of the street (some more urban, some greener (residential ones)).
These are little gems. I especially like the elevated parkette fronted by the Bill Reid Gallery, and the cherry allees at Phillips Park / Burrard Station.
However, Georgia and Burrard streets have no claim in reality as “ceremonial streets” despite their designations. They remain first and foremost conduits for traffic, and brim with mediocrity and very weak treatments designed specifically for human beings. The sheer dominance of vehicular traffic over everything else on our streets is the most significant reason why urban design is so weak here. One can hope this can change as we move deeper into the century and the 1950s traffic engineering model becomes weaker.
A scattering of plazas and pocket parks and a few chosen buildings do not create great urban design on their own. Sure, there are ‘urban design’ competitions and isolated individual awards, the vast majority for buildings with inadequate treatments where they meet the sidewalks and belie the urban design designation. Our street network needs a major conversion experience to realize the full potential as ‘Cities for People’, as Jan Gehl put it.
It depends what you want for the street – an “urban” Burrard Street or West Georgia Street could have ended up a streetwalled canyon like Dunsmuir Street or Howe Street.
I rather like the openness of the plazas.
A ceremonial street isn’t a “high street” retail street. The plazas provide respite from the traffic you mention. If you made it more “urban” – if that means bringing retail to the sidewalk – then you’d lose that.
Those plazas are brimming with people eating their lunches each weekday.
Cadillac Fairview (Pacific Centre) already has plans to build retail pavilions on both of its plazas:
– at Georgia & Howe (Four Seasons plaza) replacing the rotunda, and
– at Georgia & Granville (between Canada Line Station and TD Tower) filling in the plaza.
No argument with plazas, Guest. It’s the experience at sidewalk level that I am concerned about, and the faux ceremonial nomenclature for kilometre after kilometre of ordinary streetscape.
The provision of greater setbacks, continuous small storefront retail, greater interest and deeper texture and articulation of street walls, punching out seating alcoves and small courtyards in buildings that line wider sidewalks, and providing a much wider plethora of meaningful paving treatments, street furniture, public art, pocket parks, and a more exciting tree planting themes will work wonders on the urban psyche.
And if one needs to designate a street as “ceremonial”, then give us a street treatment that actually accommodates ceremony on a regular basis. Two-foot sidewalk grid patterns and rows of cherry trees are token and have no references to any kind of ceremony.
Copenhagen’s Stroget.
http://nrfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/copenhagen_stroget_03.jpg
Barcelona’s Ramblas.
http://www.bearandbowwow.com/Travel/Images/Spain/IMG_0161.JPG
For some reason, I equate “ceremonial” route with “parade” route
(like when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to town to visit and the flags and banners were all hung out).
i.e. a very pretty route
Describing Art Philips as a “little urban forest” is pretty accurate. Unlike most Vancouver parks it has no grass and has quite a few woodland native plants that you’d find in a typical local forest, such as sword ferns. I’ve seen an owl sitting in one of the trees before, so its shady, foresty nature must be more comfortable to forest dwellers than the manicured grassy fields we see elsewhere around town.
We should build a few more of these.
Thanks, Gordon, for this illustration of how meaningful public open space has been achieved at the centre of downtown’s highest density core. This bit of urban design and development history will age me unmercifully but in the later 1980’s and early ’90’s the need to restore Christ Church Cathedral and the advent of SkyTrain coalesced under the downtown’s discretionary zoning and urban design/public realm guidelines, yielding this really quite impressive Public Realm. The unfortunate Hyatt Regency Hotel tower at right in the photo, pre-dating the City’s ability to pursue high quality urban design, speaks volumes.
Just missing in the photo (blocked out by Hyatt!) is the magnificent Christ Church Cathedral, with the then challenge of how to enhance the prominence of this ‘A’ heritage structure. All too brief highlights of the urban design moves in this vein included:
-sliding the then proposed Park Place tower east to Hornby St. to create a generous Burrard promenade and “chamfering” this tower’s SW corner to increase sun access to the Burrard/Dunsmuir/Melville triangle across Burrard St. (Burrard SkyTrain Station) that became Art Phillips Park.
-expanding the Burrard promenade onto the easterly Cathedral Place development site (sadly, the Georgia Medical Dental Bldg. was lost, although remembered on Georgia St. by its preserved terra cotta Nurses standing guard) with a handsome treed courtyard framed by the Bill Reid Gallery pavilion with its chateau roof.
Neither the Copenhagen’s Stroget or Barcelona’s Ramblas qualify for a ceremonial street (here Diagonal is a much better fit). More generally, a ceremonial street needs to exhale some “grandeur”‘ what is hardly compatible with the ” human scale” geometry much appreciated in la Ramblas or on the Stroget. Paris’ Champs Élysées and both the Concord and arc de triomphe squares are ceremonial place. Does they are great people place? Not sure (see more at https://voony.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/geography-of-paris-squares-or-plazas/ ).
Bottom line, a city is a complex Eco system, and not all streets need or can be like your favourite European pedestrian street. You need to have place with different functions.
Is Georgia street working as a ceremonial street? Not really at this time, but the things can be improved.
Return on the urban forest at Burrard station:
here also the things can be improved, the street servicing the Hyatt hotel needs a diet… The food truck there could be handy, but they are unsightly and noisy…
It’s funny how the Eco-City seems to favour food trucks running on diesel generators, isn’t it?