On Wednesday, October 29, Vancouver City Council will review Phase I of ‘A Healthy City For All’, which could become a new municipal plan for supporting Vancouverites to be physically, mentally and socially healthy. The strategy backs up much of the work the City has already done, for example with the Greenest City and Transportation 2040 strategies, but brings it all together under one health-focused umbrella.

The strategy has 13 goals and lays out targets and indicators for each, many of which are connected to the importance of public space. For example, one goal is “Active Living and Getting Outside”; the target is to support Vancouverites to be “engaged in active living and have incomparable access to nature” with green space being less than a 5 minute walk away for all Vancouverites.

While it’s easy to see the direct link between health and public space when talking about parks and green space, many of the goals of the Health City Strategy could be met through a dedication to quality, accessible public spaces. Take, for example, the target of having Vancouverites be “connected and engaged in the places and spaces that matter to us.” Animated public spaces where we have opportunities to meet each other, and which encourage us to spend time interacting, even passively, with others, can bring us closer together.

Another important element of the report is the desire to make Vancouver a healthy city for all people. This focus on equity has the potential to support public spaces that work for everybody, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender or class, and to develop spaces equitably across the city. Designing public spaces that work for those who are already vulnerable, and those who experience mental and physical health challenges, can provide healthy opportunities for those who need them most.

Though the report provides a picture of what life in Vancouver could be, it doesn’t do is tell us how we’re going to get there. While there has already been extensive public consultation on this topic, a more detailed plan won’t be released until 2015. Then we’ll see what Vancouver is planning to do to support this vision, and how much public space feeds into that work.

For our part, the VPSN has shared our thoughts with Healthy City strategists. We asked them to ensure that the final Strategy includes language that specifically references the importance of a variety of safe, well-designed, and equitably-distributed public spaces throughout the city, as well as a few specific ideas about how to improve health through quality public spaces. A few of our ideas include:

• Support unstructured play areas and naturalized playgrounds
• Provide appropriate street furniture and washrooms to promote active and public transportation by people of all ages and abilities
• Encourage participatory arts and culture activities like public chalk boards and informal markets
• Promote land-use and zoning changes that would re-enable small-scale local food retailers
• Diffuse the club-scene energy on Granville street through promoting neighbourhood centres
• Support community-led placemenaking, particularly at night, as a means to foster connections and feelings of safety

Got your own ideas? Share them here or write your Councillors.

Last night I had a chance to take in my first of a few of the Vancouver-centred theatre pieces at this year’s PuSH Festival. What a gem of an evening!

The play was entitled 100% Vancouver. Good name! It was 100% fun. No mean feat either, given that it was on the subject of the city’s demography and used a cast of everyday Vancouverites (all untrained actors) to do so.

I spend a lot of time looking at census materials and have been grumbling ever since Harper and Clement made the asinine decision to cancel the long-form census. So I was tickled that the play started with a monologue by a reference librarian about why the census was so important. What an odd and excellent beginning to the show, I thought.

And then, in walked 100 residents of the City, introducing themselves one by one and organizing themselves by neighbourhood. Over the next hour, these same folks clustered and reclustered themselves around the stage, organizing themselves time and again based on a stream of series of questions that were presented to them. It was a simple but brilliant technique, and utterly captivating. The use of props was also sparse but highly effective: panels that flashed simple, binary answers – yes/no, east/west, etc – around which participants clustered; a rope to divide those answering one way from those answering another; flash lights to illustrate the differences between sub populations.

If you’ve ever looked at books on demography you’ll probably be familiar with the “Village of 100.” It’s a way of visually representing large populations on a proportional basis. In it, the population of a given place – a city, country, the planet – is reduced to 100, which, in turn, allows for a more accessible means to illustrate different demographic traits (e.g. if the world were a village of 100, there would be 49 men and 51 women, 50 people would be living people living below the poverty line, etc., etc.).

100% Vancouver used this same technique but made it come alive even more. It was a mesmerizing experience watching these groups – a statistically representative sample of our city – configuring and reconfiguring with each question. It was also, in turn, funny, thought-provoking and poignant. The queries themselves flowed all over the map – some were simple, some provocative, some humorous and others self-reflexive. For example: who here knows an Aboriginal person? who has experienced violence? who has committed violence? who feels safe in their city? who believes in ghosts? who feels real? who was born outside of Vancouver? who recycles? who has lied this evening? Clusters of questions were defined and ‘chaptered’ with the addition of brief vignettes and life stories by some of the participants. The result was a timely meditation on the nature of ‘community’ within the urban setting.

The play is based on work by Berlin’s Rimini Protokoll and runs until Sunday. For information on tickets and showtimes click here.

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While you’re down in Gastown be sure to check out more PuSH action on Water Street. At night time the street takes on an enchanted quality with the flood lights replacing normal street lights, illuminating the old brick buildings and casting mad shadows all over the place. I had a chance to wander around after the the play let out and found quite a crowd taking things in. Lots of little pockets of street theatre and installations up and running.