This summer the Vancouver Public Space Network, with a grant from VIVA Vancouver is transforming two laneways into fun and friendly spaces using upcycled furniture, flea market finds, and pallets.

After having hosted an outrageously successful event in East Van, Gastown is the second neighbourhood up! Join us for a casual Backyard BBQ – a laneway activation taking place in the diagonal alleyway connecting Cambie and Cordova Streets on Saturday, August 26th.

This activation will use some creatively upcycled materials to turn an urban space into the suburban dream. Think grilled food, lawn games, music, and maybe even a rogue pink flamingo. 

Backyard BBQ is the Vancouver Public Space Network’s second Laneway Living Room activation for summer 2017. This tactical urbanism project is designed to highlight the potential of Vancouver’s unloved and underutilized laneways by quickly and cheaply transforming them into people-friendly public spaces. We invite you to come to our Backyard BBQ!

 Laneways take up a significant amount of land in Vancouver, and yet only a handful of these spaces are welcoming for people. Recently, the City has taken an interest in turning laneways into places for people, most notably with Alley Oop, a richly coloured lane off Granville Street. But with hundreds of kilometers of laneways in Vancouver alone, much more can be done.

Event info:
12pm – 9pm
Saturday, August 26th, 2017
401 West Cordova (Laneway between Cordova and Cambie – enter off Cordova)

See our Facebook event here.

Back in 2011, the City of Vancouver announced its goal of becoming the greenest city in the world by 2020. The City’s Greenest City Action Plan 2020 is the roadmap to getting there, outlining 10 goal areas and 15 measurable targets. The original 2011 plan has since been updated, but the core goals and strategies remain.

The plan’s goals go beyond addressing climate and sustainability issues, they recognize the health benefits associated with access to nature and green space: “Whether they take the form of a community garden, a city park, a greenway along your block, or the seawall, green spaces have been shown to benefit our physical and emotional health by reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, and stress. These spaces also contribute to our sense of community by creating places for recreational activities, for children to play, and for neighbours to meet and socialize.” (Greenest City Action Plan Part Two: 2015-2020)

One of the key targets set out in the plan is to have all Vancouver residents living within a five-minute walk of a park, greenway or other green space by 2020. The indicator chosen to measure this is the percentage of total city land that is within a five-minute walk, defined as a 400-metre radius, of a green space. When you measure the five minute access to city’s parks and green spaces, you will get a map that looks something like this:

This City of Vancouver map shows access to green spaces (Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation)

How close are we to meeting this target??

Well, we’re actually pretty close. As of 2014 we’re about 92.7% of the way there! (That is to say that 92.7 percent of Vancouver is within 400 meters of a park, greenway, or other greenspace). This is encouraging. After all, scholarly and anecdotal research suggest that a person’s proximity to a given park relates directly to how much he/she will use it and, likewise, the more parks you have nearby, the more opportunities you have to use a park. But before we celebrate our amazing progress in solving this problem perhaps we ought to ask: to what extent was this a problem in the first place?

The answer: it wasn’t, really. The baseline measured in 2010 was already 92.6 percent.

There are two important questions to ask here: “Is this the best way to measure green space?” and “What counts towards the total of green space?” (In the case of the “Shrink the Pink” map, parks, greenways, community gardens count all count towards the total.)

With respect to the first question, there are many different ways to measure green spaces for planning purposes. For example, Vancouver’s very first city plan—the 1928 Bartholomew Plan —compared the number of park acres to the population of an area. The metric used was persons per park acre. Harland Bartholomew and Associates recommended approximately one acre for every 100 persons in the city. Since then, the method of comparing park area to population has stuck, often used as an informal metric for assessing “park rich” versus “park deficient” neighbourhoods. It’s important to note, though, that the specific proportion that Bartholomew recommended has changed over time.

Looking at area per capita or the inverse, population per unit of area, can give us important information about how many people are served by a certain amount of green space. If you look at the green space per capita (or per 1000 persons) in a neighbourhood and compare it against a larger area, such as green space per capita in the whole city, you can see how one neighbourhood stacks up against one another or the city-wide average. (See, for example, the map below.) This type of tool helps planners and policy makers work towards equitable distribution of green space among the population.

This VPSN map shows the different levels of open space compared with the population of each neighbourhood (VPSN)

As park space per capita metrics typically rely on census statistics, the focus indirectly tilts towards residential population figures. This makes sense on one level; however, the daytime and nighttime population of neighbourhoods can change dramatically depending on employment and other occupational patterns. Or put another way around: isn’t it also important to make sure there are parks and greenspaces near employment centres as well?

The Bartholomew plan also recommends that a neighbourhood park “should be within walking distance (considered to be a half-mile) of practically every person in the city.” This is close to the metric mentioned above regarding the Greenest City Action Plan. One issue with this metric is that it doesn’t measure population density. It doesn’t differentiate between a neighbourhood with high demand for green space (e.g., heavily populated area whose residents live mostly within the prescribed radius from, say, several small neighbourhood parks) and a neighbourhood with lower demand for green space (such as a sparsely populated area whose residents live within the radius of several small neighbourhood parks or even a sparsely populated area with large parks). A recent Park Board study (Parks Provision Standard and Metrics Study: Network-Based Assessment of Access) takes a deeper dive into this issue of green space access in Vancouver. Based on a model that estimates various elements of the pedestrian environment (such as slope, stairs, busy streets, local streets and controlled/uncontrolled stoplights), the study assesses pedestrian access to green space in a more practical and realistic way. However, as noted above, this measure does not differentiate between areas of high and low demand for green space. Equally importantly, it does not speak to quality of green space.

This takes the question of measurement in a different, but fundamentally important direction. Qualitative aspects of green space are a significant driver for the actual use of the space, as well as the health and wellbeing benefits derived from green space. A focus on quality also suggests that it actually doesn’t matter how close you are to green space, or how much of it exists per capita, if the space in question isn’t usable, is poor quality, unsafe, lacking in amenity.

Measures of quality could consider one or more indicators shown by research to produce key health and wellbeing benefits, such as safety, accessibility, noise, biodiversity, aesthetics, recreational space, canopy cover, spaciousness, historical or cultural associations, etc., although these may differ from place to place or even between demographic groups.

The moral of the story, though, is that each approach to measurement reveals different aspects of the park and greenspace “situation” in Vancouver. And as with many things, focusing on a single measure may have its limitations.

What counts?

The second important question noted above is “what counts towards the total?” A lot depends on what you choose to measure and map. The percentage of coverage that I’ve noted above can be mapped out by drawing a 400-metre buffer around these green spaces.

From the “Shrink the Pink” map above, you can see that there are a few stubborn pink areas that are not within a five-minute walk of any green space.

In this “Shrink the Pink” map, green space includes public community gardens, city parks, greenways, and some public school grounds. As you see, it does not include any private green space, leaving the residents of some west side neighborhoods that likely do have access to private green space “in the pink.”

And while some of the City’s greenways such as the Arbutus Greenway [I’ll insert a link here] are leafy, verdant and quiet, not all measure up in quality. For example, the Central Valley Greenway runs from the Olympic Village along First Avenue and then along Great Northern Way, does a slight jog near the VCC–Clark station on the Millennium Line and then joins North Grandview Highway, where it runs alongside the SkyTrain tracks out to Burnaby and beyond. There are certainly lots of very green spaces along this greenway, but other parts of it (such as Great Northern Way) don’t feel all that green.

It is also important to consider green spaces that support a diversity of users and uses. While it is helpful to look at green space in the aggregate (all types compiled—such as the Shrink the Pink map), there should also be an opportunity to measure different types of green space separately. For example, the types of green spaces that serve seniors may be different from the types of green spaces that serve young children. Another example: greenways serve transportation and exercise uses but are not successful as gathering spaces. Some may even consider that the inclusion of greenways that are zoned as transportation corridors towards the green space total may be an overly broad definition of green space.

Lastly, the measure of quality also has its constraints. The broad range of potential indicators points to a difficulty with measuring quality: it is not clearly or consistently defined, is often somewhat subjective, and can pose a challenge for measurement. In terms of a more generalized approach, one potential way around this is to measure user satisfaction. It’s not perfect, and while user satisfaction is a personal measure, it may, nevertheless, help address quality, since quality could be perceived differently from person to person or from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. A number of cities across Canada – and beyond – use this approach, usually administering it through an annual or semi-annual survey.

What’s next?

The Vancouver Park Board recently launched its year-long parks and recreation master plan process, called VanPlay. As part of this, the Park Board has also been looking at the question of park measures and metrics. It will be interesting to see how they choose to tackle this matter, as we’ve already seen, each of the measures identified above has merits and limitations. One way forward is to think about regular updates on a combination of metrics – for example, in a fashion similar to the one employed in Los Angeles County.

This infographic shows different green space metrics applied in Los Angeles County

Still other, more nuanced metrics may be developed – and we’ll look forward to exploring those further if and when that happens.

In the meantime, we would encourage you to get involved in the VanPlay conversation. We’re looking forward to a process that (hopefully) balances consideration of density, demand, quality and user satisfaction as well as access, rather than focusing on one or even two of these measures. You can look forward to more on the VanPlay initiative in our future posts.

We want to hear from you!

We’re running a survey about your use of green and open spaces. We’d love for you to participate by clicking here.

One of Vancouver’s most recognized cultural names has created a very shiny, bold piece of public art relating to B.C.’s old-growth forests.

As a Vancouverite, I instantly recognized Golden Tree by Douglas Coupland as a replica of the iconic Stanley Park Hollow Tree: an unreal presentation of something very real in the city’s history. Unveiled in July 2016 at the corner of Cambie and Southeast Marine, across from the Marine Drive Canada Line station, the piece was commissioned by Intracorp as its public art contribution for its MC² condo development. A 32,000-pound, 43-foot, steel-reinforced resin, fiberglass structure encased in gold finish, it took more than 6,000 hours to fabricate, to a budget of approximately $440,000.

Our forests, our art

Our province owes a significant amount of its wealth and fame to its coastal rainforest and to its centuries of forest production. For thousands of years, First Nations have used the forests for their homes, transportation, food, culture and wellbeing. Vancouverites and tourists alike spend plenty of time and effort to experience the North Shore Mountains. Our natural surroundings are a popular theme in local public art as part of the conversation on environment, history and Canadian identity.

One of Vancouver’s most familiar trees, Stanley Park’s Hollow Tree has a storied history. It’s been visited and photographed by thousands, posing inside and around it. When I was growing up, my grandparents had a photo, circa 1930s, showing them proudly sitting in a convertible with its back end inside the 800–1,000-year-old western red cedar.

The Hollow Tree in 2008. Photo: tree-species under Creative Commons

The Hollow Tree died naturally many years ago, and in 2006 the remaining stump endured considerable damage during a storm, as well as a mysterious fire in 2014. After the fire, the stump was slated for removal; however, after public outcry, the Hollow Tree Conservation Society raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore and stabilize it with cables.

Many cultures equate gold with wealth, power, permanence and growth. By replicating the Hollow Tree in gold paint, Coupland attaches those perceptions of material worth and endurance to a threatened piece of natural beauty. Golden Tree represents the millions of dollars that B.C. companies have made from forestry as a backbone of our province’s wealth. The sculpture signals our economic dependence on natural resources, presently figuring in B.C.’s high-profile dispute with the Trump administration over softwood lumber.

The Golden Tree’s location in south Vancouver’s emerging Cambie Corridor neighbourhood can be seen in complete opposition to the real tree’s location in Stanley Park. South Cambie is rapidly growing, with large parcels of land being bought and redeveloped into denser housing. Greenspaces are disappearing, while Stanley Park remains Vancouver’s most cherished and protected urban forest. Encountering this new version of one of the city’s oldest symbols in one of our newest developing neighbourhoods juxtaposes Vancouver’s image as a sustainable and green city alongside its financially driven side. The Hollow Tree represents old Vancouver, while the Golden Tree is the expensive, cosmopolitan and sexy present-day Vancouver.

Coupland prompts us to consider Vancouver’s relationship with the landscape and how the city’s rapid development has altered it. I understand Golden Tree, within its physical and historical context, as a warning to protect and cherish our environment. If we don’t change our ways, we may find that all that remains are a few golden trophies to remind us of what we’ve lost.

Top image: Golden Tree inauguration with artist Douglas Coupland. Photo: Christine Rondeau under Creative Commons 

With spring here and weather warming up, it’s a great time to get out there and start engaging with the city’s public art. One of Vancouver’s most recognized, indeed iconic pieces, A-maze-ing Laughter by Chinese artist Yue Minjun, is known for its surface-level goofiness and approachable spirit.

Located at Morton Park across from English Bay Beach, the work consists of 14 painted cast-bronze sculptures that are semi-self-portraits of the artist. With bare feet, jeans, muscular stomachs, eyes closed and laughing faces, all the figures are physically identical save for their arms, placed in seven different expressive ways.

Brought to Vancouver initially as part of the 2009–2011 Vancouver Biennale exhibition (a nonprofit public art festival running every two years), Yue’s piece was subsequently purchased by the Wilson family (founders of Lululemon) for $1.5 million in 2012 to become a permanent piece in Vancouver’s public art collection. Offering many opportunities for fun and whimsical photos, A-maze-ing Laughter has given tourists and locals alike the chance for pictures and laughs.

Yet A-maze-ing Laughter also lends itself to a deeper narrative about freedom of self-expression and individuality. Upon realizing that all the joyous faces are replicated, the viewer is challenged by their insincerity. Yue Minjun was born in 1962, just before the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. He grew up at a time when a large portion of the Chinese population was persecuted, abused and displaced. Traditional arts, culture and religion were actively, often brutally suppressed, and citizens were encouraged to denounce existing cultural institutions. This was a time when individual identity was lost and people were expected to become opaque and emotionless soldiers or supporters of Mao’s Red Army.

Smiles are ubiquitous in Yue Minjun’s work. Photo: Jacob Bøtter by Creative Commons license

Having grown up in such a restrictive era, Yue explores ideas of philosophical inquiry and existence in his art, which has gained worldwide attention and acclaim. Ubiquitous throughout his work, including his paintings and installations, is his own self-portrait as an image of frozen joy. This image has been connected to the Laughing Buddha, which, interestingly, was banned during Yue’s childhood. With their eyes closed and mouths wide open, Yue’s self-portraits can be understood as ironic symbols of the violence and vulnerability experienced by humanity and the current state of spirituality and consumerism in Chinese culture.

Terracotta Warriors (Contemporary) by Yue Minjun. Photo: Paul Stevenson by Creative Commons license

As a piece of public art, A-maze-ing Laughter is multifaceted and dynamic. It can be enjoyed at “face” value for its playfulness, as suggested by the Wilson family in the dedication: “May this sculpture inspire laughter, playfulness and joy in all who experience it.” It also lends itself to a deeper reading that challenges viewers to reflect on their own experiences of identity and expression.

Top photo: A. Davies

If you’ve walked the Arbutus Greenway lately, you’ve probably noticed that the temporary pathway is all paved now. Every time I go on it, I’m encouraged to see it well used by pedestrians and cyclists alike.

Time for an update.

From January 18 to February 15, the City ran an extensive public consultation gathering feedback on what people wanted from the greenway in its final form. The results are now in, and a comprehensive summary and short video are posted online.

The City also issued an RFP for consultants bidding on engineering, landscaping and other work associated with the permanent path. The RFP, which incorporated the results of the public consultation, closed on April 4.

So what’s the upshot?

What Vancouverites want

In the January–February consultation, the City asked residents for input on what would most entice them to use the greenway. Stakeholders, members of the public and City advisory committees were all involved in this process of articulating values.

The City held online Talk Vancouver and paper questionnaires, three stakeholder meetings, three public open houses, three “Pop-Up City Hall” events, a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” and meetings with four of the City’s advisory committees: children, youth and families; persons with disabilities; urban Aboriginal; and active transportation. The City reports more than 4,000 interactions with participants through these activities, including almost 3,000 responses to questionnaires.

Having participated in the second of the three stakeholder meetings (“Transportation and urban design”), I’m encouraged that the values informing the VPSN’s own advocacy for the greenway going back many months are highly consistent with the main objectives articulated by the public in the recent consultation. As reported by the City, the public wants the greenway to:

• be “a high-quality, accessible public space for walking and cycling”;
• be “a safe, comfortable, and welcoming destination with places for gathering, socializing and relaxing” that would be “not just a corridor, but a destination or series of linked places,” with coffee shops, park space and “perhaps outdoor exhibits”;
• connect “to neighbourhoods, parks and other points of interest … as well as the broader transportation network”; and
• offer green spaces: places for finding tranquility, reconnecting with nature, growing food and nurturing ecosystems and biodiversity.

Residents expressed appreciation that the Arbutus Greenway gives access to green space and community gardens. Shown: gate to the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden from the greenway. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

Consensus was strong, evidently, on the points above. The overwhelming majority of participants expressed interest in using the greenway for walking, cycling and/or enjoying nature. Such being the case, it’s unsurprising that reactions toward a future streetcar were somewhat divergent. While some responded favourably, others questioned the necessity or expressed concern that having a streetcar could detract from non-motorized uses. This ambivalence toward streetcar use – and indeed to the corridor’s overall designation as a transportation corridor rather than a green trail – was consistent with the ambivalence on this point that the VPSN has observed in past meetings as well.

Construction right now

Though fully paved, the temporary path is still under construction. In a newsletter, the City has announced that the following improvements will be made in the coming months:

• pavement marked with separations for pedestrians and cyclists;
• “minor improvements to street crossings”;
• pollinator seeding; and
• benches

Since the first two of these points have serious safety implications, the VPSN urges that they be treated as pressing. With regard to separations, I’ve had feedback from pedestrians who feel threatened by the speed of bikes and have expressed apprehension that the final design could privilege cyclists over pedestrians by giving them more room. Clearly, the sooner the separations are indicated, the better.

As the VPSN has also argued, the confusion at street crossings is an accident waiting to happen, and I’m not sure what scope is intended under “minor improvements.” We reiterate our keen hope that the City will hasten to provide obvious priority for greenway users. Many times, drivers either disregard the greenway or simply seem unaware that it’s even there. At the intersection with 6th, for instance, I snapped this photo of cars parked across the greenway:

Photo: Naomi Reichstein

Toward a permanent design

Meanwhile, the City is moving ahead with developing a permanent design.

Throughout the RFP, there’s a strong emphasis on transportation as a fundamental component of the greenway’s identity. Beyond that, I’m pleased to see that the values expressed at the consultation – and in the VPSN’s own advocacy – figure explicitly in the RFP’s emphasis on accessible use and safety, community connectivity, amenities, focus on ecology, placemaking opportunities and integration of cultural and heritage elements. 

For example, I’m pleased that the RFP places explicit value on attending to neighbourhood variety: “Early discussions with stakeholders and the public have indicated a desire to reflect the distinct character of each neighbourhood along the greenway. With such a long and linear site, one of the design challenges will be the development of features and elements that can maintain a coherent experience within the physical confines of the entire greenway while allowing for uniqueness within distinct sections of the corridor” (p B-9).

I’m also happy to read that the “City’s expectation is that public art [will become] an integral component within public landscapes throughout the City, including the Arbutus Greenway” and that “the City’s Public Art Program will oversee the preparation of the ‘Arbutus Greenway Public Art Plan’ in conjunction with the Arbutus Greenway’s Project Manager” (p B-23).

Paved now, the Arbutus Greenway retains echoes of its railway past with its track-like quality, running behind the little park at 6th. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

Next up

According to the City, various design options will be developed over the summer, and the public will receive further communications in the fall. After seeking public review and evaluation of these options, the City will provide a detailed update on the one preferred.

Do you have any feedback on the greenway? The VPSN will continue to advocate with the City for its design, so please feel free to get in touch with me at naomi@vancouverpublicspace.ca.

In an effort to address the absence of a comprehensive approach regarding our public spaces in Vancouver, the City has announced the Downtown Places and Spaces Strategy. This follows on VIVA Vancouver, the program behind public space initiatives like Robson Redux and the Parklet Program, whereby private businesses sponsor public seating areas outside storefronts. The new strategy will help the City determine what kind of spaces are needed in our downtown while providing a framework for prioritizing and coordinating their delivery. The strategy currently only covers neighbourhoods on the downtown peninsula, but the Downtown Eastside, False Creek Flats and the communities south of False Creek will be included in future phases.

Public and private

The strategy will seek opportunities for the creation of public spaces on both publicly and privately owned land, specifically looking at street rights-of-way, including plazas, sidewalks, parklets, laneways and the spaces in front of retail and office buildings. A more concerted effort to activate downtown’s open spaces will address the concern that increased density and redevelopment in Vancouver are resulting in a loss of public space. Many office and retail buildings provide welcoming spaces through the provision of pedestrian shelter, patios and plazas. In recognition of this, the strategy will find ways to retain and encourage these privately owned public spaces.

Urban Pasture Parklet outside of Café Crêpe, Robson Street, Vancouver. Photo: Steve Chou under Creative Commons 

Data collection

Part of the process will be an inventory of current public spaces in the city and how these spaces are being used. The Standing Committee of Council on Policy and Strategic Priorities recommended that the work of the Vancouver Public Space Network be acknowledged in this regard and that the strategy be informed by the knowledge and data already gathered. A “public space and public life” study, to be conducted this summer, will help the city collect data while engaging Vancouverites in the planning of the strategy. The public can also expect the implementation of pilot projects throughout the downtown in order to test ideas and provide “action while planning.”

Pop-ups

Right now, the City is offering a funding opportunity for pop-up projects that will help activate and reimagine public spaces. An applicant can apply for up to $5,000 to implement an idea. Proposed projects must be:

• Interesting, fun, and engaging
• Easy to set-up and move
• Deliverable within the budget and timeframe

As part of their pop-ups, successful applicants will be asked to include in their projects a short survey for the public. Feedback from this survey will help the City gather input on future public space initiatives.

For more details and to apply, visit the City’s website here. Applications are due by 5 PM on April 28, 2017.

All photos by Creative Commons license

Following publication of this article on the major upcoming changes to the framework for the Vancouver Heritage Register, VPSN communications coordinator Naomi Wittes Reichstein appeared for an interview on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM, on “Sense of Place” with host Minelle Mahtani. They talked about the effects of demolition on historical memory and the cultural erasure that can result when the built environment gets torn down.

Check it out!

Recently I crossed the border for an overnight stay in what is probably my favourite small town in the United States.

Bellingham, Washington. The friendliest human ambience. Proximity to nature. Wooded trails where everybody says hello when passing by. Strong civic pride among committed residents. Highly successful urban renewal placing value on heritage preservation and creative commercial reuse in the city’s two downtown cores of Bellingham and Fairhaven. (Love Port Townsend? Yep, you’d love it here too.) Excellent restaurants, especially if you want your choice of Mexican food. And the best bookstore north of Seattle, Village Books: venue of last summer’s Steampunk Festival and a generous stream of other events before and since.

In fact, in June 2016, Bellingham had the distinction of making the landing page of 24/7 Wall Street’s “50 worst cities in America to live in”: clearly high praise when you consider that New York, San Francisco and Boston also made that list.

Historic Fairhaven, with outdoor cinema. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

I’d visited Bellingham many times before, but this time round I had a fairly specific motive: walking the Bellingham Interurban Trail. Aside from my general fascination with rails-to-trails (because, of course, they’re among the coolest things ever), I wanted to see what this established 6.6-mile railroad conversion could teach us in developing the Arbutus Greenway here in Vancouver.

A forest, a creek, a 50K race

The Bellingham Interurban is a north-south trail along the former right-of-way of a Bellingham–Mount Vernon electrical passenger line built in 1912 and decommissioned in 1930. The railway’s trajectory forms a poignant testament to an era when much work went into building short-lived local trains. Happily for the community, the line earned permanent life through its designation as a rail-to-trail in 1987. It originates in the Fairhaven historic district, passing through the canyon-filled woodlands of Arroyo Park to terminate at Larrabee State Park to the south.

Colours of early spring on the Interurban. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

With some concrete trestle footings as historic remnants, the Interurban has a surface of hard-packed cinder and a number of convenient access points along the way. Here’s a map in case you want to hike or bike it yourself.

For our walk, my co-traveller and I started at 10th and Donovan in Fairhaven and did about half the trail before running out of time and turning back. It was Saturday, March 18, and the Interurban was fairly busy thanks to the Chuckanut 50k race, on its 25th run. Funky little motivational signs along the trail encouraged runners to reach the end.

From Fairhaven, the Interurban takes you along Padden Creek. Submerged under a tunnel starting in the 19th century, the creek has been the subject of a 2015 daylighting project to encourage restoration of the ecosystem, as signs along the Interurban explain. (Interestingly, daylighting has made recent news in Vancouver as well, with the proposed restoration of our own Tatlow Creek.)

Padden Creek daylighting, with trail access. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

The Interurban also takes you right beside Padden’s fish ladders.

A wide, level train bed passing through a variety of plant systems, streams and remnants of old railway embankments, the trail leads into narrower footpaths full of switchbacks running through mossy Arroyo Park. I would’ve loved to continue on and see the train bed pick up again to feed into Larrabee State Park, but that remains for another trip.

Salmon ladder, Padden Creek. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

Bringing it home: The Arbutus Greenway

What can we take from this as Vancouver builds its own railroad conversion?

In the past I’ve spoken of Arbutus as a rail-to-trail, but the visit to Bellingham helped me to appreciate that it isn’t actually one in the true sense. As emphasized both in public forums and in the RFP recently published for contracting work on the greenway, the City of Vancouver purchased Arbutus with the intention of turning it into a transportation corridor accommodating an eventual streetcar. By contrast, the Bellingham Interurban epitomizes the type, as reflected in its listing by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. So the analogy between Bellingham’s pathway and the much more urban Arbutus is far from exact.

That said, there’s a lot we can learn from the Interurban’s successes:

Multipurpose use

The combination of the 50k race and the ecosystemic context provided along the trail (by the signage about the Padden Creek daylighting, for instance) brought to my mind the opportunity to bring together recreational, environmental and educational experiences along Arbutus through events, informative installations, public art and more. At the VPSN, we’ve consistently advocated for such enriched and multifaceted possibilities.

Retaining wall greened with moss and sedum. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

Community

The sense of camaraderie along the trail – with even the most exhausted joggers smiling and saying “Hi” as they passed – affirmed for me the potential of Arbutus to bring people together out of social isolation and into the community: indeed one of the most vital aspects of its value as a public space, as emphasized by some of the greenway stakeholders during the consultation.

Connectivity

A super-important asset of the Bellingham Interurban is the connectivity it creates among different parks and between parks and urban areas. Public space is a network. It’s not just the nodes that matter, but the connections also, and a trail like this – and like Metro Vancouver’s Central Valley Greenway – provides the perfect means. The Interurban stitches the area’s jewels together via neighbourhood access paths that are plentiful and easily attained. Depending on where you live as a resident, you can use the trail to visit a friend in another neighbourhood, visit the Fairhaven historic village centre or take a walk or your mountain bike through the woods. Such connectivity is a principal objective for which we’ve been advocating where it comes to Arbutus, as a means of opening up the city’s green spaces, neighbourhoods and commercial pockets while also getting people out of cars in accessing them.

I’ll plan to course through the Interurban’s southern stretch on my next visit to town.

The Chuckanut is a 50k race, after all. Photo: Naomi Reichstein

So what’s all this about?

Designed to spur action on gender-based discrimination and improve equality, Vancouver’s Gender Equality Strategy envisions a city where all those who self-identify as women “have opportunities to fully participate in the political, economic, cultural and social life of Vancouver.” The strategy is very much a localized complement to larger national and international efforts.

Now that the policy is dated by more than a decade, the City has recently resolved to establish a process to review and update it by having staff work with the Women’s Advisory Committee. The revised strategy will also integrate other “recently adopted policy, such as that in the Healthy City and Mental Health and Addictions Task Force, and [will take] into account a change in national and provincial context” (Council motion, April 16, 2016).

As part of this process, the City is looking for feedback from groups and individuals, which it will integrate into the updated strategy. You can provide comments on the strategy either via the Talk Vancouver survey (open now!) or at the April 19 gender equity forum (4–8 pm, Creekside Community Centre).

Where public space comes in

When we think about how gender politics play out in physical cityscapes, we need to think about for whom, and by whom, public spaces are designed. Often, the lens through which spaces are shaped is male by default and does not necessarily consider the different ways women navigate their environments. This lack of spatial inclusion in many ways perpetuates inequality between genders.

As a group, we at the VPSN believe that the points below are key to bridging the equity gap between genders in the context of public space.

The importance of data

Gathering local data on how women use public space is key to equitable planning. The collection must moreover take into account how different groups of women – based on dimensions such as age, race and economic class – use the space.

Without baseline data, planning rests on assumptions and information that are not specific to context. For instance, while we know that women tend to use transit in more heterogeneous ways than men, in part because of their propensity to fill caretaking roles, we don’t know how women residents of Vancouver use TransLink. In Vienna, gathering data on women’s use of transit and public space was key to the early progressive, gender-based planning projects for which that city is known worldwide, and such data-gathering continues to influence infrastructure design there.

Cycling on Union Street, Vancouver. Photo: Paul Krueger

Data are additionally integral to driving where we build new public spaces and what facilities they contain. For example, women with children – both their own and other people’s – tend to be among the most frequent users of public space. With this in mind, we can look at our city and make family-friendly public space decisions in the context of the services these women use.

City staff and foundational thinking

Gender should be integrated into the organization of the City through the creation of roles specific to the pursuit of gender equality (such as Vienna’s project manager of gender mainstreaming). Gender experts must work within a variety of City departments, from Engineering Services to Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability; from Community Services to Development, Buildings and Licensing.

The City can also implement gender budgeting, a process that “[reviews] all parts of the budget from a gender-perspective and [presents], in a separate chapter, who benefit from different items in the budget.”

Finally, gender awareness training should be a mandatory component of employing City workers. By embedding gender sensitivity in the DNA of the City as an organization, we can work towards more intersectional and equitable planning.

Visibility in public spaces

We’d like to see the City work to increase the visibility of women in public spaces, with a keen eye towards ensuring diverse representation. This can be done through events and marches like Take Back the Night or a women-led Jane’s Walk, and through public art that emphasizes and documents women’s presence in public space. This is key, as for centuries, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, citizens have used public space as a way of exercising their rights and participating in democracy, and yet women, especially young girls above the age of 12, are much less likely to do so. Through the symbolic interactionism of making sure that women can see other women using public space, we can begin to change this.

Experimentation

Let’s treat our city as a living lab, experimenting with the creation of equitable spaces, without being afraid to fail. Since it began investing in gender-sensitive planning in the nineties, Vienna has completed more than 60 gender-mainstreaming pilot projects. Making use of the pilot project model would allow Vancouver to test-run options, see how public spaces are used by women and witness what works and what doesn’t. The City could also encourage women-only design competitions of varying scales, allowing women to remake previously male-designed spaces in their own ways.

Safety

While discussions around safety often focus on increased lighting and security cameras (whose importance we don’t dispute), we’d like to see the conversation broadened to include the protective role of actual human beings. To quote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it behind.”

Additionally, women should be equally present as symbols of safety: as security guards, bus drivers and SkyTrain attendants. Thus they would not only serve as resources for women wishing to seek help from other women, but they would act as empowering symbols: women as purveyors of safety.

Transit

By understanding how women use transit in Vancouver, we can start to change the way we build infrastructure and better allow for mobility of care. Sidewalks can be widened where needed to allow more room for strollers and wheelchairs, a measure that has been taken in Vienna (significant given that European streets in general tend to be even narrower than Vancouver’s). The City could investigate methods of surfacing park pathways that would be environmentally sound while encouraging a diversity of abilities (wheelchairs, walkers, etc.). Research has also shown that as women tend to be more risk-averse than men, building bike lanes, especially separated ones, can help bridge the gender gap in cycling. And of course, we have to be vigilant when it comes to making public transit safe for women and continue to make people aware of the See Something, Say Something campaign run by Vancouver’s transit police.

Bathrooms

Finally, there need to be more female washrooms in public space, period. This is a very simple requirement that’s consistently overlooked, particularly in the Downtown Eastside.

What you can do

Gender mainstreaming and equitable public space planning make up a vast topic, and this article only scratches the surface.

Speak your own mind! What do you think could make Vancouver work better for women? Come to the April 19 forum at Creekside Community Centre. If you can’t make it, share your thoughts via the Talk Vancouver survey.

Top image: Hot tub parklet, Vancouver. Photo: Paul Krueger

All photos under Creative Commons license 

You may have heard of the BC Hydro Seed project, which proposed to redesign and enhance three open spaces in downtown Vancouver, in exchange for the opportunity to build underground substations.

Heralded as innovative by some and considered by others as being of uncertain scientific merit, Seed was a short-lived blip on our public space radar. On March 8, the City of Vancouver passed a motion to delay a decision on the controversial project, introducing a timeline that proved disagreeable to BC Hydro, which had hoped to receive the green light by March 31. The utility rescinded its proposal shortly thereafter.

Promoted as a solution to increased energy needs and scarce utilities space in Yaletown and the West End, Seed had proposed building one underground substation each at Emery Barnes Park and Nelson Park. The savings in property values that BC Hydro would have realized by building on City-owned property would then have been diverted to improving park land and providing public amenities in the form of a school, housing, and recreation facilities. Organized by the same firm that led the marketing and outreach campaign for the Site C dam on the Peace River, the consultation process spanned January and February, taking place in the form of four open houses, four small group discussions, two PAC meetings and an online survey. Incidentally, the consultation wrapped up one week after BC Hydro released a Stantec report on the impact of the plan, providing little time for respondents to incorporate the information from the report into their feedback.

Despite the whirlwind timeline, the proposal garnered a positive response from reporters at The Province and Metro Vancouver, with a more subdued one from the Vancouver Observer and News 1130. Amid the flashy BC Hydro consultation materials, it was difficult to see who would oppose a plan that would finance improved public space, a new school and a new daycare centre in the densest area of Vancouver. A little digging, however, shows how the downsides came to outweigh the upsides.

Though BC Hydro often cited the existing substation at Vancouver’s Cathedral Square as proof of the technology’s safety, the science on exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) is very much unresolved, particularly where children are involved. A 2014 article published in the Journal of Biosciences and Medicines states that “There is … some epidemiological evidence that prolonged exposure to higher levels (more than 0.4 μT) of power frequency magnetic fields is associated with a risk of leukemia in children.” According to the U.K. government, “a number of studies” show “a possible link between exposure to magnetic fields in the home (and/or living close to high voltage power lines) and a small excess of childhood leukaemia,” though the studies aren’t conclusive as to cause. In his earlier (2003) book Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields, P. Stavroulakis cites evidence that rates of childhood cancer are 2.7 times greater when kids are continuously exposed to levels above 0.3 μT. He goes on to reference a 1995 study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency that suggests that “daycare centres should not be built in areas where exposure exceeds 0.2 μT,” because of increased health risks. In fact, EMF measurements taken at Cathedral Square Park have ranged from 0.2 μT to 10 μT.

In response to the Seed proposal, the Vancouver Parks Board commissioned an independent environmental study that would delve deeper into the potential health effects of underground substations. This report, however, would not be published until one week prior to the March 31 deadline: a factor that may have contributed to the City’s motion to postpone a decision. (The report is still unpublished as of this writing.)

In addition to the potential health effects, the City was concerned with the factor of property values. Both Emery Barnes and Nelson parks are city-owned properties of considerable worth. To provide an idea of this value, 1290 Homer Street, three blocks from Emery Barnes and a small fraction of the size of either of the parks, was assessed a land value of $8,199,000 in 2016 (figure courtesy of Colliers International). Thus Seed promised to provide major cost savings to BC Hydro (which had requested a 99-year lease on both properties), the vast extent of which would likely not have been publicly reinvested. Indeed, the City’s requirement that BC Hydro pay a price based on the cost of buying the land outright reinforces this further as the reality (and was cited by BC Hydro as prohibitive to pursuing the project).

In addition, approximately 4% of Emery Barnes would have been permanently lost to substation infrastructure (vehicle access and intake structure and exhaust shafts), with 45% of the park lost during construction, estimated to take a minimum of three years. One hundred percent of Lord Roberts School Annex would have been out of use for a minimum of three years as well. Moreover, although the individual trees at Emery Barnes would have been replanted for the purposes of retaining their net number, the removal of mature trees would have cost the park 95% of its overall canopy. Additional plantings would have been difficult because trees cannot be planted above underground substations.

While an enticing proposition, the Seed proposal demanded many questions and offered few answers. The additional constraint of a tight three-month timeline made reaching a thoughtful decision all the more difficult. Overall, it certainly seems that the City’s decision to postpone a final say on the proposal (and to push it past the May election, which no doubt would have impacted provincial support in the event of a shift in government) was in the best interest of Vancouverites. The City’s further requirement that BC Hydro pay the City a price based on the cost of buying the land outright makes a revival of the proposal unlikely.

It’s conceivable, however, that a similar proposal might resurface in other municipalities, particularly where land is limited. Should this occur, it’s key to keep in mind the lessons our City has learned: pursue independent scientific investigations into EMF impact, weigh carefully the potential benefits against the value of owned land, and don’t be rushed by swift timelines.

Top photo: Cathedral Square, the site of Vancouver’s first underground substation