Urban Vancouver

Notes from "Dialogue of Cities: Public Dialogue: Vancouver Viewed and Reviewed"

By Richard Eriksson on June 7, 2006 - 11:22pm

Over the weekend I attended the final session of "Dialogue of Cities", which invited architecture critics from around the world to talk about the cities about which they are expert and then, finally, review Vancouver. Another blogger posted notes of the first day, the second day, and the third. James posted some photos, as did I. (I'll add a link as soon as they're up.) Did anybody else attend any of the panels? If you've written about it, feel free to drop a link in the comments or contact us. My incomplete notes follow.

Dennis Sharp: introduced CICA (Comité international de critiques d'architecture, or International Committee of Architectural Critics) which was, as the French name suggests, originally setup in France. It has three principal objectives:

• get architectural criticism widely published
• get architectural critics in international competitions
• disseminate architectural discussion

He called architecture a "dialogue of doings".

Louise Noelle Gras: it being her first time in Vancouver, she was impressed with the natural scenery (the flowers, the mountains, the sea), but was very strongly negative about what she perceived as Vancouver's "condo craze" (a phrase repeated by other critics) and "foolish greediness". She worried that, even though a small part of Vancouver, it could grow into something bigger.

Joseph Rykwert: said he loves the Law Courts, which he sees as "honest" and the closest thing Vancouver has to a city centre. He argued that the recreation of an urban centre would be the most important positive development for Vancouver.

Desmond Hui: has been to Vancouver a few times while living in Toronto, but this was the first time he had visited as an architecture critic. He sees the city as museum, architecture as art of persuasion, and likes the Central City project in Surrey. (Dan Gavie has a nice photo of outside the complex.) He was critical of the condo craze, but along with the Woodwards project, he sees them as experiments in creating a dowtown. He specifically mentioned that if Woodwards were successful, Vancouver may become the new model of urbanism.

Roberto Segre: (my notes from him are sparse and less accurate as I had difficulty understanding what he was saying) he is a critic of capitalism but noted that there are no highways that bisect the city as well as the quality of urban spaces he's sad about the amount of towers and condos, as the towers fight between each other for views of the surrounding landscape. Towers, he said, were not the only way to keep people in the city: parks and urban spaces could do that as well. He's worried about the lack of space between each tower, and that they are often empty, with people from Asia buying them up in case things go bad in their home country and they have to suddenly move to North America.

Samia Rab: don't listen to us critics, she made clear: find your own path to development. "You are Vancouver's assets": architects make space, but people make spaces. She noticed that during the work day the streets were largely empty (isn't that normal for central business districts?) and noted that towers not only frame the views of the water, but our relationship to the surrounding landscape. The challenges Vancouver faces include how to merge public interests with private interests (she noted that Robson St. was essentially an outdoor mall), and making tourism not the economy—as she says it is not a viable economy—but part of the economy. She would re-iterate that architects design space to be occupied by people (who make it a place), and noted the trend towards having building act as city centre.

Yasmin Shariff: architects and critics have focussed too long on the physicality of buildings and not their humanity. She was impressed with "the spirit of this place", Vancouver's connection to nature, but that the towers were making it hard to tell North from South. (I wonder if anybody told her what every Vancouverite, it seems, tells visitors: "the mountains are North".) She's disappointed that she's not seeing environmental wilderness, calling the urban landscape "tame".

Dennis Sharp: he asked us to consider a city of views, that is, to the things beyond the thing we're looking at. Vancouver has very much glass architecture, and when more towers get built in glass, the position of glass towers in relation to each other matters. He then asked if there was a master plan for Vancouver, whether the towers meet housing requirements for students and those with low-incomes, etc.

Desmond Hui: attacked the condo craze, blaming it on Hong Kong developers (or at least suggesting them as a cause). Citing some statistics for HK, there were 7 square meters per person on the island city, 20% of the land is "buildable", land prices and taxes are high, so you have to build high (HK developers are experts, evidently, at building high-rises on slopes). He argued that since we have plenty of land, we have more options than building up.

Samia Rab: (she might have lost me in this portion, as my notes don't make a lot of sense) she talked about master planning required of industrial cities—at which point Dennis Sharp interjected with something about medieval cities—and that with horizontal zoning—in response to the problem of industrial pollution—you have segmentation of activity: living, working, and recreating (I think she meant reproducing). The function of public places were to boost the economy of the city. She said there were ways to have parks under buildings, taking rain out of the equation for people to gather.

Joseph Rykwert: the automobile in the 1920s posed a challenge: parking. Already having tall buildings added to the parking problem contributed to urban wastelands.

Yasmin Shariff: museums, educational instutions need to be active, creating dialogue in cities. She noted pre-occupation of the male members of the panel with building size (I had been waiting for someone to add a feminist perspective), but where does the money go? Developers! The role of government is to protect people from exploitation, but so much of the development process is a foregone conclusion with decisions being made before any public participation.

Louise Noelle Gras: downtown Vancouver becoming a resort: people spend a few weeks on vacation. Promoters of the city as a place to live won't do anything without a master plan.

Bing Thom (in the audience): wanted to get people to talk about transportation and authenticity, as Vancouver was once a colonial city for the British, and now for Asia. If it's going to go from a port city to a service city, how do we find our authenticity?

Joyce Drohan: there's no strength between public institutions. All streets in Vancouver end at the waters, not public places. In fact, the water is our public place. What can Vancouver learn from other waterfront cities, as the city has an opportunity to embrace the water like Sydney, Australia.

Samia Rab: not a master plan, but a master vision. Vancouver needs to look at the different layers of history of its places. "The answers are here", she said. She noted that native cultures in Hawaii did not value the waterfront, because the ocean did not yield drinking water: instead, more important to find where the water came from, the springs at the bottom of mountains. Her point was that we have much to learn about ourselves and that the solutions to our urban problems will come from within, not from without.

Joseph Rykwert: in the city, residents are customers, not citizens.

Louise Noelle Gras: Mexico City residents became citizens in September 1985, when the city government failed to respond adequately to the earthquake there. She worries that it will take an earthquake here for Vancouverites to become citizens of their city.

Yasmin Shariff: to raise civil participation, get to know who you're trying to convince. Get architectural critic in the newspapers. (The blogger in me wanted to cry out and point to Pacific Metropolis and the other writers online writing about Vancouver architecture.) Participation needs to incorporate the dynamism of opinions: one solution might be to hold a competition on real projects and get people to vote.