Tag Archives: urban planning

Jane’s Walking through Vancouver’s Historical Communities

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“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

— Jane Jacobs, ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’

It’s a simple equation, really: walking + history + people + urban literacy = strong, vibrant communities. This Saturday and Sunday (May 1 & 2, 2010) you can be part of the equation by participating in Vancouver’s Jane’s Walk 2010.

Fun Fact: Jane’s Walk is a Canadian creation that has been exported around the world – today, there are over 400 Jane’s Walks taking place on Earth. And you can be a part of it.

The Vancouver initiative is developed and driven by Think City, which, according to their website, “helps citizens understand the issues facing their communities while developing collective solutions to protect the environment, strengthen local economies, advance democratic rights and ensure access to quality public services.” After all, walking, as our Resident Architect, Stewartworks, will tell you, is perhaps the best method of transportation for properly engaging a community.

Jane’s Walk is all about the ideas of Jane Jacobs – writer, activist, Uncle Sam Impersonator – who stood up for the interests of local residents and pedestrians in opposition to a car-centered approach to planning. The event strives to take Jacobs’ ideas to communities unfamiliar with her ideas, like Phoenix, in order to advance raise awareness for people-first planning and design.  The walks bring people together based on shared interest; some of the best communities have been formed by strangers going for walks.

Recently, I sat down with Jane’s Walks Vancouver coordinator, Kim Fleming, who let me know about the impact this event makes on communities. “Jane’s Walk builds community in a number of ways. Firstly, it gets people out of their cars walking around their neighbourhoods talking to their neighbours! The idea behind Jane’s Walk is that it is a dialogue that happens while you are are on the walk. The tour host is more like a fascilitator who has knowledge around a theme and the idea is to engage interested people and have them share their knowledge, ideas and experiences as well. Walkers get a broader picture of their community and the people who live in it.”

And, in true Gumboot style, I asked Kim to identify her three favourite things about Jane’s Walks:

1. It builds community!(see above)

2. It allows us to discover and re-discover our city through pedestrian focused activities and the use of public space…all public space which includes our sidewalks, laneways, parks, school yards, boulevards etc…

The great surprise in the Olympics for me was the use of public space and the great sense of community that using those spaces built, pride in our community, our city and connection with our fellow citizens. We don’t, in Vancouver, use our public spaces in this way very often and our planning does not factor in the importance of it. But we saw with the Olympics that it is important and what we see with Jane’s Walk, which is all about this, is that Vancouverites have a hunger for it! It is our city after all.

3. Walkability. It’s fun, its healthy, its free! Exploring is fun. Stories are fun! People are interesting. Jane’s Walk is just a starting point. Walkability is a concept that can carry through every time you put foot to pavement, not just on a Jane’s Walk, when you go to the cornerstore think about how it got there, (is there a cornerstore? where would one be if there was….)how is the sidewalk used that you are walking on, who uses it?…

Needless to say, I will be attending a Jane’s Walk on Sunday. And I’m lucky. Because my guide is pretty much the Indiana Jones of Jane’s Walks. His name is Phil Skipper and he will be facilitating a community-minded jaunt around Douglas Park and the South Cambie ‘hood. From Phil, I expect to experience humour, random (seemingly impossible) facts, excellent questions, and possibly coordinated dance off against another tour-group and/or some unsuspecting neighbours. You can register for Phil’s walk by following this link.

Finally, before, during and after the walk take lots of pictures. Later from home, upload your best photos to Flickr and add thinkcity and janeswalk10 as tags. If you have a Twitter account, please update your status with anything of interest you see or learn along the walk. Use #janeswalk10 and #janeswalk before your message. Be collaborative and social – after all, it’s all about community!

Growing Pains

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Greenbelt_mapIn the GTA the question of whether an individual municipality should continue population and economic growth isn’t up for debate. That question has already been decided. But what really needs to be considered is how to grow and the decisions that GTA municipalities are in the process of making now will shape our communities for decades to come.

To provide some context, other than Lake Ontario, there are no natural barriers to constrain the GTA’s outward growth. And since Lake Ontario has been subject to infilling, even it to a small extent has been encroached upon. And the result of no natural boundaries, supportive provincial policy, demand for single family homes, cheap fuel for our cars, big pipes and roads, etc. has been decades of unconstrained growth and sprawling suburban municipalities. (It’s a lot more complicated than that, so check out Frances Frisken’s The Public Metropolis: The Political Dynamics of Urban Expansion in the Toronto Region, 1924-2003 or John Sewell’s Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl).

The pace of outward growth is now being disrupted by two pieces of provincial legislation: “The Greenbelt Act” and “The Places to Grow Act”. In short, the Greenbelt protects 1.8 million acres of land from development in 2005 and is based on supporting the environment, recreation and agriculture. Greenbelts aren’t a new concept. BC has an Agricultural Land Reserve and Ottawa also has a Greenbelt.

The companion piece of legislation is “The Places to Grow Act”. It charts out growth in the GTA until 2031 and expects an additional 3.7 million people to move to the GTA by then, bringing the total population to around 11.5 million. Plus, the plan includes the forecast for 1.8 million new jobs. On the maps it includes land designated between the Greenbelt and the developed area that has the potential for further outward development (it is commonly called the Whitebelt). Since Places to Grow was enacted in 2005 the province has given growth targets to regional municipalities and the regional municipalities are now in turn setting growth targets for their local municipalities (most suburban municipalities in the GTA are two tiered).

For most GTA municipalities it took around 5 years to get to the point where there is a clearer picture of what kind of growth targets they actually have to deal with. And now the question they all have to grapple with is how to grow. Between last year and this year most municipalities will be deciding how much of that growth will be intensification (within the current built up area) and how much will be in the Whitebelt (a lot of that is still being farmed). Some are toying with the idea of growing the Greenbelt, so the province now has guidelines for municipalities to follow. Markham, one of where I work, has yet to determine its intensification and is having a public meeting on Tuesday, February 16th.

The Greenbelt and Places to Grow have the potential and intention to move the GTA’s municipalities towards being more sustainable, livable, walkable, bikeable, transit oriented, compact and complete communities. But getting it right isn’t going to be easy. There are divided opinions within the suburbs; residents who want their community to stay suburban and others that want to urbanize, developers who want to continue building low density single family homes and others who are interested in density and condos, and farmers who want to sell their land to the highest bidder regardless of their intended land use and others who are desperately seeking long-term security to keep their farm where it is. It is complicated to say the least and no municipality is having an easy time with the decisions that they have to make.

Urban Planning and Oxygen

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scenic vineyards cliffs lake

Riding through vineyards is fun - but watch out for snakes.

Urban planning is a lot like oxygen, you don’t miss it until you realize you no longer have it.

I realized this on my recent father-son bike tour through the Okanagan. Last week my dad and I set out to wander the vineyards of the Okanagan and test our mettle against the windy hills of Penticton and beyond. During the journey, we visited three small Okanagan cities and one small town.

In Penticton, we found the first great example of a contrast between good and bad urban planning. The effects on local community were just as obvious. As we drove into the city, we were met with a strip of fast food joints all serving the same cheap, unhealthy stuff. The roads were large and the parking lots massive and packed with every type of American built truck you could imagine. After cruising by half-a-dozen RV parks, drive-in motels and big box stores we finally found ourselves in the three square blocks of downtown Penticton. Unlike the train wreck of urban sprawl we witnessed on entry to the city, downtown Penticton was quaint with a variety of small cafes, a couple little mom and pop restaurants and a used book store that was to die for. There was even a local community mural project that had drawn dozens of young artists to spray a wide array of different gorgeous designs on the walls (some of these designs were as impressive as Vancouver’s recent offering of community art). The whole project was funded by the Penticton Business Improvement Association.

On the streets, there weren’t to many people wandering around, and I imagined many of the residents of the city now avoid the downtown area for their shopping needs preferring the big box shops we’d passed by. Transit was basic to say the least and considering the sprawl of large single level houses out into the hills, it’d be almost impossible to provide decent service. As a result people drive – everywhere.

The thought made me sad. It also made me lonely, as I glanced around it was difficult finding many people (oh so vital for most communities) on the streets.

The next day, we set out on our bikes for OK Falls. Along we went, hugging the side of Skaha Lake and passing dozens of for sale signs. It seemed at time that half the Okanagan was for sale – thousands of retirees who were retirees no more following the market’s collapse and were desperately trying to sell back their dream homes in the face of market cataclysm.

When we arrived at OK Falls, we got yet another treat of just how important decent urban planning is to making a town desirable. Unlike other small towns I’ve driven through, which lay in far less gorgeous a location, OK Falls had no centre. In the mad rush to cash in on development, RV parks and gated villas were given run of the beach area. A few blocks back, on what seemed to pass for main street, the few shops stood depressed and devoid of any particularly welcoming vibe.  It wouldn’t be a stretch to watch tumbleweeds pass by the deserted, dusty streets.

Contrast this with Naramata, another small town on another lake (Okanagan Lake rather than Skaha) and you see the opposite. Even in a depressed fall economy, Naramata had a core at the bottom of the hill and seemed quaint rather than desolate. The shops there were well maintained and the streets were surrounded by dozens of pretty and smaller homes and cottages. Unlike OK Falls, there was no highway running through the town.

OK Falls Aint Ok.

OK Falls Aint Ok.

Later in the trip we visited both Oliver and Kelowna. Both cities had a far denser main street/downtown areas and with that density and local business feeling came much more economic and social activity. Kids riding bikes, people sipping coffee or wine at local cafes, and general businesses setting up shop all build community.

It became increasingly clear that although all of these things seem possible in a district surrounded by dozens of  wineries, which draw millions of tourist dollars each summer, they can be undermined by poor urban planning.

These days, the more I travel and see other ways cities and towns have developed, the more conscious and thankful I am for the wise planners up in City Hall. Way to go folks. Way to keep Vancouver from being a really big version of  Penticton.