Ellen Dunham-Jones spoke on Next Generation Urbanism on Tuesday evening as part of the SFU City Program, here in Vancouver. She is a new urbanist and member of the Congress For New Urbanism. She co-authored Retrofitting Suburbia. She spoke on many things and I thought it was a thought provoking presentation that was nicely balanced between being theoretical and conceptual, as well as practical and realist. Her main topic was critiquing a new upstart which is challenging new urbanism. This new movement is called Ecological Urbanism. According to Dunham-Jones, while new urbanists like to plan through good design, ecological urbanists don’t. They prefer to set something in motion and see what happens. Kind of more ecology in the city, but it also seems to be more lower density suburbia where, although surrounded by hills and other natural landscapes, most people would still have to drive everywhere. Being a new urbanist, unsurprisingly, she is fairly critical of ecological urbanism, although she did acknowledge that new urbanists can learn something from the less planned, more spontaneous places that seem to be so popular. I asked a question at the end, suggesting Vancouver’s own Granville Island was a good example of this. She hadn’t heard of Granville Island, but I hope she has time to check it out during her stay. Now I don’t know for sure whether Granville Island was unplanned or whether it just appears that way. But Dunham-Jones didn’t seem to think that mattered. The fact that it feels different and looks different, in a good way, is enough.
She also mentioned that post recession, we will have to find cheaper ways of doing things. People may become less consumer focused out of necessity. Will there be a new emphasis on seeking happiness? I thought it interesting that she thinks that as a result we’ll have to find alternatives to retail to enliven our public spaces.
As part of this, she mentioned some small scale examples of temporary things people have done to enliven public spaces. Examples included Parking Day, Build a Better Block, Pop Up City and, one I especially liked the sound of, Pie Day.
And I won a book. ‘Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley‘ by Derek Hayes. It has a lot of old maps in it – I like it already. Thanks to Gordon Price and the City Program for that. All I did was stand up when asked who had a blog!
Granville island has a nice mix between cars and people, as with the best shared spaces, but spontaneous? Unplanned? Oh no… that place has had the bejeezus planned out of it right from the moment that CMHC cleared out most of the industry and developed a meticulously designed festival marketplace with a carefully curated mix of tenants; even the buskers are managed by the CMHC.
Does it work? Is it successful? Is it a pleasant place? My take is that sure, it’s pretty cool; it’d be nice if Vancouver had a ‘real’ market (like Jean-Talon in Montréal), but Granville Island is pretty nice. But it sure as heck didn’t emerge spontaneously, it took a lot of effort and careful planning. Who knows, maybe it’d've been even more interesting had it been truly unplanned…
Granville Island was an entirely planned entity and is still owned by the CMHC…if that’s what you’re asking.
Point taken people! Yes, Granville Island is ‘planned’. However, it does feel less planned than many other places. A concrete factory next to a public market? And as I said, it seemed to be the feeling of unplanned that Dunham-Jones was after.
I assume the concrete factory is there is because Vancouver can’t rezone ALL it’s industrial land and nor should it.
[...] in the theory of place making. Jason King, on his Landscape and Urbanism blog linked back to my review of the Ellen Dunham Jones lecture. His post, entitled, ‘More on Ecological Urbanism‘ provides a view from the other side, [...]