People aren’t taking care of the public realm, a friend says
Bob Ransford
Sun
We may have created in Vancouver the most livable downtown in North America in the last 15 years, if measured in simple numbers alone. The downtown peninsula population has increased by 40,000 to 80,000 and will probably reach at least 110,000 by the end of the decade, double the population before Expo 86.
But what is life really like for downtown dwellers in the new Vancouver?
Recently I received an e-mail from a friend who is a keen observer of just about everything that goes on around her. She and her husband have lived in the West End in a beautiful apartment in a heritage building for as long as I have known them. They are true urbanites, appreciating everything about downtown living.
She was lamenting what she sees as the deterioration of Vancouver’s downtown, especially the West End.
You should know that she is someone who cares deeply about something most people don’t really understand — community. She understands much better than most the interrelationships between the physical environment, the built environment and the way people interact and the way our institutions that represent “community” evolve.
Vancouver‘s new look is “tired and scruffy”, according to my friend. She attributes this appearance and new feeling to the fact that people are simply not paying attention to what’s going on around them on the street. People aren’t taking care of the “public realm”.
This is a term planners use to refer to those public spaces and the bits in between buildings — the places that are special places in highly dense mixed-use neighbourhoods.
“What about stores [especially major chains] that do not bother to sweep the street, pickup garbage or wash down the street in front of their stores – ever? One cannot help thinking that the managers do not live in the neighbourhood or do not care what happens outside the walls of their stores” my friend states, pointing to the lack of concern shown for those areas downtown dwellers should cherish.
The street and sidewalk is the family room or den for many apartment dwellers that lack this kind of informal space in their small apartments.
She also wonders why police aren’t dealing with the “the drunk or drugged panhandlers who hassle the public as they shop at their neighbourhood stores.”
“How can we get people to look around them and pay attention to there surroundings?” she asks with some desperation.
It is interesting that my friend also commented on the “tacky apartment buildings – glass towers, where the backs of computers, cords, backs of desks and other ‘stuff’ are located in front of the window.”
And, “What about people who use their balconies as an additional room to their apartment? The storage of bicycles, kids’ toys, the untended plantings/planters? Everything looking sloppy and untidy and thereby eliminating them for their intended use — outdoor living?”
Her observations about the architectural style of downtown residential towers and the way people live in the space that architects and planners designed might just be a telling commentary on how downtown life is evolving in Vancouver.
There is undoubtedly a connection between the way people value their private living environments and the way they value the public realm.
Is there also a connection between how people perceive the architecture of the built form they are living in and the way they value the place in which they live?
Does Vancouver’s brand of the modern architectural style as embodied in the downtown high-rise residential buildings speak to a lesser sense of value that people attach to their individual living environments — an attitude reflected in a public realm people don’t really cherish?
Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. Email:
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
