On our Stories page, we have put the call out for you to share a story, observation, or idea (big or small) on how you re-imagine downtown Vancouver. Here is how Betsy Agar re-imagines downtown Vancouver:
11 years ago I visited Vancouver for a conference. I stayed at my sister’s house in Deep Cove and relied on TransLink to bus me into the Convention Centre. That’s when I learned that Vancouverites orient themselves around the mountains and the ocean.
I was puzzling over the schedule at a bus stop when a good Samaritan asked how she could help, “Deep Cove? You want to head north, and that means, head for the mountains.”
Even in the 2010 Olympic ads Michael J. Fox is standing in a forest, Sarah McLachlan is at the shoreline, there are random cowboys, fly fishermen, and canoeists, Ryan Reynolds is by a campfire, and Kim Katrall is at a vineyard; Steve Nash and Eric McCormack are the only celebrities actually standing in the city and at some distance from it, or in the case of Nash, seemingly on top of it!
“You gotta be here,” is their line, but where is Vancouver in those clips?
5 years ago, I was house hunting in Metro Vancouver and my sister argued, “North Vancouver is the place you think you are moving to when you move to Vancouver.”
They’re all wrong.
Vancouver is villages within city limits. From Shaughnessy to East Vancouver, it is the neighbourhoods, the people, the history, the conflicts, and the cultures, all nudging up against one another, jostling for a place in their space.
Re-imagining downtown? Well, let’s first imagine who will be there building community gardens, caring for marginalized Vancouverites, sweeping the doorways, generally breathing life—not business bustle—into the space and making it a place. It is the mom and pop shops, the up-and-coming designers, the café’s, and the pubs; it is the pedestrians and cyclists, transit and car shares; it is the people who are in the city, not just traveling through the city, who bring it to its full potential.
Why not have sliding rental rates to allow new businesses to grow? What about open spaces for innovators to collaborate? How could we let community groups host community events at the feet of corporate towers? Where could we plant small garden plots to grow food for foodbanks? Why couldn’t we bring the life back into working with human-oriented planning? When will we truly start to live where we work?
Those are the “who, what, where, when, why, and hows” of my re-imagining downtown. The next time I notice someone is lost in Vancouver, instead of pointing to the mountains, I would hope I could point out the city’s landmarks that orient them straight into the city’s core, or the heart, as they say.
—Betsy Agar is an engineer licensed in Ontario,
now working with Renewable Cities at SFU
Your Turn
Do you have a downtown Vancouver story, observation, or idea (big or small) you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you! Share your contribution with us on our Stories page. Your contributions will help us re-imagine downtown Vancouver!