[Music]
I’m here this morning to actually make a
confession to you a confession to a
lifelong obsession and that is that ever
since I was a child I’ve been fascinated
by laneways by the forgotten places in
our communities these are the vacant
lots these are the the hidden places and
for me they held the sense of wonder a
sense of being able to explore and never
knowing what you’d actually come across
in these spaces this unfortunately drove
my family crazy because like all of the
other normal people in this world they
would when they wanted to go for a walk
they’d good on the places that they were
supposed to go which is the sidewalks in
the front yards past all of the things
that people wanted them to see the nice
lawns the the manicured flowerbeds and
the pretty cars that didn’t interest me
I was interested in what was behind that
facade and what was behind that mask and
that’s what I found in laneways was the
ability to to peer over a fence and to
see what was behind behind the things
that people wanted you to see I found a
realness there an authenticity there
that just absolutely captivated me I
grew up to become an architect in part
because of my fascination with spaces
like this but what I discovered as I
started to peer into other laneways
across the city was that they weren’t
the same positive experiences that I had
had as a child in fact these were places
that were dominated by feelings of fear
by by garbage trucks picking up garbage
bins by by service vehicles by you know
discarded needles and and people that
had to sleep there because they didn’t
have any other where else to go and I
started to understand that these
laneways were actually representative of
the larger forces that are that are
shaping our cities today and those
forces are to do with things that are
not about people they’re to do with land
economics they’re to do with planning
and zoning policy they’re to do with
with power politics governance and that
those is so in a sense these these
laneways are representative fragments of
how our cities are crafted and the one
thing that was absolutely clear to me is
that people certainly didn’t factor into
that list lane waves were this were this
unique space where you could peer into
the guts of the city where you could
understand what actually shapes the city
and what I found there wasn’t wasn’t all
that inspiring one of the most powerful
questions we have at our disposal is the
what-if question and it’s because it
takes us out of the realm of our current
constraints and the boundaries that were
we currently find ourselves in everyday
and it allows us to to paint a picture
of what could be what is truly possible
I get to work with an awful lot of
talented folks at my firm which is HC MA
architecture and design and we started
to ask that question about the city that
we love that the city that is dear to us
in a pretty serious way we started to
ask the what-if question about different
parts of our city we started with the
harbor all of you know that our city has
the same called the seawall and the
seawall does one thing really well and
that is move people back and forth along
the sea well rollerblades strollers
bikes you name it and it moves people
awfully fast
one of the things that doesn’t do is
actually allow you to engage with the
water which is a crying shame in my
opinion because water has this this
transformative potential is it’s a
magnetic material that brings people
together and so we started to ask the
question what if the harbor was a place
for people what if it allowed people to
actually engage with the water and so in
the middle of one of North America’s
busiest harbors right next to the to the
freighters right next to the sea planes
that are landing we came up with a
concept for something we called Harbor
deck and harbor deck was simply it
wasn’t it wasn’t a dock it wasn’t a pool
it wasn’t a it wasn’t a a park it was a
new form of public space and it and its
mandate was simple allow people to
re-engage with this thing we call water
so you can come here you can sit you can
take a load off you can meet somebody
you’ve never met before you can your
kids can splash in the water you can
take a selfie I don’t know if this is
ever going to get built but we we
started to understand the power of
asking questions and casting a vision
based on those questions and quite
frankly we started to get excited by the
question so we we started experimenting
with other ways of asking the what-if
question we partnered with Simon Fraser
University and we brought together over
a hundred people from all walks of life
these are creatives and non creatives
and ordinary people we brought them
together for one afternoon with a single
mandate and that mandate was make one
small part of your city
this city better for one day make it a
place for people for one afternoon
that’s it and so we had a lot of fun we
put people into random teams give them
random sites and very small budgets and
then we unleashed these hundred people
on the city and and the impact was
transformative for one afternoon in our
city the city that you and I know it was
changed people would walk through a
space they’d walk through a thousand
times on the way to work and saw it in a
completely different light they stopped
and had conversations with people that
they had never met before because of
whatever something funny was happening
on the street corner and we started to
understand what could happen if we
started to apply the what-if question
what’s possible question to the cities
that we live in but it wasn’t enough we
we had this this amazing experience on a
rainy November afternoon and we
understood understand what the impact
could be but we got greedy we wanted
that impact to be bigger we wanted we
wanted to have a bigger impact and so
not unsurprisingly that took us back to
laneways and we started to ask the
question how do we make laneways a place
for people how do we take take it out of
the realm of service of power
infrastructure of fear and and put
people back in lane ways and so we
started we started and we started
partnering with the local BIA
we partnered with the city and we
started spending time in these spaces to
really get to know them to understand
them we put up cameras in them we put
students in the alleyways to count
people and we started to uncover some
really interesting things firstly and
not so unsurprisingly the the majority
of the traffic in these spaces is really
vehicle driven so it’s garbage trucks
it’s service its delivery vehicles but
we also discovered that the people that
are travelling new through these spaces
are really just traveling through
they’re not spending any time in in
those spaces and perhaps most
surprisingly we discovered that the
ratio of males to females in of the
people that were travelling through that
space was heavily weighted towards males
which tells us that this isn’t a space
that’s welcoming for all people in our
society it’s not a space that is safe
it’s not a space that is inclusive so we
took all that data and we crunched it
down and we came up with an idea and the
idea was something we called a loop and
really it rested
on one fundamental notion and that is
that in the heart of what is
characterized in this part of the city
as a financial district a place of
Commerce and business we would introduce
the notion of play as a fine grained
kind of insertion to the character of
the existing neighborhood and so we
started planning we do what we do as
architects we design we sketched we drew
and then we started throwing paint down
we covered the walls we covered the
floors in bright colors of paint we we
put court markings on so people could
play basketball so that people could
kick a soccer ball around or hockey play
hopscotch we wrapped the cafe’s around
from the end so you could sit in the
alleyway and just have coffee and then
we invited the city in to their new
space and the the the reception that
received was overwhelming people
instantly be even beyond the initial
opening party people accepted this space
as a new part of their community it was
overwhelmingly adopted by all people all
members of our society you can go here
on a Friday night at 11:30 at night and
there would be people playing basketball
in this alleyway the local language
school now does their phys ed classes in
the alleyway people complete strangers
come by and there and they talk about
what’s going on in this space
it took Instagram by a storm it became
the the selfie darling for Vancouver for
for a long time and and we have pictures
of stuff that we had no idea ever would
have happened in this plain way and we
learned some really interesting things
we went back and actually measured the
the statistics and what we discovered
absolutely floored us because the foot
traffic tripled simply because of the
small intervention it tripled the amount
of people that are spending and they
weren’t just they weren’t just traveling
through they were spending time in the
space there the duration of stay in that
space had had grown dramatically we also
discovered that the ratio of female
pedestrians had gone up by almost 50%
which was which was really satisfying
for us we also discovered that this
isn’t necessarily not everybody adopted
this change in the same way that we
would have hoped to we sat down with the
planners the first time and we had 20
engineers sitting at a table trying to
figure out how to shoehorn this thing
through some sort of a permit it wasn’t
a mural it wasn’t a building and it
certainly wasn’t a public art piece and
so they were scratching their heads for
a while
and we also discovered that
psychiatrists really don’t like the
sound of basketballs being bounced off
of their office walls when they’re in
the middle of a session and we also
discovered that people have different
ideas of public property and in fact
this gentleman here decided to walk out
for their basketball hoop about three
weeks ago so if you see him walking
around we would like our basketball hoop
back please
but the most important thing we learned
is that you can have a dramatically
disproportionately large impact with
small change it doesn’t have to be big
it doesn’t have to be expensive we’re
moving on to the next thing this is a
crazily and we’re gonna envision a micro
performance space in the heart of a
dingy alley behind the Orpheum with a
public interactive art piece here’s the
cool thing about this one we didn’t have
enough money to build this so we went
out to the public with a Kickstarter
campaign we asked for $35,000 we said if
you guys want this space if this is
something you want for your city for
your city not my city not HCM a city
your city then put your money where your
mouth is and we had over 450 people
commit and contribute to the campaign
and when we close the doors on it three
weeks later we had sixty seven thousand
dollars in the coffers and so this is
going ahead this is getting built right
now you can go down there it’s it’s
they’re throwing paint up on the walls
but there’s one thing I need to talk
about here which which scared the
daylights out of me at the beginning of
this project and was my biggest fear
before we embarked on this and that is
you and I all know that there’s there’s
people in our city who aren’t as
fortunate as we are people in our city
that call alleyways home it’s the place
where they do business where they do
work where they live in play the last
thing that I wanted this to do was to
take that space away from people that
really needed it and hand it over to a
bunch of privileged people who could
afford to take a couple hours off at
lunchtime to play basketball so I want
to introduce you to a gentleman named
Rob Rob is a binner and he lives in
Allie and one day one of my colleagues
had the good fortune of travelling
through the alleyway on his way to work
and Rob was in a bin and he popped out
and he said and he said so my colleague
ostomy said what’s going on here what
have they done and and Rob said it’s
crazy they’ve they’ve completely changed
it they’ve painted everything it’s a
totally different space
so my colleague asked him another
question he said okay let that sounds
great but is it is it a good thing or is
it a bad thing like how’s this impacting
you and what he said next absolutely
floored me
well first he said he held up a banana
he said well the food sure has gotten
better but what he said next I’ll never
forget he said kids now come up to me in
the space they’ll talk to me they ask me
questions
they never did that before it’s a space
now I feel like I’m part of a community
now it’s a it’s a democratic space where
I can belong where right where people
feel comfortable engaging me in a
conversation so when we talk about
building cities and and cities belonging
to people we need to remember one thing
and be absolutely crystal clear on this
and that is that cities belong to all
people they belong to you they belong to
me they belong to our children and they
almost certainly belong to people like
Rob all of you have spaces in your mind
that are going through your mind the
vacant lots or the hidden corners of
your city I want you to think about
those spaces and I want you to ask
yourself how could those spaces be
different if they were places for people
I want you to ask yourself the what-if
question and this isn’t gonna be easy
this is hard work it takes courage takes
commitment it takes risk but here’s why
it’s worth it this is my son this is me
thirty years ago
I owe it to him to give him a city that
he belongs in that he finds the same
wonder and inspiration and that I did
you owe it to your children we owe it to
the people in this room we owe it to the
next generation to ask the what-if
question and then to do something about
it
thank you
you
[Music]
I’m here this morning to actually make a
confession to you a confession to a
lifelong obsession and that is that ever
since I was a child I’ve been fascinated
by laneways by the forgotten places in
our communities these are the vacant
lots these are the the hidden places and
for me they held the sense of wonder a
sense of being able to explore and never
knowing what you’d actually come across
in these spaces this unfortunately drove
my family crazy because like all of the
other normal people in this world they
would when they wanted to go for a walk
they’d good on the places that they were
supposed to go which is the sidewalks in
the front yards past all of the things
that people wanted them to see the nice
lawns the the manicured flowerbeds and
the pretty cars that didn’t interest me
I was interested in what was behind that
facade and what was behind that mask and
that’s what I found in laneways was the
ability to to peer over a fence and to
see what was behind behind the things
that people wanted you to see I found a
realness there an authenticity there
that just absolutely captivated me I
grew up to become an architect in part
because of my fascination with spaces
like this but what I discovered as I
started to peer into other laneways
across the city was that they weren’t
the same positive experiences that I had
had as a child in fact these were places
that were dominated by feelings of fear
by by garbage trucks picking up garbage
bins by by service vehicles by you know
discarded needles and and people that
had to sleep there because they didn’t
have any other where else to go and I
started to understand that these
laneways were actually representative of
the larger forces that are that are
shaping our cities today and those
forces are to do with things that are
not about people they’re to do with land
economics they’re to do with planning
and zoning policy they’re to do with
with power politics governance and that
those is so in a sense these these
laneways are representative fragments of
how our cities are crafted and the one
thing that was absolutely clear to me is
that people certainly didn’t factor into
that list lane waves were this were this
unique space where you could peer into
the guts of the city where you could
understand what actually shapes the city
and what I found there wasn’t wasn’t all
that inspiring one of the most powerful
questions we have at our disposal is the
what-if question and it’s because it
takes us out of the realm of our current
constraints and the boundaries that were
we currently find ourselves in everyday
and it allows us to to paint a picture
of what could be what is truly possible
I get to work with an awful lot of
talented folks at my firm which is HC MA
architecture and design and we started
to ask that question about the city that
we love that the city that is dear to us
in a pretty serious way we started to
ask the what-if question about different
parts of our city we started with the
harbor all of you know that our city has
the same called the seawall and the
seawall does one thing really well and
that is move people back and forth along
the sea well rollerblades strollers
bikes you name it and it moves people
awfully fast
one of the things that doesn’t do is
actually allow you to engage with the
water which is a crying shame in my
opinion because water has this this
transformative potential is it’s a
magnetic material that brings people
together and so we started to ask the
question what if the harbor was a place
for people what if it allowed people to
actually engage with the water and so in
the middle of one of North America’s
busiest harbors right next to the to the
freighters right next to the sea planes
that are landing we came up with a
concept for something we called Harbor
deck and harbor deck was simply it
wasn’t it wasn’t a dock it wasn’t a pool
it wasn’t a it wasn’t a a park it was a
new form of public space and it and its
mandate was simple allow people to
re-engage with this thing we call water
so you can come here you can sit you can
take a load off you can meet somebody
you’ve never met before you can your
kids can splash in the water you can
take a selfie I don’t know if this is
ever going to get built but we we
started to understand the power of
asking questions and casting a vision
based on those questions and quite
frankly we started to get excited by the
question so we we started experimenting
with other ways of asking the what-if
question we partnered with Simon Fraser
University and we brought together over
a hundred people from all walks of life
these are creatives and non creatives
and ordinary people we brought them
together for one afternoon with a single
mandate and that mandate was make one
small part of your city
this city better for one day make it a
place for people for one afternoon
that’s it and so we had a lot of fun we
put people into random teams give them
random sites and very small budgets and
then we unleashed these hundred people
on the city and and the impact was
transformative for one afternoon in our
city the city that you and I know it was
changed people would walk through a
space they’d walk through a thousand
times on the way to work and saw it in a
completely different light they stopped
and had conversations with people that
they had never met before because of
whatever something funny was happening
on the street corner and we started to
understand what could happen if we
started to apply the what-if question
what’s possible question to the cities
that we live in but it wasn’t enough we
we had this this amazing experience on a
rainy November afternoon and we
understood understand what the impact
could be but we got greedy we wanted
that impact to be bigger we wanted we
wanted to have a bigger impact and so
not unsurprisingly that took us back to
laneways and we started to ask the
question how do we make laneways a place
for people how do we take take it out of
the realm of service of power
infrastructure of fear and and put
people back in lane ways and so we
started we started and we started
partnering with the local BIA
we partnered with the city and we
started spending time in these spaces to
really get to know them to understand
them we put up cameras in them we put
students in the alleyways to count
people and we started to uncover some
really interesting things firstly and
not so unsurprisingly the the majority
of the traffic in these spaces is really
vehicle driven so it’s garbage trucks
it’s service its delivery vehicles but
we also discovered that the people that
are travelling new through these spaces
are really just traveling through
they’re not spending any time in in
those spaces and perhaps most
surprisingly we discovered that the
ratio of males to females in of the
people that were travelling through that
space was heavily weighted towards males
which tells us that this isn’t a space
that’s welcoming for all people in our
society it’s not a space that is safe
it’s not a space that is inclusive so we
took all that data and we crunched it
down and we came up with an idea and the
idea was something we called a loop and
really it rested
on one fundamental notion and that is
that in the heart of what is
characterized in this part of the city
as a financial district a place of
Commerce and business we would introduce
the notion of play as a fine grained
kind of insertion to the character of
the existing neighborhood and so we
started planning we do what we do as
architects we design we sketched we drew
and then we started throwing paint down
we covered the walls we covered the
floors in bright colors of paint we we
put court markings on so people could
play basketball so that people could
kick a soccer ball around or hockey play
hopscotch we wrapped the cafe’s around
from the end so you could sit in the
alleyway and just have coffee and then
we invited the city in to their new
space and the the the reception that
received was overwhelming people
instantly be even beyond the initial
opening party people accepted this space
as a new part of their community it was
overwhelmingly adopted by all people all
members of our society you can go here
on a Friday night at 11:30 at night and
there would be people playing basketball
in this alleyway the local language
school now does their phys ed classes in
the alleyway people complete strangers
come by and there and they talk about
what’s going on in this space
it took Instagram by a storm it became
the the selfie darling for Vancouver for
for a long time and and we have pictures
of stuff that we had no idea ever would
have happened in this plain way and we
learned some really interesting things
we went back and actually measured the
the statistics and what we discovered
absolutely floored us because the foot
traffic tripled simply because of the
small intervention it tripled the amount
of people that are spending and they
weren’t just they weren’t just traveling
through they were spending time in the
space there the duration of stay in that
space had had grown dramatically we also
discovered that the ratio of female
pedestrians had gone up by almost 50%
which was which was really satisfying
for us we also discovered that this
isn’t necessarily not everybody adopted
this change in the same way that we
would have hoped to we sat down with the
planners the first time and we had 20
engineers sitting at a table trying to
figure out how to shoehorn this thing
through some sort of a permit it wasn’t
a mural it wasn’t a building and it
certainly wasn’t a public art piece and
so they were scratching their heads for
a while
and we also discovered that
psychiatrists really don’t like the
sound of basketballs being bounced off
of their office walls when they’re in
the middle of a session and we also
discovered that people have different
ideas of public property and in fact
this gentleman here decided to walk out
for their basketball hoop about three
weeks ago so if you see him walking
around we would like our basketball hoop
back please
but the most important thing we learned
is that you can have a dramatically
disproportionately large impact with
small change it doesn’t have to be big
it doesn’t have to be expensive we’re
moving on to the next thing this is a
crazily and we’re gonna envision a micro
performance space in the heart of a
dingy alley behind the Orpheum with a
public interactive art piece here’s the
cool thing about this one we didn’t have
enough money to build this so we went
out to the public with a Kickstarter
campaign we asked for $35,000 we said if
you guys want this space if this is
something you want for your city for
your city not my city not HCM a city
your city then put your money where your
mouth is and we had over 450 people
commit and contribute to the campaign
and when we close the doors on it three
weeks later we had sixty seven thousand
dollars in the coffers and so this is
going ahead this is getting built right
now you can go down there it’s it’s
they’re throwing paint up on the walls
but there’s one thing I need to talk
about here which which scared the
daylights out of me at the beginning of
this project and was my biggest fear
before we embarked on this and that is
you and I all know that there’s there’s
people in our city who aren’t as
fortunate as we are people in our city
that call alleyways home it’s the place
where they do business where they do
work where they live in play the last
thing that I wanted this to do was to
take that space away from people that
really needed it and hand it over to a
bunch of privileged people who could
afford to take a couple hours off at
lunchtime to play basketball so I want
to introduce you to a gentleman named
Rob Rob is a binner and he lives in
Allie and one day one of my colleagues
had the good fortune of travelling
through the alleyway on his way to work
and Rob was in a bin and he popped out
and he said and he said so my colleague
ostomy said what’s going on here what
have they done and and Rob said it’s
crazy they’ve they’ve completely changed
it they’ve painted everything it’s a
totally different space
so my colleague asked him another
question he said okay let that sounds
great but is it is it a good thing or is
it a bad thing like how’s this impacting
you and what he said next absolutely
floored me
well first he said he held up a banana
he said well the food sure has gotten
better but what he said next I’ll never
forget he said kids now come up to me in
the space they’ll talk to me they ask me
questions
they never did that before it’s a space
now I feel like I’m part of a community
now it’s a it’s a democratic space where
I can belong where right where people
feel comfortable engaging me in a
conversation so when we talk about
building cities and and cities belonging
to people we need to remember one thing
and be absolutely crystal clear on this
and that is that cities belong to all
people they belong to you they belong to
me they belong to our children and they
almost certainly belong to people like
Rob all of you have spaces in your mind
that are going through your mind the
vacant lots or the hidden corners of
your city I want you to think about
those spaces and I want you to ask
yourself how could those spaces be
different if they were places for people
I want you to ask yourself the what-if
question and this isn’t gonna be easy
this is hard work it takes courage takes
commitment it takes risk but here’s why
it’s worth it this is my son this is me
thirty years ago
I owe it to him to give him a city that
he belongs in that he finds the same
wonder and inspiration and that I did
you owe it to your children we owe it to
the people in this room we owe it to the
next generation to ask the what-if
question and then to do something about
it
thank you
you
[Music]
Please follow and like us: