The Vancouver Achievement

The Vancouver Achievement

Author: John Punter

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0774859903

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This book examines the development of Vancouver’s unique approach to zoning, planning, and urban design from its inception in the early 1970s to its maturity in the management of urban change at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By the late 1990s, Vancouver had established a reputation in North America for its planning achievement, especially for its creation of a participative, responsive, and design-led approach to urban regeneration and redevelopment. This system has other important features: an innovative approach to megaproject planning, a system of cost and amenity levies on major schemes, a participative CityPlan process to underpin active neighbourhood planning, and a sophisticated panoply of design guidelines. These systems, processes, and their achievements place Vancouver at the forefront of international planning practice. The Vancouver Achievement explains the evolution and evaluates the outcomes of Vancouver’s unique system of discretionary zoning. The introductory chapters set the context for the study: they cover the invention and refinement of this system in the reform movement, its development of policies, guidelines, and control processes, and its translation into official development plans and neighbourhood design in the 1970s. Subsequent chapters focus upon the downtown, waterfront megaprojects, single-family neighbourhoods, the city-wide strategic planning programme (CityPlan), pressures for reform of control processes, and current downtown and inner city developments, especially issues of affordable housing, social exclusion, and multiple deprivation. The concluding chapter summarizes The Vancouver Achievement, explains the keys to its success, and evaluates its design success against internationally accepted criteria. Heavily illustrated with over 160 photos and figures, this book – the first comprehensive account of contemporary planning and urban design practice in any Canadian city – will appeal to academic and professional audiences, as well as the general public


Street-Level Architecture

Street-Level Architecture

Author: Conrad Kickert

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-04

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000603342

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This book provides the tools to maintain and rebuild the interaction between architecture and public space. Despite the best intentions of designers and planners, interactive frontages have dwindled over the past century in Europe and North America. This book demonstrates why even our best intentions for interactive frontages are currently unable to turn a swelling tide of economic and technological evolution, land consolidation, introversion, stratification, and contagious decline. It uses these lessons to offer concrete locational, programming, design, and management strategies to maximize street-level interaction and trust between street-level architecture, its inhabitants, and the city. This book demonstrates that designers, developers, planners, and managers ultimately have to create the right preconditions for inhabitants and passersby to bring frontages to life. These preconditions connect architecture to its urban, social, economical, and technological context. Only the right frontage in the right context, with the right design, the right inhabitation, and the right attitude to the city will become part of the ecosystem of trust and interaction that supports public life. This book empowers the many participants in this ecosystem to build, inhabit, and enjoy truly urbane architecture.


Citizen Participation at the Local Level in China and Canada

Citizen Participation at the Local Level in China and Canada

Author: Andrew Sancton

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1482228971

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What, if anything, is similar about citizen participation at the local level in Canada and China? The answer, of course, is politically sensitive. There are many in Canada who would claim that the question is absurd. How can there be meaningful citizen participation in a country where there are significant restrictions on political activity, including on the right to form organizations with political purposes? Presenting the work of leading scholars, Citizen Participation at the Local Level in China and Canada examines how citizens in each country participate at the local level. The book examines the development of citizen participation in local governance in Canada and China respectively. It then covers the characteristics of political culture and climate on local participation, highlighting factors especially unique to urban poor, class migration, and aboriginal and immigrant populations. The chapters also explore means of protest, demonstration, and articulation of preference by populations and issues where citizen participation has effected change such as land use, housing, urban development, and resource sustainability. The book includes case studies that compare Canadian and Chinese communities and extrapolate interesting policy-level changes at the local level based on citizen behavior and involvement. It underscores the similarities and differences in political participation in both countries and sets the stage for the steps in the citizen participation in both countries.


Becoming Vancouver

Becoming Vancouver

Author: Daniel Francis

Publisher: Harbour Publishing

Published: 2021-09-25

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1550179179

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A brisk chronicle of Vancouver, BC, from early days to its emergence as a global metropolis, refracted through the events, characters and communities that have shaped the city. In Becoming Vancouver award-winning historian Daniel Francis follows the evolution of the city from early habitation by the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to the area’s settlement as a mill town, to the flourishing era speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s, to the years of poverty and protest during the 1930s followed by the long wartime and postwar boom to the city’s current status as real-estate investment choice of the global super-rich. Tracing decades of transformation, immigration and economic development, Francis examines the events and characters that have defined the city’s geography, economy and politics. Francis enlivens his text with rich characterizations of the people who shaped Vancouver: determined Chief Joe Capilano, who in 1906 took a delegation to England to appeal directly to King Edward VII for better treatment of Indigenous peoples; brilliant and successful Won Alexander Cumyow, the first recorded person of Chinese descent born in Canada; L.D. Taylor, irrepressible ex-Chicagoan who still holds the record as the city’s longest-serving mayor; and tireless activist Helena Gutteridge, Vancouver’s first woman councillor. Vancouver has been called a city without a history, partly because of its youth but also because of the way it seems to change so quickly. Newcomers to the city, arriving by the thousands every year, find few physical reminders of what was before, making a work like Becoming Vancouver so essential.


The Interactive Documentary in Canada

The Interactive Documentary in Canada

Author: Michael Brendan Baker

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0228021626

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Interactive documentary emerged rapidly from a constellation of changing technologies and practices to much excitement, yet its history is short and its future uncertain. In the mid-2010s Canada was a world leader in the creation of i-docs. Less than a decade later technological obsolescence has rendered many of these celebrated projects inaccessible, while rapid digital innovation continues to change the i-doc form and its modes of experience. The Interactive Documentary in Canada captures this transitional moment in documentary filmmaking and media production. Bringing together a range of historical, theoretical, and critical approaches, this collection examines the past – and the imagined future – of a nonfiction storytelling phenomenon that has Canadian institutions, figures, and works at its centre. Embracing a polyphonic conception of interactive documentary, the volume includes explorations of web-based, app-based, installation, and virtual reality works that push the boundaries of what is understood as documentary cinema. Leading documentary scholars and makers consider the historical and technological contexts of i-doc production, innovation, and exhibition; the political and pedagogical potential of the genre; the ethics of the i‐doc experience; and the format’s future lifespan in the contemporary media landscape. The Interactive Documentary in Canada establishes a place for the i-doc in the history of Canadian film, highlighting the genre’s significant impact on the National Film Board of Canada and on contemporary global documentary media.


Canada

Canada

Author: Michelangelo Sabatino

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1780236794

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Canada is a country of massive size, of diverse geographical features and an equally diverse population—all features that are magnificently reflected in its architecture. In this book, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino offer a richly informative history of Canadian architecture that celebrates and explores the country’s many contributions to the spread of architectural modernity in the Americas. A distinct Canadian design attitude coalesced during the twentieth century, one informed by a liberal, hybrid, and pragmatic mindset intent less upon the dogma of architectural language and more on thinking about the formation of inclusive spaces and places. Taking a fresh perspective on design production, they map the unfolding of architectural modernity across the country, from the completion of the transcontinental railway in the late 1880s through to the present. Along the way they discuss architecture within the broader contexts of political, industrial, and sociocultural evolution; the urban-suburban expansion; and new building technologies. Examining the works of architects and firms such as ARCOP, Eric Arthur, Ernest Cormier, Brigitte Shim, and Howard Sutcliffe, this book brings Canadian architecture chronologically and thematically to life.


Dream City

Dream City

Author: Lance Berelowitz

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Published: 2010-08-24

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781553651703

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Located at the edge of a continent and at the corresponding edge of national public consciousness, Vancouver has developed in unique and unanticipated ways. It is now emerging as an experiment in contemporary city-making, with international interest in Vancouver as a model of post-industrial urbanism increasing exponentially. Lance Berelowitz explores the links between the city's seductive natural setting, its turbulent political history and changing civic values, and its planning and design culture. He also makes the startling case that Vancouver is to Canada's imagination what Los Angeles is to the American -- a mythologized place of endless possibilities, while being grounded in an altogether more limited set of socio-economic and environmental limitations. Dream City is richly illustrated with both historical and contemporary photographs of many significant buildings and public spaces, as well as specially commissioned maps that reveal the underlying patterns of growth and change of Canada's youngest metropolis.