One day too late for advance voting, which means that I now have another day to reconsider all my “maybe” picks.
Biked from Gastown shop and hop, stopped by the Astoria for beer, biked home in the first snow(?)fall of the season. Technically, it’s raining slush outside. That’s Vancouver for you. 10 years here now, so I’m not as picky as I was…even the wettest snow still looks pretty in the streetlights as it falls.
Great alley! Nice urban intervention in South Hill, East Van by Instant Coffee (amongst other things, the Vancouver chapter brought us the odd glossy sandwich boards and faux-yarn-bombed buses for the Main Street transit redesign a few years back).
(via OtherSights)
Amazing interactive website about a diverse little local neighbourhood. Click on a building pictured on the beautifully-designed site, and you’ll get poignant (really!) audio stories and documentary-style photos about its inhabitants.
It feels like a sort of a super-modern, and more human-centred, take on Stan Douglas’ Every Building on 100 West Hastings Street.
Okay, Internet, I stand corrected — a brief Google search tells me that this website by David Look is the super-modern take on the Stan Douglas piece: it’s called “Every Building on 100 block of West Hastings Street (in Google StreetView): after Stan Douglas”.
100% Vancouver was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been — any mix of statistics and personal stories is a potent combination (for me)!
The premise: 100 ordinary citizens are cast according to Vancouver’s demographic mix (sex, age, ethnicity, language, residential neighborhood), each person representing roughly 1% of the population.
These 100 people come together on stage to ask and answer questions en masse about their individual identities: all sorts of questions, from origins (“We were born in Vancouver” had about 20% clustered under the “Me” sign) to behaviour (“We recycle” saw one brave, if environmentally unsound, man standing on the “Not Me” side of the stage) and beliefs (“We believe in God.”).
Of course the statistics appealed to me, but the surprising part was how much it moved me, too. After all, census data is powerful and useful — but how well are statistics able to tell the stories of real people? But here they were, not just statistics, but people who had lived those numbers. It’s hard not to be moved by vulnerability.
A few of the people on stage told small, charming, and often surprising stories of their lives, ones that made a segue into yet another question for the masses.
But I also really loved the stories that were merely implied in the patterns that people formed. You could follow the movements of a specific person through a series of 4 or 5 questions, and get a familiar feeling about the picture of “who” they are. Or you could start to wonder what the sweet looking middle-aged lady did to land herself in the group of people who have committed violence against another person.
The scenes that brought emotions closest to the surface were ones that asked the really intimate questions, like life-shaping experiences that never get talked about: (“We have experienced war”, “We have been in prison”), and those answers that repeated all those familiar patterns that you wish weren’t true — the ones that represent, I think, structural damage. Overrepresentation of colour in answers about jail, violence, starting over. Youth contemplating suicide. Family structures (okay technically, 100% of married people on stage moved under the “Me” sign when asked who among them were in love. 100%? Shenanigans.).
Of course hard, unsafe questions were the ones which moved me closer to the edge of my seat while we waited intently for bodies to part in answer. (“We have been lying from the start” netted not a small crowd of “Me“s).
There was a general lightheartedness to the evening, all told. Lots of questions and stories told by all “kinds” of people, and lots of good-natured recognition of selves in others. I suppose this was the lesson here — how intensely human it is to want to identify with the folks on stage.
Now in Vancouver flavour! Portland is hanging out in my living room, and Toronto is still awaiting a frame (I really do need that IKEA trip, pronto) — I feel like I should get this one, out of fairness. Too nerdy for the office, you think?
The blue print is a winner — seems the most Van-like to me. Though truthfully it’s not the most interesting of the designs. Toronto comes out much nicer. But if you’re not stuck on hometown (or current-town, or nice-town-to-visit) pride, I’d go with Brooklyn.
They unveiled a new neon sign for Chinatown last night —
One step closer to the glory days: http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/chinatown/program/neon.htm
Drawing model of the 250 s.f. “microlofts” proposed for the Burns Block on Hastings — expected to fetch about $750/month.
The current minimum floor space area for a new residential unit is 372 sq ft — though I have heard rumours that there will be a motion to reduce this in the interest of affordable housing provision.
This is problem that comes up again and again with public amenity developments in general, usually framed as “quality vs quantity?” or “what, are we building Cadillac (insert building type here: housing, neighbourhood houses, daycares, etc.) here?”
In the case of this proposal, the quality of finishings stands to make up for the very small floorplate (very small in this city’s eyes, at least). But
photos: Vancouver Sun
—Everything Is Going To Be Alright, Martin Creed.
—
east van cross, ken lum.
Martin Creed’s neon installation on the old (now Rennie-renewed) Wing Sang building in Chinatown.
Let’s face it, developer-commissioned public art for the DTES begs to be greeted with skepticism. But in this (and to a lesser extent, the giant Stan Douglas photo re-creation of the Woodward’s riots, for the lobby of the new Woodward’s building), at least the mood feels right — half-determined, half-despairing message, spoken through gritted teeth. I think it’s actually quite beautiful.
to me via blownspeakers and frances bula.
Urban planner with a penchant for social policy, public engagement, infographics, illustration, and zee artz. This is a small collection of notes-to-self.
