The study was conducted in the Downtown East-Side and Granville Street corridor of Vancouver, British Columbia.  The 100 panhandlers who participated in this study revealed their opinions and experiences in view of a token based meal program.  The results, based on a structured interview, indicate that 86% of panhandlers believe the program is a good idea, and 100% of study participants liked the food they received.  “Strangers just walk by and hand them out.  I can tell they are more comfortable giving me tokens instead of cash,” says one anonymous panhandler.  “The money goes back into the community and helps feed the poor.  It’s a win/win.”

Token based meal programs have triggered debate and encountered sharp criticism.  “Providing meals to people should not be so controversial,” says Jayson Shurgold, a representative of Contagion Consulting.  “Much of the criticism appears to be coming from some advocacy groups speaking for others, but the panhandlers we personally engaged widely accepted the token based meal program and painted a very different picture.  Many panhandlers also shared opinions beyond the focus areas of our study and shed light on what concerns and angers them.”

Hunger is a complicated issue and the study should be carefully considered in view of the specific conditions present in the Granville Street corridor and the Downtown East-Side of Vancouver.  “This is the first independent study of its kind and the findings are relevant for researchers and groups interested in gaining elemental insight on how panhandlers access food, experience hunger and feel about token based meal programs,” says Shurgold.

The full report can be read here.

***

Contagion Consulting Group is a network of innovative and diverse researchers that engage and assist with academic and social based initiatives.  With representatives in Ottawa and Vancouver, the collaboration is founded on the principle that information can change the world. For further information, please visit contagionconsulting.com

• Who benefits from the answer to Toronto’s $2.5 billion transit question? [Toronto Star]
• Pape Station will close for 12 days in June to speed up renovations [National Post]
• Closed staircase makes it a long hike to Sherbourne TTC entrance: The Fixer [Toronto Star]

ROB FORD ‘CRACK VIDEO’ SCANDAL

• Mayor Rob Ford says crack video accusations not true ‘and I believe him:’ Doug Ford [Toronto Sun]
• Sit-in to greet Ford on Sunday [Toronto Sun]
• Kagawong lessons for Mayor Ford [Toronto Sun]
• Mayor Rob Ford sacked as Don Bosco football coach [Toronto Sun]
• Public opinion of Mayor Rob Ford all that counts? [Toronto Sun]
• Mayor Rob Ford sidelined as football coach by school board  [Globe & Mail]
• Calls mount for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to address drug allegations [Globe & Mail]
• Councillor Ford, Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s brother, addresses drug-use allegations [Globe & Mail]
• Is the alleged Rob Ford crack video evidence of a set up? [National Post]
• Rob Ford continues silence amid crack video allegations, is let go from beloved football coaching job [National Post]
• With Rob Ford crack scandal dragging on, it’s over for the mayor: DiManno [Toronto Star]
• Rob Ford crack scandal: Doug Ford says he believes his brother [Toronto Star]
• Ford Brothers’ damage control effort blows up in their faces: James [Toronto Star]

OTHER NEWS

•  3 teenagers charged with arson over destruction of Scarborough playground [Globe & Mail]
• Casino pitch: Suburban cities warm to the project Toronto rejected [Toronto Star]

A video that captures our over 3 decades of the PWL Partnership‘s work contributing to the development of some of Vancouver’s great public spaces. The project was lead by Jon Long with music composed by Ben MacDougall.

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Date of photo: May 20 2013

Photographer: Martin New at Montreal in Pictures

CASCADIA
• Newspaper kiosks on city land face removal in Victoria [Victoria Times Colonist]
• Public art project helps mark Victoria’s historic places [Victoria Times Colonist]

CANADA
• How Rob Ford’s Meltdown Could Save Toronto [The Tyee]

INTERNATIONAL
• Driver fees could help combat gridlock [San Francisco Examiner]
• Project in Paris Reflects City’s Ambitions for the Suburbs [New York Times]
• Don’t Forget the Burbs [Architect Magazine]
• The Evolution of Moscow’s Subway Maps [The Atlantic Cities]
• Why You Can’t Be Blasé About the Next World’s Tallest Building [The Atlantic Cities]
• Urban renewal? Big US cities showing strong growth [The Seattle Times]

CASCADIA
• Vancouver Island First Nation seeks traditional name for island landmark [Vancouver Sun]
• Adams Lake Band loses challenge of expansion of Sun Peaks ski resort [Vancouver Sun]

INTERNATIONAL
• In Greenland, an Urban Heat Island Is Growing Fast [The Atlantic Cities]
• A Team of Academics Redesigns an Icon [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• Why You Should Leave Your Kids at the Park [Slate]

Imagine a bicycle carved from walnut, ash or cherry wood. Or one totally customized and shipped in fewer than two days. This list of 15 of the coolest bikes to hit the streets has something for everyone.

Although the cyclo-phone might not be useful for bringing home vegetables from the market, it definitely deserves to be on the list. This bike actually makes music as you pedal. Pedal faster, and the beats pick up. Created by Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente, the cyclo-phone is sure to make waves.

Or check out the beautiful La Malle Bicyclette developed as a collaboration between a French luxury line and the Italian bicycle company. The bike includes a mini-suitcase, perfect for carting glamorous picnics to the park.

Via Good.

Urban Planet is a roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter.

There is still an opportunity to contribute to the three design concepts. Saturday, May 25 is Upcycled Urbanism Team Day at the Museum of Vancouver. This is your last change to influence plans, contribute your ideas or pick and team to rally behind leading up to the design + build day.

For more information visit the Museum of Vancouver Upcycle Urbanism.

This workshop is free. All are welcome. Please register in advance.

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Contribute your photos to Spacing’s Flickr pool

There are some beautiful homes on the Vancouver Heritage House Tour this year—a couple of old Shaughnessy manors, a quirky turreted terra cotta and stone house in Mount Pleasant, and a colorful Edwardian on Kitchener Street, but the one I am most interested in is a tenement building in the DTES.

The house at 313 Alexander Street first appears in the city directories in 1907 built for Yonekichi Aoki, and listed as a Japanese boarding house. Aoki was a contractor for the CPR, and this area near Powell Street was part of a bustling Japan town district.

By 1912 the area was changing as madams were chased out of Dupont Street (East Pender), bounced through Shanghai and Canton Alley, and evicted from Shore Street (100 block East Georgia). Alexander Street—especially the 500 and 600 blocks—became Vancouver’s flashy new red light district.

Brothels went up at a rapid pace, built by madams such as Dolly Darlington (500 Alexander), Lucille Gray (504 Alexander) and Alice Bernard (514 Alexander). Marie Gomez even had her name spelled out in mosaic tile inside the door at 598 Alexander, unfortunately now a vacant lot. The brothels were luxuriously decorated and furnished, the prostitutes beautifully dressed, and the work earned the “inmates” a liveable income, something almost impossible to achieve as domestics, seamstresses or florists—a few of the only jobs open to women.

A police crackdown on the brothels in 1914 gave the madams—who were mostly American—the choice between six months in prison or a return to the States—and prostitution quickly disappeared from the area.

The boarding house at 313 Alexander stayed in the Aoki family until WW2 when the Japanese were interned and their properties confiscated. Charles Haynes, a West Vancouver architect, bought the building in 2006 and proceeded to renovate 24 rooms into Single Room Accommodation as a tribute to his son Ross, 19, who died from a drug overdose in 2000. The original fir floors, tongue & groove panelling still remain, as well as the ghost lines of many doors from a room now used as a kitchen, leading to speculation that it may have at one time been part of the red light district.

The 11^th Annual Heritage House Tour is on Sunday June 2 from 10 am to 5 pm. Tickets are $40 and available through the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

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Eve Lazarus is a writer with a passion for history and heritage houses. She is the author of Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens; and At Home with History: the Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Houses. Eve blogs obsessively about buildings and their genealogies at www.blog.evelazarus.com.

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Date of photo: May 20 2013

Photographer: Martin New at Montreal in Pictures

• It’s over: Toronto council votes overwhelmingly against downtown casino [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto casino: Decisive 40-4 city council vote kills Ford’s dream [Toronto Star]
• Council formally kills possibility of a Toronto casino [National Post]
• Casino dies as Rob Ford stays silent on scandal [NOW]
• Toronto casino well and thoroughly dead [Torontoist]

ROB FORD ‘CRACK VIDEO’ SCANDAL

• Allegations of cocaine use are too serious to ignore [Globe & Mail]
• Ontario premier on Rob Ford: ‘personal issues’ should be dealt with quickly [Globe & Mail]
• The End of Ford, chapter 253 [The Grid]
• Will crack allegations be enough to sink Mayor Rob Ford [National Post]
• Rob Ford like ‘an embarrassing guest,’ says Conrad Black [Toronto Star]

OTHER NEWS

• Trim Gateway newsstand lease extension, TTC staff says [Toronto Star]
• New study suggests Torontonians make links between diversity and success [Globe & Mail]
• Does Toronto need more wild bees? [Torontoist]
• Porter’s proposed runway extension defers marine exclusion zone fill project [Toronto Star]

As I watch the fifty-car-pile-up that is Rob Ford’s mayoralty, I sometimes find myself wondering, what would Mel Lastman have done in the same circumstances?

Without making too much of the comparison, there have always been a few striking parallels between Lastman and Ford. Both are rich, buffoon-ish conservatives who had/have an innate sense of how to appeal to the average suburban voter. Neither were/are articulate or the least bit interested in policy. And they both had/have a tendency to set themselves ablaze on a regular basis.

Lastman, remember, got himself into all sorts of hot water when he shook hands with a bunch of Hell’s Angels, insinuated the city’s restaurants were full of “rat shit” and, most famous of all, fretted out loud about being boiled alive by cannibals while on a trip to Africa to promote the city’s Olympic bid. Of course, no one ever nabbed him for smoking crack. He did, however, have a real knack for generating an immense amount of civic embarrassment and global headlines.

But there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that if Mel, a first class huckster with a hound-dog’s nose for a political deal, had been handed the casino file, Toronto would be getting a casino at Woodbine, starting today.

For some time, some variation on the Woodbine option — a motion to add 1,500 slots and 150 gaming tables was defeated yesterday by 24 to 20 — has looked to me like a classic compromise position in an outwardly polarized debate.

The pro-casino side would get the big development project, the jobs (albeit well south of the fictitious figures tossed around by the casino lobbyists), and extra revenue to the City. Well short of a $100 million, which was Ford’s line in the sand, but not chump change, either.

The province, in turn, would salvage the capstone feature of Ontario Lottery and Gaming’s modernization strategy. As for the No Casino crowd, that coalition always represented a mix of people opposed to a downtown site per se and those against casinos on principle. Woodbine remains the out-of-sight/out-of-mind solution that has lots of parking and doesn’t try to shoe-horn a garish mega-project into a tight urban spot.

Yes, Mike Layton and the anti-gambling councillors are correct in asserting that the addiction issues are serious. But they never fully explained why a casino, meant mainly to catch GTA residents who leave the region to play black jack, represents a quantum expansion of a social ill. We already gamble, a lot, except we tend to do it at the other end of a 90-minute drive to Rama or Casino Niagara.

Mel, moreover, could have effortlessly triangulated a Woodbine deal on council. He’d have recognized the middle ground, identified swing votes (you know who you are) and the paid the appropriate price for their support.

So while the No Casino faction today can claim total victory, it’s important also to enumerate what’s been lost: a Woodbine casino could have boosted employment in a distant part of the city, at least minimally, that could desperately use the jobs and the construction activity and whatever spin-offs materialize from the whole affair.

Now, let’s come back to that 24-20 vote on a proposal to merely expand Woodbine, which was backed by City staff. It’s fair to say that Ford — who is frustratingly incapable of recognizing the political gains to be had in compromising — had lost this whole fight long before the Toronto Star/Gawker crack allegations surfaced. But our scandal-besieged mayor, beetling around City Hall yesterday in a desperate bid to out-run the vultures in the press corps, made sure he had no ability to gather sufficient votes to win either the full Woodbine casino option or even the more modest plan to expand the existing facility.

No skin off the downtown’s back, but this loss does deliver a kick to the shins of the northern reaches of Etobicoke and North York — the beating heart of Ford Nation. So in a more specific way than at any other point in his mayoralty, Ford — the former councillor for Woodbine in Ward 2 — failed to bring home any bacon for the base of his base. As any strategist will tell you, that’s a failure from which there can be no recovery.

photo by Jesse Kinos-Goodin

Have you ever walked through a residential neighbourhood, admiring the homes and gardens as you passed, and wished you could have a peek inside? I admit to being one of those people. The homes that most capture my imagination are the ones found in old established neighbourhoods – where residents are living their lives and adding their own chapters to the stories of the generations of residents that came before.   Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you may even score a quick glimpse of a vintage interior as you stroll by – especially at night. Some may think of this as being a bit voyeuristic. Instead, I prefer to think of myself as an urban explorer with a penchant for heritage homes.

If you admit to having a little bit of urban explorer in you, you won’t want to miss an upcoming tour opportunity. On Sunday, June 2^nd, 2013, Vancouver Heritage Foundation is hosting its 11^th annual Heritage House tour.  This is your chance to visit the interiors of 12 fascinating heritage homes in neighbourhoods throughout Vancouver – ranging from elegant, grand dames, to charming vernacular cottages that served as worker housing in the early 20^th century.

A special treat this year is the inclusion of a Single Room Accomodation (SRA) on Alexander Street. Located east of Gastown, it served as a Japanese tenement house in old Japantown prior to World War II and has been recently rehabilitated.

Another highlight are two heritage homes designed by renowned architect CBK Van Norman featuring exceptional gardens – one a spectacular classic landscaped garden (pictured right) – and the other a bountiful food garden harvested by the Vancouver Urban Farming Network. There’s even a chance to learn from experts at the tour houses as VanDusen master gardeners will be talking about landscaping, and Peter Ladner will be answering questions about Urban Farming. Peter will also be speaking at VHF’s pre-tour lecture tonight at the Unitarian Church on W 49th Street.

If you’re a fan of the Grandview Woodland area you will definitely want to take the tour, as half of the homes on the 2013 tour are in this interesting historic neighbourhood. The six Grandview homes offer everything from modern open concept main floors, such as the one pictured left, to careful interior restorations, including original pocket doors, hidden behind walls for years.  They all offer a look back into Vancouver’s history when so many homes  were rich in character and hand crafted details.

Whatever your taste in urban exploration, there is something you’ll love on the heritage house tour. And speaking of taste  –  a variety of food stops conveniently located along the way will appease the most discriminating foodie  while bolstering your strength to navigate your way to all 12 marvelous homes on the tour. Be sure to stop by the Japanese Language School as they are offering up $10 bentos complete with udon, traditional Japanese side dishes and dessert. You can also take a tour of the school and learn about their recent renovation, which respected the building’s exceptional history and heritage design elements, while making it more energy efficient (completed day care renovation pictured above).

For tickets and more information, contact Vancouver Heritage Foundation at www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org. But hurry, the tickets may sell out fast and you don’t want to miss this chance to get inside these homes, instead of secretly pondering their interiors from the street.

Karen Russell is an urban planner with a background in heritage planning and is currently Manager, Development Services at UBC Campus and Community Planning. Karen is a long time heritage enthusiast and volunteer. She was recently appointed to the Board of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation and has previously served on the Boards of the Heritage Vancouver Society and Heritage BC. She lives in a designated 1909 Edwardian home in Grandview.

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist
Jerry Waese.

A new study has collected data from more than 7000 neighbourhoods to find the most bikeable streets in America. Six of the top 10 neighbourhoods scored a perfect 100, and three of those perfect scores come from the college town of Davis, California.

According to their webpage, “it is the goal of the City of Davis to create and maintain an integrated system of bikeways. The City recognizes the need to encourage bicycle travel for both transportation & recreation and works to promote bicycle use as a viable, attractive, non-polluting form of transportation and assure safe and convenient access to all areas of the city.” There is even a bicycle incorporated into the town’s logo.

The Bike Score – which is similar to Walk Score – took into account bike lanes, hills, and road connectivity to score bikeability.

More than 50% of American neighbourhoods studied scored lower than 50 out of 100.

Incidentally, Toronto has a Bike Score of 56 and Calgary – one of the most bikeable cities in Canada – scored 91.

Via Atlantic Cities. Photo via Wikicommons.

Urban Planet is a roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter.

British synthpop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) is releasing their 12th album – English Electric – next month featuring this song. (HT PriceTags)

Contribute photos to Spacing Vancouver’s Flickr Pool

A tree assumes its form depending on its variety. By repeating very simple rules, the tree creates a very complex order.
But a tree also decides its own specific form as it grows. A tree decides its shape in response to its surroundings. A tree is always open to the environment.
When you stand beneath a tree – with the span of its branches, within the space it creates – it is impossible to determine whether you are inside or outside.

- Toyo Ito

Edited by Jessie Turnbull  (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012)

Over a decade ago, while I was a student in architecture school, the editor of the school publication Trace asked me to write an article on an exhibition on display at our downtown studio. The subject of the exhibit was a building under construction in Sendai, Japan, and as it turned out, this would be my first exposure to the architecture of Toyo Ito, who this year has been named recipient of the Pritzker Architectural Prize.

Represented by both computer generated wire-frame projections and a video feed of the construction site, his ingenious solution at the Mediatheque—combining both the physical and digital systems of the building—was his response to how new technology was changing the world. The building would consequently withstand the devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and, as the media center had its video cameras rolling inside the building during the 9.0 shake-up, it captured the force of nature that wreaked havoc on Japan that day, for all the world to see.

As the subject of Toyo Ito: Forces of Nature, editor Jessie Turnbull has combined a 2008 essay “Generative Order” the architect wrote on three of his projects – the breathtaking Tama Art University library (2007), an opera house in Taiwan, and an unrealized art museum in Berkeley – along with an essay Ito wrote in 1978 entitled “The Reflection of the Sacred in the Profane World” (translated by the book’s editor). With both the introduction and an essay contributed by former Princeton Architectural director Stan Allen, the book is an insightful collection of this architect’s work and philosophy. Ito’s work is at once inspirational and understated, and very much consistent with the work of the other Pritzker winners of the past few years, where the vanity of formalism has yielded to the necessity of function.

In the final few pages of the book is a sketch Ito did for a housing project that is currently under construction as part of the rebuilding effort from the devastation of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Entitled “A Home for All,” the editor of Forces of Nature expresses her gratitude for being able to include it in the book. Ito’s firsthand experience of the 100,000 who lost their homes is reflected in the simple yet essential gesture of his proposal:

“I would call such primal architecture Minna-no-le (home for all), communal gathering places we can build in the disaster areas in between the relief centers and temporary housing. The idea is to make something that is a house but all living room and no bedrooms. A place with sofas and tables where people can go to sit and talk, maybe read a book or newspaper over coffee. A reassuring place that offers a bit of normal life.”

The book is also part of the Kassler Lecture Series that has gone on at Princeton since 1966—the inaugural lecture being given by none other than Buckminster Fuller. Since 2009, the lectures have been published by the school of architecture under the direction of Stan Allen. In fact it was Ito’s lecture in that year that prompted Allen to begin to publish the books. With the Buckminster Fuller`s lecture the first in the series, Forces of Nature is the second to be released and, as such, is a thoughtful collection of material on the Pritzker winner spanning several decades of the 71 year old architect`s career.

Opening his own studio – Urban Robot – in Tokyo in 1971, his early career was mostly comprised of a number of private residences, including a quiet, introspective U-shaped house he built for his sister and two children following her husband`s succumbing to cancer. The resultant architecture, known as the White U house, is an exercise in restraint, with a windowless street wall and inner courtyard for reflection and contemplation. Six years later, he would design and build his own house next door, known as the Silver Hut. It later won the Architecture Institute of Japan award, in 1986.

His studio would became the point of departure for a new generation of young Japanese architects, including Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa who would go on to form SANAA—recipients of the 2010 Pritzker Prize.

Ito`s earliest work to get international acclaim would turn out to be a group of buildings more conceptual than functional, including his ethereal Tower of Winds (1986) in Yokohama, and later his design for the Serpentine Gallery in 2002. And while his body of work represents a collection of more intimate work, his 2001 Sendai Mediatheque building represents the watershed moment in his career from a theoretical perspective. As Stan Allen notes in his essay, an architect is lucky if he or she is able to achieve one building that rewrites the rules of the game – as he sees it, Ito has designed three, of which the Mediatheque is one.

While much of his early career sought to reconcile his present day context—both domestic and institutional—with Western forms and technology, the Mediatheque appropriates Le Corbusier`s five points of architecture and adds a sixth to transcend the physicality of the building: the vertical core, containing infrastructure both physical (structure, mechanical, electrical) and digital (bundles of fibre-optic conduit), freeing the open plan in a way that even the great Swiss master could not have foreseen.

As Stan Allen sees it: “His Sendai Mediatheque (designed in 1995 and completed in 2000) culminated a decade-long preoccupation with the effects of emergent digital technologies on architecture, which he has called the body of electronic modernism.” Ito was cognizant of the fact, even in the early 1990`s, that architecture was about to change forever in the face of the internet and personal computer, and so he created a building to respond and adapt to this new reality. The fact that he also created a structurally ductile building also meant that it would respond and adapt to the 9.0 earthquake that would strike the area ten years later.

And while the Sendai Mediatheque stands as one of Ito`s most celebrated structures, he has also demonstrated an equally skillful hand at shaping larger urban interventions, including both an airport and stadium in Taiwan, a 24-storey hotel in Barcelona, along with one of his perhaps most recently celebrated works, the Tama Art University library in Tokyo.

In this last building one can see the ghost of Viollet-le-Duc in the structural rationalism of the building`s lightness, where the floor plates columns and arches have shaken off their historical precedents to evoke a whole new architectural order, “more Richard Serra than Robert Venturi” according to Allen.

In the end, this thoughtful treatise on Toyo Ito provides for both the erudite scholar and newcomer to the architect`s work—containing, as it does, both his early ventures into Japanese formalism and his later, more culturally significant projects in the public realm. Having now realized four decades of architecture steeped in modesty and restraint, this second book from Princeton Architectural Press is a rich yet compact monograph of the equally modest Japanese architect`s career, and provides all good reason as to why he is this year’s recipient of architecture’s highest honour.

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Sean Ruthen is a Vancouver-based architect and writer.