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.

The post Be an Urban Explorer in Your Own Town appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

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.

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

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Contribute photos to Spacing Vancouver’s Flickr Pool

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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 the highest honour in architecture.

***

Sean Ruthen is a Vancouver-based architect and writer.

The post Book Review – Toyo Ito: Forces of Nature appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

CASCADIA
• Nanaimo residents turn to Facebook to help battle crime [Vancouver Sun]
• How city wastes light rail in SE Seattle [Crosscut]
• The outsider’s guide to sustainable Seattle government [Crosscut]
• The Chinese investors are coming [Crosscut]
• Washington Gov. Inslee vetoes anti-Columbia River Crossing measure [Oregon Live]

CANADA
• Even if alleged video of Rob Ford smoking crack surfaces, the city can’t force the mayor to resign [National Post]
• How smoking at home reduces property values [Toronto Star]

INTERNATIONAL
• India’s cities set to benefit from urban planning controls [Financial Times]
• Lost Vision? Miami-Dade Transit 40 Years On . . . [Transit Miami]
• A Treasure Trove of Economic Data on European Metro Areas [The Atlantic Cities]
• Why Suburban Poverty Is Less Visible and More Insidious [The Atlantic Cities]
• Hubbert’s Peak, Eneropa, and the Visualization of Renewable Energy [Places: Design Observer]
• Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust [New York Times]

The post Vancouver’s Urbanism Headlines: Tuesday appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

To say affordability is an important issue in this region would be an understatement. Vancouver has been recognized as one of the least affordable cities in the world. However, just because we view something as important, that doesn’t mean we’re right about it. This is not to say that Vancouver is “affordable”. Instead, it is meant to highlight the importance of defining “affordability” more specifically and being more detailed as to those parts of the region that are affordable and those that are not.

When we think of affordability, we usually think solely about housing costs—a common threshold for which is spending less than 30% of income on housing. However, looking at housing costs alone leaves the false impression that it is more affordable to live in the suburbs where housing costs are generally lower. What is often overlooked, however, are the high transportation costs that go hand-in-hand with the low density living typical of suburban development. In most cases, these additional costs offset any savings in housing expenditures.

So when we think of affordability, we should really we should be thinking of housing AND transportation costs. This is what the Center for Neighbourhood Technology has done, having created a Housing and Transportation (H+T) Affordability Index that defines affordable as a household spending less than 45% of its earnings on housing and transportation.

For the past few months, I have been part of a group examining affordability in Greater Vancouver through this framework and creating a similar index using 2006 Census data and 2011 Translink Trip Diary data.

The initiative focused on a series of interrelated questions associated: how does our view of affordability  change – or not – with this new definition of affordability? What areas in Metro Vancouver are the most (and least) affordable? What policies could make the biggest difference in improving affordability?

Before we touch upon these, however, we needed to determine how factoring transportation costs changes our view of affordability. Below is an map comparing the conventional definition of affordability with our new housing and transportation definition. (Yellow means affordable and blue means unaffordable.)

Affordability Comparison map.

It is immediately apparent that our region is considerably less affordable when we factor in transportation costs. What is less apparent is that some census tracts in the City of Vancouver became affordable with our new definition. Overall though, our region is significantly less affordable than we think it is. A scary thought.

Affordability change map.

Based on our analysis, it is clear that Vancouver (proper) is more affordable than we think, but the region is much less affordable than we think. And the main culprit is transportation costs (Yellow is <15% of household income)

Transportation costs map.

Notice the sliver of yellow following the Expo Line

Given the above, where does affordability lie?

The most affordable areas in the region were found to be the West End and Metrotown, whereas the least were found at the periphery in Surrey, Coquitlam, Port Moody and West Vancouver. 

10 most affordable neighbourhoods.

10 least affordable neighbourhoods.

As one would guess, areas that are walkable, centrally-located and have good access to transit are much more affordable than those that are car-oriented and where land uses are segregated.

How do we make Metro Vancouver more affordable?

Based on the research—and counter to popular belief—the areas that should be the focus of affordability improvements are those that are unaffordable when both housing and transportation costs are considered and where people are experiencing it. Reducing living expenses is often not a priority for the wealthy population, for example.

The image below is a plot of all the census tracts in Metro Vancouver based on actual affordability and experienced affordability. We calculated experienced affordability by using the income of local residents instead of for the whole region. The dividing line for both axes is the 45% affordability threshold. Overall, the ‘cloud’ appears centred with many areas on both sides of the affordability divide.

Map of actual and experienced affordability for Metro Vancouver.

The area of greatest concern is the top right quadrant—these areas with very high housing and transportation costs, where the residents are spending more than 45% of their income on housing and transportation. Though the entire ‘cloud’ appears to be centred around the threshold, it is not the case for different cities in the region.

Here is Vancouver…

Map of actual and experienced affordability for Vancouver.

…and here is Surrey:

Map of actual and experienced affordability for Surrey.

As one can see, Vancouver has only one census tract in our ‘Greatest Concern’ quadrant, whereas Surrey has approximately half of its census tracts within it. This clearly demonstrates that there is clear and pressing need for affordability improvements in Surrey and other suburbs such as Coquitlam, White Rock, Langley and Maple Ridge, where people are really experiencing a lack of affordability.

When it comes to improving affordability, improving transit and walkability in the suburbs makes a lot of sense. The Evergreen Line (contrary to what some believe) and Surrey Rapid Transit would greatly reduce transportation costs and improve affordability.

In conclusion, including transportation in the affordability equation makes it clear that it is the Urbs, not the Suburbs, that are truly affordable and that if we really want to improve affordability in Metro Vancouver, improving transit and creating a more walkable environment in places like Surrey would  make the biggest difference.

If you are interested in reading more about our study, here is our Presentation and our Final Report.

***

Lee Haber is a Masters Student in the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. He is also the Campaign Director for GetOnBoardBC.

The post Driving Up the Cost – A new perspective on affordability in Vancouver appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

CASCADIA
•Watchful eyes in the night: Waste Management drivers trained to spot security, safety issues [Oregon Live]
• Keeping it weird in Portland: cycling the brew pubs [Vancouver Observer]

CANADA
• Rob Ford, gas pains, the Senate: Scandals and bad spin-jobs plague all levels of government [Toronto Star]

INTERNATIONAL
• Why We Love Alleys [SPUR]
• Planning is Not Necessary [Planetizen]
• Accounting for Latent Travel Demand [Planetizen]
• Suburbs Are Home to Growing Share of Region’s Poor [New York Times]
• Into the Water Tower, With Flair [The Atlantic Cities]

The post Vancouver’s Urbanism Headlines: Monday appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

CASCADIA
• Pandora Avenue development runs into traffic dilemma [Victoria Times Colonist]
• Growth of Portland bicycle traffic slowed in 2012 [Oregon Live]

CANADA
• Premier Kathleen Wynne, Paul Godfrey had different visions [Globe and Mail]

INTERNATIONAL
• The Potential Problem With Personalized Google Maps? We May Never Know What We’re Not Seeing [The Atlantic Cities]
• Google Maps helps reunite man with family 23 years after he was kidnapped on his way to kindergarten [National Post]
• New York apartment dwellers furious over artist’s photos taken through windows [National Post]
• Does Living Near Fast Food Restaurants Increase Your Risk of Obesity? [The Atlantic Cities]
• First Rentals: Native New York Style [New York Times]

The post Vancouver’s Urbanism Headlines: Weekend appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Kelowna City Hall wants residents to explore new ways to get involved in municipal affairs during this year’s Local Government Awareness Week, May 19 to 25. To encourage informed participation, the city has a public engagement RSS news feed accessible from kelowna.ca/getinvolved. Also, during planning processes, the city seeks input on upcoming parks, transportation, utility and community projects through open houses, workshops, surveys, online tools and social media.

Residents living in 1940s era summer cottages rented from Metro Vancouver in Belcarra Regional Park have won a small victory in their bid to stay. On Thursday, the Environment and Parks committee deferred a decision to consider demolishing the seven cabins maintained by the Belcarra South Preservation Society after hearing from residents.

Saanich may have its work cut out for itself after open houses found mixed public reaction to two proposed community allotment gardens in the municipality. The first, planned for Gorge Park, received 77.3 per cent support, according to survey results posted online. The second proposed park, currently slated for a parcel of grass behind Saanich Commonwealth Place, received much less support. Fifty-nine per cent of survey respondents don’t like the proposed location.

[Thompson-Nicola] Regional planners are worried the loss of the mandatory long-form census will make it increasing difficult to plan for the futures of small communities. ”Is it debilitating? No. It does make it harder for policy planning,” Regina Sadilkova, the TNRD’s director of development services, said Thursday.

Weighing in at a whopping 180 pages — the combined 36-month effort of over 100 volunteers and city staff — it’s being called a major milestone, both on account of its sheer accomplishment, and what it means to the City of Nelson’s future. Made official this past Monday night, the City’s newly revised Official Community Plan (OCP) was adopted as Bylaw 3247 by Mayor John Dooley and city council.

The post Neighbourhood Watch appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Sitting like a mirage in the desert, Masdar City might just be on the frontier of a new – environmental friendly – urban life.

The city is an $18 billion  project in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and is scheduled to be completed by 2015. It will be home to 40,000 residents within a two square mile radius, where cars are simply not allowed. Each building in the city being toted as carbon-neutral and residents are transported about via PRTs (Personal Rapid Transit) pods.

A 148-foot tower draws cool air down to create a perpetual breeze in the courtyard of the Masdar Institute.

Via Popsci

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.

The post Masdar City: eco-friendly city of the future appeared first on Spacing National.

CASCADIA
• Trans-poor-tation 4: A mighty toll order [Crosscut]
• Understanding cities through urban diaries [Crosscut]
• Victoria parking machines could sell bus passes [Victoria Times Colonist]
• No new streetcars from United Streetcar this week: Portland City Hall Roundup [Oregon Live]

CANADA
• Rob Ford in ‘crack cocaine’ video scandal [Toronto Star]

INTERNATIONAL
• Here’s What a Metro Station in Saudi Arabia Looks Like [The Atlantic City]
• Hungry City: Bunker in Ridgewood, Queens [New York Times]
• How to rile up a crowd (in D.C.) talk building heights [Washington City Paper]
• ‘Bring on more gentrification,’ declares Detroit’s economic development czar [Motor City Muckraker]
• With Security, Trade Center Faces New Isolation [New York Times]

The post Vancouver’s Urbanism Headlines: Friday appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Shot with a Braun Nizo Super 8 camera mounted on a bicycle. The camera had an intervalometer so it automatically shot a frame of film every so many seconds. I redid the ride in 2011 and photographed stills at key points in the film to show then and now. The Vancouver radio is from the early 70′s.

The post Video Vancouver: A Bicycle Ride-the long version appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

CASCADIA
• Victoria, Edmonton residents raise vegetables and fish using aquaponics [Vancouver Sun]
• Trans-poor-tation 3: No high five for I-5 [Crosscut]

CANADA
• SmartCentres hopes there is life after Walmart — Hume [Toronto Star]
• Hole in Champlain Bridge downplayed by feds [Montreal Gazette]

INTERNATIONAL
• The new Google Maps includes neat new transit comparisons [Buzzer Blog]
• Google Escalates the Competition in Map Services [New York Times]
• Bike Sharing Prepares to Get its World Rocked [Planetizen]
• Berlin: Barbie’s New Home [The Atlantic Cities]
• How to Save Water-Starved Cities [The Atlantic Cities]
• Jim Bassett: “Everyone a Tourist”: On the Photography of Monuments [Places from Design Observer]

The post Vancouver’s Urbanism Headlines: Thursday appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.

Last VT image: Grouse Mountain at night, Vancouver.

***

Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at Spacing Vancouver. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with personal and professional interests in the urban landscapes. His private practice – Metis Design|Build – is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places. You can also see some of his drawing and digital painting adventures at Visual Thoughts.

The post Visual Thoughts appeared first on Spacing Vancouver.