“To make this course of action clear to my French readers, I must explain that in Italy, a country very far away from us, people are still driven to despair by love.”

• Stendahl

Stendahl Syndrome can be defined as an emotional anxiety attack that one can be stricken with as a result of looking at too much art in too short a time. Put another way, the human heart can only take a finite amount of artistic endeavour all at once. Such was the plight of the 19^th century writer Stendhal, with reference to the emotional breakdown he is reputed to have had in the nave of Santa Croce in Florence, shortly after visiting the Accademia and Uffizi.

And so it was tragic news that my wife and I learned while visiting Florence this past month that a Spanish tourist died in the same church, crushed by a falling stone, around the same time we were climbing the stairs of the Duomo. Safe back in our hotel at the end of the day, our thoughts were with the family of the poor man, providing us a moment of perspective to realize we were not just visitors to Florence, but all of Italy, and to be respectful and courteous of our gracious host.

This is the third travel piece I have now written for Spacing, the previous two being on Barcelona and Holland. Recently rereading those earlier pieces, I could not help but be stricken by the change in narrative since the first feature in 2010. More a survey of Barcelona’s architecture, galleries, bookstores, markets, and churches, it seems to me now more a naïve attempt to create an NFT—’Not For Tourists’ guide—for Barcelona demanding that one blend in with the locals in order to truly appreciate the city. My traveling companion and I had Italo Calvino as a guide that time, with Invisible Cities a palimpsest of how I experienced Barcelona and helping to tell its story upon our return.

In contrast, my second travel piece was much more extroverted, written to escape the ennui of the day-to-day, with the panacea being a visit to several cities in the Netherlands—the Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam—writing about the new and exciting architecture  that had just recently been completed in those cities. For the galleries my guides were the Dutch masters – Rembrandt, Vermeer, Breughel, and Bosch, accompanied by new and old architecture alike, like the new Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk next to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark.

This time out, however, there was no denying that I was a ‘tourist’ rather than a ‘visitor’, made especially evident by my limited Italian speaking skills, along with my seeming inability to properly match my meal to its beverage, for which I blamed being out of sync with the siesta-style business day. And with this visit to Italy being the first for my traveling companion, the two week’s itinerary included visits to all the great works of art and architecture in Venice, Florence, and Rome. In marked contrast, we saved a few days for some of the smaller cities and towns, including Ferrara and Siena, which would be a first time visit for both of us. This time would also include four blissful days spent in a Tuscan villa in the Chianti region, miles away from the nearest town, ruins or art gallery.

Visiting Italy as a youth in 1994, I could not have imagined that on my return, some two dozen years later, we would be in the midst of such a dramatic paradigm shift. Specifically, one in which travel photos could be viewed and posted online immediately, with city maps and ticket prices for attractions available at one’s fingertips, and travellers from all walks of life and all corners of the earth easily able to travel to see the usual suspects of the country’s history, whether Imperial, Medieval, or Renaissance.

When we remark in casual passing on how much our world has changed in such a short time, nowhere does this seem more evident I think than Italy, where large city buses navigate narrow streets, Venetian gondoliers text on their smartphones, and old medieval cities like Ferrara have shifted from horse-and-buggy to automobiles to bicycles in the space of one generation.

Meanwhile, Rome and Florence have fully and completely been transformed from an ecclesiastical phenomenon to one entirely driven by the tourist industry, with walking tours of its great monuments being pumped out each hour for the masses. Where in the past one would travel to the great cathedrals and churches to read the gospels in the architecture, one now travels there to witness that time as an artifact of the past, a fragment like a saint’s relic preserved in some church crypt, now commodified and captured by the ubiquitous selfie.  I couldn’t help but marvel while I was there, how never before in art history has there been so vast a personal photographic record of all the treasures of the Vatican, Uffizi, Accademia, and more.

With all this in my mind, perhaps the biggest difference traveling to Italy this time out was my overall sense of purpose. As an older traveler one realizes how precious ones time away is, and understandably ought to do one’s best to make the most of it. And this journey did not disappoint, visiting five cities in fifteen days, with stops at several hilltop towns, wineries, churches, with the requisite visits to the Pantheon and Colosseum in Rome, along with the MAXXI by the late Zaha Hadid.

Beginning in Venice, my wife and I worked our way south – some 525 kilometers – over the course of two weeks, traveling most of the distance by train, with one shorter 120 km leg of the journey traveled by car, rented along with an indispensable GPS. Landing in Venice, flying over the Alps from Munich on a sunny Saturday afternoon, we found Venice partially hidden by a late-Summer heat haze, blanketing the city in a sort of mid-day yellow miasma. And despite it being late October, we also discovered it was still high tourist season, with St. Mark’s Square packed to capacity on the Sunday afternoon we were there.

With only one full day to spend in the city, we headed first to Santa Maria dell Salute, closely followed by a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim gallery. By midday, we found ourselves in St. Mark’s square, and finding the line too long to get into the cathedral, we instead went in the Doge’s Palace, complete with audio tour, and a trip over the Bridge of Sighs to the old prisons. Another highlight was dining at Trattoria alla Madonna close to the Rialto Bridge, while later at another restaurant, we sat amazed eating our dinner while watching a local Venetian ‘park’ his boat in a neighbouring building—raising it up and out of the water with a winch and storing in an above water garage.

And yet as astonishing as Venice is without its cars, the city we visited next equally amazed us with its wholesale adoption of the bicycle for its day-to-day city life. With Ferrara behind walls like so many other Italian cities, the castle and cathedral flanked plaza at its centre has benefited from a relative car-free existence, and today is thriving as a pedestrian and bike friendly realm. We quickly discovered our hotel offered complimentary bicycles, and so while in Ferrara we did as the Ferrarans do, easily finding our way around its historic town centre on two wheels.

Next was Florence, which is in the midst of building a direct train between the airport and the central train station, itself situated almost right next to San Lorenzo and Santa Maria Novella. Very soon, one will be able to fly into Florence and be surveying the Galleria dell’Accademia within a hour of clearing customs.

And the treasures of Florence did not disappoint. It occurred to me while we were standing in line to get in the Uffizi that when I visited the city in 1994 the massive gallery was closed, as a car bomb had exploded in an adjacent street and badly damaged the gallery some months before. This time out, I made a beeline for the gallery (in one gallery they are even showing a painting damaged in the car bomb explosion). Its greatest treasures – the Botticelli’s, Michelangelo’s, Raphael’s and Leonardo’s – are fine, and need to be seen. But as Stendahl noted, best not to think too much about it, lest you be overwhelmed the moment you find yourself there and gazing upon it.

Other highlights in Florence included visiting the gallery of the Accademia, walking the arcade at Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, climbing the 465 steps to the top of the Duomo, and walking over the Ponte Vecchio at sunset. And then there were the markets and squares, filled with the leather goods that have been there for centuries. Lastly, there was the Opera Duomo Museum, a new museum just opened in 2015 that highlights many treasures of the Duomo, including the reconstruction of its early Gothic façade in its main three-storey high gallery space.

Leaving Florence in our rental car, I couldn’t help but feel there was still so much to see. The feeling lasted just as long as it took for us to get immersed in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, the campagna. Within an hour we were checked into our little hillside villa at Vescine, called Il Borgo. We discovered the charming town of Radda right away, and would return to it a few times over the course of the week. We were in complete awe of the green hills, vineyards, and terracotta roof lines, occasionally interrupted by a thousand year old walled town.

Over the next three days we visited Castellina, San Gimignano, Volpaia, Volterra, and Siena. In each, a different town square, with a different cathedral, with those of Siena and San Gimignano being standouts. In the latter, we discovered its small and unassuming church to contain breathtaking 14^th century paintings on its inner nave walls, with the whole interior of the church like a great book.

We also discovered that the Chianti wine produced in our region was accompanied by some startlingly amazing history, including one winery that had connections to Leonardo da Vinci, with another reputed to have been started by the 11^th century monk who brought the Sangiovese grape vine to the region: the key ingredient in Chianti wine.

This particular winery, called Badia a Coltibuono, was run by Benedictine monks until the Napoleonic wars, at which point the church and winery were closed, converted into a villa for one of Napoleon’s generals. Afterwards, a Polish nobleman acquired the land and reopened the winery.

With the villa now a bed and breakfast, and the original monastery church reopened, the tour of the winery also included a visit to the original cloister, along with a visit to its restored inner hall, where the monks would meet under the watchful eyes of the founding monks, all of whom are painted on its four walls.

Leaving Radda and heading to Rome, a bit sad to leave the peace and quiet of the countryside, we were soon on a train to The City of the Seven Hills after dropping off the rental car in Chiusi. Within a couple hours, we were checking into our last hotel of the trip on Via Veneto, a few blocks from the Spanish Steps, and easy walking distance from the main train station. While the regular suspects of the city were on our to-do list—the Vatican museums, St. Peter’s basilica, Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, Colosseum and Forum—the main event for me this time out was to be the MAXXI museum by Zaha Hadid.

And so we found ourselves on the last day of our trip in a quieter part of Rome, within walking distance of the Piazza di Popolo, experiencing Rome’s new gallery dedicated to both art and architecture. On the ground floor, there is currently an amazing exhibition on the architecture of the new metro stations in Naples. And on the top floor of the gallery until January, one can find an exhibition on Zaha herself, with a focus on her Italian projects.

Italy is a country of immense beauty, both natural and cultural, and now more than ever a mecca for those who would seek to experience in person this rich tapestry of civilization.

***

Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver based architect and writer.

The post Notes from Italy appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Eran Ben-Joseph (MIT Press, 2015)

Surface parking lots are ever-present in the contemporary city. Moovelab’s incredible visualization project What the Street!? that inventoried parking lots in 23 cities around the world found, for example, that car parking takes up 17,020,594 square meters of land in Los Angeles—roughly 1/6th the area of Vancouver. In fact, in 2010, it was estimated that 500 million surface parking lots exist in America alone. A number that has surely increased since then.

Given their pervasiveness, surface parking lots play a large part in the experience of the city, influencing multiple facets of everyday life. Moreover, their asphalt-dominated surfaces have large ecological impacts. This being the case, it’s amazing how little thought or discussion goes into these prevalent urban environments. In real terms, even a small recalibration of surface parking lots can have large consequences on the workings of the built and natural worlds. In order to intervene, however, a better understanding of the surface lot—culturally, environmentally and economically—is required. This is the motivation behind Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking. Written by Eran Ben-Joseph—head of MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning Department and author of two other excellent, somewhat related books, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities and The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making—the book has humble intentions:

…not to champion the abolition of surface parking lots or to advocate the creation of strict codes and standards that dictate their design, but rather to illustrate their ongoing contemporary effects on our life and their great potential for the future.

And this it does, with wit and grace. Its humourous play on words is not only evident in the book’s clever title, but throughout the book, including the three chapters around which it’s structured—A Lot in Common, Lots of Time and Lots of Excellence—each of which is broken into smaller sections. These, in turn, are further broken down into bite-sized segments, some of which are two paragraphs in length. The result is a very accessible read that is easily referenced. A peppering of wonderful photographs and imagery throughout makes it that much easier to go through.

Following the cleverly named introduction A Lot of My Mind, the first chapter A Lot in Common introduces the parking lot as one of the most common and under appreciated spaces of the contemporary city and describes its social and cultural significance in North America. It also outlines key metrics and standards around their creation as well as the larger effects of parking on the environment (water, energy, etc.) and associated costs.

Lots of Time looks at the interesting history and development of surface parking. Included within is a brief history of curbs and roads, an important discussion around women and their role in the evolution of parking lots, the effects of parking on the morphology of the urban environment, and a critical examination of the history of aesthetics and surface parking lots. Key figures in the growth and regulation of parking—such as William Phelps Eno, “The Father of Parking Rules”—are also introduced, highlighting their contributions to the adaptation of parking lots over time.

The last chapter, Lots of Excellence, is dedicated to demonstrating the potential of surface parking lots. It focuses on its capacity for flexibility and ability to be cultural and social assets for their surrounding communities: exciting spaces of multi-use and complex programming. This is further extended to illustrate how parking lots can also be ecologically beneficial. Naturally, a handful innovative of global precedents are also outlined within. A short conclusion—Musing A Lot—follows the latter and ties things together nicely as a bookend.

Too frequently, the discussion around cities, urban planning and design focuses on the most blatant, visible parts of the urban landscape—overlooking the most ordinary. This is done to detriment of a more comprehensive understanding of the cityscape and its latent possibilities. In providing a wonderfully succinct and readable analysis on one of the most commonplace environments and highlighting its ability to become significant public spaces of aesthetic and ecological value, Eran Ben-Joseph has done urbanist, architects and planners and designers a great service—making Rethinking A Lot a necessary read for those looking to gain a more holistic understanding of the contemporary urban landscape.

***

For more information on Rethinking A Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, visit the MIT Press website.

**

Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief 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 see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

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RELEASE: Slow Streets

Have you ever wondered if our city streets, mobility networks, and public spaces could be redesigned to enhance the well-being and safety of women and girls? Slow Streets would like to share an important survey addressing this question. Prepared through a partnership of Slow Streets, Green Our Walls, UN Women-USNC LA with the support of Women in Cities International, this survey aims to evaluate the everyday experiences of women in public streets, public spaces and transit systems. The information you provide will help us design safer, more equitable cities for all.

The survey will be open until January 31th, 2018, and should take 5-10 minutes to complete. All answers will be kept strictly anonymous. If you share the survey link http://bit.ly/WomenMobilitySurvey with the hashtag #urbandesign4women on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you will be entered for the chance to win a fabulous prize! Please share this survey freely. Please get in touch with us at womenmobilitysurvey@gmail.com with any questions you may have about the survey.

The team is launching the survey with a Twitter Chat on Thursday, January 11, 2018 at 12pm @UNWomenLA with partners @SlowStreets and @GreenOurWalls and under the hashtag #UrbanDesign4Women. They look forward to your insights to the conversation.

The post Women Mobility Survey and #UrbanDesign4Women Twitter Chat appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Stefan Al (The MIT Press, 2017)

The first time I visited Las Vegas, I was quickly taken aback at the structures. I’d just returned home a week earlier from a trip to the Atacama desert in Chile, and the two landscapes were more eerily similar and egregiously contrasting than I could have imagined. As I walked the Strip, I was struck by the fact that my sense of scale was completely off, and as I walked, nothing seemed to get closer, as the scales of the signs and facades, statues and ornamentation were unlike any I’d ever seen before. It was fascinating in its complexity, and I read quite a few books on Vegas after that, but opening up The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream by Stefan Al was the first comprehensive architecture-based history lesson I’d read on the iconic desert highway. Al’s book is an exhaustive yet accessible look through what made Vegas what it is today, and is a comment on how the Strip has influenced the rest of the world’s architecture.

Before diving into the content of the book, I’d love to highlight the formatting as one of my favourite aspects. The large 8″ x 10″ pages allow for full size historical photographs and reproductions of blueprints and posters—in keeping with the idea of Vegas being a highly visual experience. The subheadings within each chapter provide great breaks and help to jump back to a specific area for quick referencing. The quirkiness of the subheading titles—“Casino Suburbanism”, “American Babylon”, “Disney À La Vegas” to name a few—are a wonderful pause in themselves.

The book itself is broken into nine sections, with insightful essays as bookends—opening with Las Vegas as America and ending with America as Las Vegas. The basic tenet of the introduction is perfectly summed up by the last line which sets the stage for the argument presented in the book: “Las Vegas is a microcosm of America.” The theory that runs through the book is that as American values and desires changed, so has the Strip. Vegas was there with cutting edge ideas to refine and recalibrate, until, as noted by the title of the conclusion, America (and the world) has learned much and grown from the ideas presented first in Las Vegas.

The pieces between these two essays are the seven sections related directly to Vegas’ history through architectural periods: Wild West (1941-1946), Sunbelt Modern (1946-1958), Pop City (1958-1969), Corporate Modern (1969-1985), Disneyland (1985-1995), Sim City (1995-2001), and Starchitecture (2001-Present). These periods correspond highly with influential events in American culture, such as the rise of the atomic bomb, Disneyland’s rapid fire success with their amusement park and unique style, as well as the rise of Starchitecture in the US and around the world. What began as a prohibition fuelling the Neo-Wild West quickly transformed and transformed again, until the overarching result was a constantly shifting landscape that is fluid in its design.

The focus of this fantastic book is not solely on architecture. Interior design, marketing, and sign designers are all given their fair due (good and or bad). In the conclusion, Al writes that “as outrageous as The Strip’s excesses may seem, it has always been the ultimate manifestation of a quintessentially American practice: marketing.” Vegas has had to remain current and ahead of the times to survive as a desert city fighting regulation, the environment and, at times, the entire United States, to consistently remain relevant.

Overall, The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream is a wonderfully interesting and fun ride through one of the world’s strangest locations. Stefan Al has done it great justice, creating an amazing collection of images and historical anecdotes that will delight readers from many realms.

***

For more information on The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, visit the MIT Press website.

**

Jeremy Senko is happily lost in the world of theoretical architecture and design. He is forever a student at heart, consistently reading, experiencing and learning about the world he inhabits. More specifically, he works as an Interior Designer in Vancouver and plays an active part in bettering the environments we live in.

The post Book Review – The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Phaidon Editors (Phaidon Press, 2017)

The global perspective provided by this portable book makes it the ideal companion for all travelers who love architecture. It includes work from countries as culturally, geographically, climatically and economically diverse as Argentina, Senegal, Denmark, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, Lithuania and the USA. The building types represented range from super-scale towers to tiny places of worship, high-tech cultural centres to regional rest stops.

• From the Introduction

Much in the spirit of Phaidon Press’ 2004 released Atlas of 21^st Century Modern Architecture, Destination Architecture: The Essential Guide to 1000 Contemporary Buildings is a wonder to behold, and a year-end gift of 2017 to ponder along with the current events going on in the world. Unlike the Atlas, which had an astonishing 800 pages of 4600 illustrations, this tiny compendium fits into the palm of your hand, a cleverly designed handbook that doesn’t require a piece of luggage to tote it around in.

And as noted in a recent review of the same book in Architectural Record, it is evident that our transference from an analog to a digital paradigm—at least for architectural academia—is starting to leave some of our millennials behind. Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, who has lectured and given guest critiques up and down the West Coast, including UBC SALA, recently noted how current students’ familiarity with architectural history is waning. Whether or not our wiki-world is to blame, Destination Architecture is an attempt to provide for what is falling between the cracks in our profession’s selectively edited erudition, a call to arms to provide a primer of global architecture, represented here by 1000 buildings built in the last few decades (though for the most part they fall on this side of the 21^st century).

In order to fit 1000 buildings in less than 600 pages, the editors have devised a formula whereby each building has been reduced to a single landscape colour photo, accompanied by a small write up, with four buildings featured over two pages. In this way the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, as each representative building begins to provide a geographical narrative for the 70 countries represented in the book—each conveying its own unique take on critical regionalism. Even the international starchitects, who show up all too frequently, begin to lose their own individuality when framed in such a massive context, refreshing to say the least.

As a further aid to navigating the book, maps of each of the 70 countries are provided in simple black-and-white graphics. The editors could’ve opted to use colour instead of monochrome tabs to represent each region in the book, a missed opportunity which could’ve enlivened the pages, perhaps reconsidered at the last minute as being too much of a distraction from the featured buildings. Despite this oversight, the book has a tight and concise format to rival the imagery of any computer monitor or smart phone screen, which may very well be at the heart of this ambitious handbook’s raison d’etre.

The book is also a testament to the globalized nature of the business of architecture, which clearly has enabled the modern architect the ability to practice in all corners of the planet. Work by Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Herzog & DeMeuron, OMA and the late Zaha Hadid are all featured in regions far from their home offices, much as the extensive representation of built work in the USA is host to both local and international architects (much of which we’ve seen in the pages of Architecture Record over the past decade). Overall, the editors have accomplished a formidable feat, given the herculean task to represent a world of architecture. Those of us choosing to have this book in their library are richer for it, given that it provides for such a staggering amount of architecture, easily and nimbly, at one’s fingertips.

If there is one criticism, however, it is that Canadian architecture has been woefully under-represented. With only 18 buildings out of 1000 selected to represent our fair nation (with four on Fogo Island in Newfoundland), this represents 1.8% of the book’s content. I know several architects, myself included, who might take offense to the idea that their livelihood has made such a small impact on the world stage. Despite this, the buildings selected manage to represent at least two of Canada’s freshest and most talented firms – 5468796 Architecture and FABG – along with older more established firms like KPMB and Lemay. However, the book should’ve also included more of the young, amazing talent from Montreal and Vancouver, with the absence of work by both McKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and the Patkau Architects—who represent the literal bookends to our nation—being a missed opportunity.

But to point fingers at the editors of this book is perhaps as laughable as the nation’s under-representation itself—there is a bigger conversation here, one hinted at by an article in this week’s Globe and Mail entitled ‘Canadian Architecture needs the support of a national policy’. Written by Toon Dreessen of Ottawa-based Dreessen Cardinal Architects, he hits the nail squarely on the head that federal government support by both recent Conservative and Liberal governments has recently slumped to all-time lows when it comes to architecture. This was also recently noted in June by the editor of Canadian Architect over the poor showing of any building program for the nation’s sesquicentennial, and certainly when compared to the architecture policies of both the US and Europe.

With First Nation’s architecture set to represent Canada at the next Venice Biennale, along with the presence of a formidable Canada House at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, now would be the most salient moment to strike a Canada Public Work’s commission to create a Destination Architecture equivalent for Canada, with perhaps the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. At the very least, there needs to be a conversation about the glaring fact that out of the 18 buildings representing our country, over half of them have been designed by non-Canadian architecture firms.

***

For more information on Destination Architecture, visit the Phaidon Press website.

**

Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect and writer.

The post Book Review – Destination Architecture appeared first on Spacing National.

Humanity’s collective drive towards urbanization within the past century has gone hand-in-hand with the mindless erasure and destruction of past urban environments. Historic preservation of historically significant architecture and districts has helped to cull this tide, yet the prevalent modes of preservation tend to focus on buildings, often at the exclusion of the underlying historic settlement patterns that inform a city’s historical development.

These patterns – much like the architecture that encloses the places we inhabit – have a logic and intelligence, founded in the socio-cultural values and geography of a particular place. They contribute to the organizational systems that underlie our settlements by dictating public space and street dimensions as well as lot and block sizes. They also reveal how our ancestor’s social and cultural values were embedded within their collective context and used to live more harmoniously with one another and their surrounding environments than most cultures today.

With the unparalleled power of contemporary civilization to rapidly alter the landscape and build at ever-increasing scales, the erasure of the underlying pattern of countless settlements has never been so prevalent. Their destruction is, in fact, encouraged within the culture of how we currently build. Large block and multi-block development and lot amalgamations, for example, characterize today’s construction practices as financial concerns are translated into building regulations.

When these patterns are destroyed, we lose much more than sites of antiquarian interest. We lose sight of a way of city building that is increasingly relevant to the goals and ambitions of contemporary urbanism. More specifically, these sites demonstrate an environmental intelligence and connection to the surrounding landscape and climate that we are currently striving to re-establish, are valuable examples of human-scaled settlement that promote human well-being and comfort, and foster the creation of resilient, adaptable communities through the small dimension of their city structure.

Environmental Intelligence

One of the most significant values of historic settlements is that all facets of their creation have an intimate relationship with their surrounding natural contexts. The form and layout of the street, lot and block systems all responded to topography, solar exposure, soils, and other climatic phenomena.

We can look to the well-known ancient Greek “solar city” of Priene (400 BCE), for example, to learn how a gridded block pattern, integrated with the surrounding topography and positioned according to solar orientation, set the foundation for an architecture that brilliantly reconciles human use with solar exposure.

The historic fabrics of Eastern settlements show similar characteristics. The hidden urban structure that supports the architecture of Old City Beijing, for example, was carefully calibrated to balance socio-cultural needs with the realities of its natural context. In real terms, the architectural order of courtyard buildings and the urban pattern they created, crystallized social structure, cultural values, urban structure, built form, climate and geography into a cohesive whole. Several other non-orthogonal cities such as Tunis in Tunisia and Mardin, Turkey also demonstrate an intelligent integration with the surrounding natural environment.

As a shelter for environmental intelligence rooted in sustainable practices and a connection to surrounding environmental systems, the urban framework of our older settlements offers a valuable repository of concealed wisdom worth learning from, emulating, and building upon based on our newly acquired knowledge of the many different environments around the world. Our growing awareness of the nuances of climate and geological processes – among others – can and must be integrated with the keen observations and built practices of the past.

Human scale

There is a growing awareness in city planning best practices that the scale and grain of a city’s inhabited spaces is critical to human comfort and well-being, and that this, in turn, is closely related to the underlying structure of its form. Although the specific measures of length and land subdivision in historic cities were often idiosyncratic, derived from anthropomorphic units of lengths (the Egyptian cubit for example), or from context specific behaviors such as walking or farming (the 15 ft. right-of-way of the standard Roman streets of 15 BC, for example, was born from the dimensions of horse carts), the resulting patterns related extremely well to the human body.

The important adaptation of city pattern to human senses and dimensions of the body – championed by strong research of people like Jan Gehl – is often first sacrificed by contemporary forms of development. Between tight time lines, the increased speed of transportation methods and the massive scale of developments, new urban areas are often far removed from human scale and comfort.

Similarly, given that the lot and block dimensions inherent to past urban pattern are closely tied to higher densities – a quality closely tied to supporting transit and commercial activities – their value as models for today’s urbanism is clear. Vancouver, Canada, for example, is constantly touted as one of the most livable cities in the world and has developed an innovative urbanism that is intimately related to its original standard 33’x120’ lot structure. This is also evident in the ‘Compact City’ initiative evident in Europe that promote walking and cycling, low energy consumption and reduced pollution living.

Resilience and Adaptability

The implications of the human-scaled lot sizes common to traditional city structure reach further than human comfort, for history shows that they perform better over the long term, as well. At a time when complex global forces are increasingly volatile and unpredictable, the creation of resilient and adaptable communities fostered by the small lots is becoming more and more important. Smaller scale patterns make communities more robust through tempering large-scale transformations to communities under pressure.

Anne Vernez Moudon’s seminal work on the physical transformation of San Francisco—Built for Change—is an important testament to how a community’s ability to evolve and change relates to the hidden traditional framework that supports it. By ensuring that property remains in many hands, she writes, small lots bring important results: from ensuring variety in the built environment through the different decisions of many to slowing down the rate of change by making large-scale real estate transactions difficult.

Large lot patterns with fewer owners, on the other hand, are susceptible to the potentially unpredictable change in reaction to unforeseeable outside forces. This is explicitly evident in the transformation of vibrant traditional commercial areas that have been selectively transformed by large, multi-lot footprint retail stores. As the volatile nature of recent global influences force large-footprint retail space out-of-business, it often creates sizeable “activity voids” along an otherwise energetic street. In many cases, these oversized spaces lie vacant for long periods of time due to their size. The large scale of these spaces, in turn, prevents the opportunity for small, incubator, start-up businesses to contribute to and maintain the vitality of the area. In this way, the large lot developments typical of contemporary development practices can also have potentially disastrous long-term economic impacts.

Although few studies have been done on the properties and performance characteristics of different settlement patterns over time, those that have been conducted – such as Arnis Siksna’s influential studies on the study on block size and form – clearly reveal the advantages of small/medium blocks and lots common to traditional settlements in virtually every category.

Interestingly, Siksna’s research goes further to expose how different large block and lot sizes tend towards similar subdivision patterns over time – demonstrating explicitly how the large development patterns in Adelaide, Australia and Toronto, Canada, for example, have been subdivided or broken down over time, effectively approximating sizes and dimensions similar to the older patterns of cities such as Savannah, Georgia and Portland, Oregon.

On Preservation:

The study of traditional city patterning suggests that there are universal principles of scale, dimension and environmental responsiveness underlying good settlement design. The violation of these principals, and the consequent failures in city building we see today, points to how significant the hidden pattern is for our collective future.

We must try to preserve and learn from what is left of the historic and hidden patterning of our cities while being mindful of the dangers of our heritage and preservation tendencies that result in petrified building fabrics, which are closed to change, and therefore must rely on other unpredictable factors, such as tourism, to keep them vibrant.

The preservation of the hidden settlement patterns of the past is not opposed to change. To the contrary, the fact that many of the patterns still exist today speaks to their merit and durability. Change is a necessary for built environments to survive. By virtue of their strong logic and (universal) principles, the abstract lines of historic settlement patterns accommodate transformation of all types – such as changes in technology and building practices – while remaining firmly rooted in the common human values that created them.

As the foundation of what makes the built environment succeed and/or fail, the significance of preserving our hidden settlement pattern lies beyond the architecture that it supports and perhaps even the past cultural values it embodies, to a way of thinking that we must re-learn – standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us – if we are to confront the future boldly and confidently.

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This piece was originally published in Sitelines Magazine (June 2013).

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Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief 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 see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The post Hidden Intelligence: Preserving Historic Settlement Patterns appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Gijs van Hensbergen (Bloomsbury Press, 2017)

Giljs van Hensbergen has pulled off a remarkable feat, taming the monstre sacré of twentieth-century architecture without diminishing him. He takes a levelheaded and highly readable journey through the life of Antoni Gaudi, an architect loved by Dali, hated by Picasso, and now destined for sainthood.

– Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, London

There is not much that can be said about the Sagrada Familia that hasn’t been said already, at least according to the author of this new book from Bloomsbury Press. This privately funded cathedral is one of the planet’s longest ongoing construction sites, one of a few rare buildings to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site before even being finished. While some think it hideous and others sublime, most agree it is a marvel to behold, along with the profile it strikes in the dense Barcelona building fabric as laid out by city planner Ildefons Cerdà.

In this new book by art historian Gijs Van Hansbergen, we are given a breathtaking exposition of both the architect Antoni Gaudi and the behind-the-scene events of Sagrada—a play-by-play of all the contributors from the time before Gaudi was born in the mid-1800’s—bringing us to its current incarnation with its construction now 100% funded by the millions of people that visit it each year (construction costs are around €18 million annually).

For those in the know in the architectural community, Jordi Fauli—the current project architect of the Sagrada—has said the building will be completed in 2026, the centenary of Gaudi’s death. And as those who have been there recently know, the new stained glass lighting the central nave is now completed, a small miracle unto itself. As such, the building has thousands visiting it daily, along with Gaudi’s other works in Barcelona—Palau Guëll, Casa Battló, Casa Milà, Park Guëll, and the Sagrada school—which, together with Sagrada, are protected as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

While the book is named for the cathedral, it is really more about Gaudi himself, providing the narrative that connects all the work he did over the course of his career, along with his unwavering devotion to the Sagrada family to see his vision carried on to completion. Hensbergen skillfully weaves together all his projects, explaining how he worked on his other masterpieces like Casa Battló and Casa Milà while Sagrada continued on in the background.

The author has also done extensive research connecting the succession of architects both before and after Gaudi that have worked on the church, along with the devastating Spanish Civil War which stopped construction for almost half a century. Within Gaudi’s lifetime, he was alone able to oversee only 15-25% of its construction, with his successor Domènec Sugrañes i Gras able to realize the final three towers on the Nativity façade, leaving much still to his successors when he passed.

Several historical events in Barcelona serve as a backbone for the book, including the already mentioned Civil War, a reminder that the events currently taking place in present day Barcelona have been going on in the background for centuries. In Gaudi’s lifetime, it was the horrible Tragic Week in which Sagrada could have very well been lost (and during which time Gaudi took refuge in his house at Park Guëll), as the rioters and anarchists marching through the streets burned several convents, with over 80 religious structures in total destroyed as the Roman Catholic Church was seen as part of the bourgeoisie class which was the target of the insurrection.

Passing away as Gaudi did at 73, tragically hit by a streetcar in Barcelona’s busy streets, his accomplishments are the stuff of wonder and awe. What is perhaps less known is that the devout Catalan architect refused to abide a national edict disallowing Barcelona citizens from observing a Catalan holiday, a stubbornness which led to his spending a night in jail the year before he passed away. Such was his passion that he was able to balance a devout faith with the empiricism of his exacting profession, the resultant body of work which has now become one of the country’s national treasures, along with Alhambra and the works of Pablo Picasso, and more recently the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

We can only wonder now what Gaudi would’ve thought about computers helping to finish his project, though as Hensbergen points out at one point of the book, “Gaudi was open to all the latest innovations as long as they made sense.” Sadly, the civil unrest that continues in his native city would most likely not have surprised him, and he would’ve been devastated had he known the construction of Sagrada was shuttered during Franco’s reign of terror.

He would also be humbled to learn that he is being considered for sainthood by the current Pope and his cardinals, not just for his architecture but his commitment to the workers and parishioners surrounding his projects, whom he ensured had safe and healthy living conditions (including the Sagrada school which he built for his worker’s children). He most certainly would’ve been abashed by the title of “God’s Architect” which his admirers have adopted, and it is said that Pope Benedict XVI was visibly moved by the cathedral when he consecrated it in 2010. We will learn in the next few years whether his canonization is to be or not.

Perhaps what is most astonishing about Hensbergen’s book was his decision to have no photography or drawings, such that the text is able to transport one more readily through the building and architect’s amazing history without any distraction. As the author himself says in the opening pages: “For the reader expecting a standard guidebook with an easy route to follow, and some simple observations followed by the odd suggestion for what else to see, this is not for you. The Sagrada Familia is already so well publicized, so often visited, so often photographed that as the icon for Barcelona, it needs no introduction.”

As such, Hensbergren has done a formidable job with his subject, creating a page turning experience about an architect and his masterpiece, both a testament to this amazing structure and its creator. As such, The Sagrada Famila can take its rightful place on your bookshelf next to Vers une Architecture, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and S,M,L,XL.

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For more information on The Sagrada Familia, visit the Bloomsbury Press website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect and writer.

The post Book Review: The Sagrada Familia appeared first on Spacing National.

Editors: Alan M. Berger, Joel Kotkin with Celina Balderas Guzman (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017)

According to Queens University’s David Gordon, approximately 70% of Canadians live in automobile-oriented suburbs. His research, that rigourously analysed Canadian census data between 2006-2011 and categorized suburbia based on modes of transportation, also concluded that roughly 80% of the population growth over that time frame occurred within this type of fabric. Using the same methodology, Wendell Cox—Principal of Demographia and Contributor Editor of New Geography—found that roughly 70% of the American population is suburban. Both accounts point to the fact that suburbs dominate the urban landscape both in area and population. In a nutshell: this ‘city’ is the suburbs. By extension, the future of the ‘city’ is dictated by our engagement with the suburbs.

Largely associated with ‘urban sprawl’, the suburbs often evoke a negative response among urbanists, designers and planners. This has seeped into popular culture, as well. The positive innocence of Leave It To Beaver and The Wonder Years find their present-day alter egos in the boredom of Britain’s The Good Life, the sinister narratives of Weeds, and apathy of Arcade Fire’s Album of the Year The Suburbs—to name just a few. In reality, however, things aren’t that simple. As many people have described, the suburbs have a long history. With the origin of the modern word dating back to the Roman era, suburbs have gone hand-in-hand with settlements arguably since the beginning of cities. The vast expanses of contemporary suburbs have only served to increase their complexity—one often masked by the oversimplifications we hear frequently.

With this in mind, the release of Infinite Suburbia could not be more timely. The culmination of  yearlong study on the future of suburban development by MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, this book is undoubtedly the most comprehensive analysis on the suburbs to-date. With the intention of compiling the “most recent, cutting edge research on suburbia” the book brings together a dizzying 52 essays from 74 multidisciplinary authors across a diversity of topics.

Synthesizing roughly 200 topics, the editors chose to categorize the essays under five broad chapters—The Drive for Upward Mobility, Polycentric Metropolitan Form, Metropolitan Economic Interrelationships, Harnessing Ecological Potential, and Scales of Governance. Although these chapters gather pieces by their dominant themes, the content of each individual essay crosses divisions. To reflect this, the editors also include a diagrammatic “Roadmap” that explicitly shows the complex interrelationships between essays across chapter themes—mirroring the complexity of the suburbs themselves.

The Infinite Suburbia Raodmap.

With this in mind, the essays need not be read in order. A thorough Introduction that succinctly touches upon all the essays, serves as an excellent stepping stone into the book’s diverse subjects. I toggled constantly between the latter and the Roadmap to select essays to read and found this approach worked well in fostering unexpected and meaningful connections between essays.

In terms of content, no stone is seemingly left unturned—from history to ecology, policies to economics, landscape to technology and beyond. This speaks directly to the excellent mix of authors from around the world that are contained within Infinite Suburbia’s 770 pages. Contributors that several contemporary urbanists and planners may know include Robert Bruegmann author of Sprawl: A Compact History, Keller Easterling (Extrastatecraft), Thomas J. Campanella (The Concrete Dragon),  Ann Forsyth (Reforming Suburbia) and Susannah Hagan (Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City), over and above the Editors themselves Joel Kotkin (The Human City) and Alan Berger (Drosscape).

These names are balanced by authors that some who may not be as well known, but whose excellent work makes their inclusion critical to the books success. David Gordon and Wendell Cox, mentioned earlier, are two such contributors among dozens of others, such as Rahul Mehrotra, Louise A. Mozingo (Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes) and Manuel Madrid.

The result of this colossal undertaking is an excellent, critical exploration of contemporary thinking, practices and future potential of the suburbs. One that does its fair share of debunking common myths and assumptions about this unique settlement pattern, while recognizing its drawbacks. In no uncertain terms, Infinite Suburbia is a book for the open-minded: essential reading for urbanists, designers, planners and others dedicated to the built environment who want to break the unnecessary barriers that divide suburbanization from urbanization. A process that must be undertaken if there are any hopes of a better urban future.

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Find out more about Infinite Suburbia at the PAP website. You can also read an interesting interview with Berger and Kotkin about the book here.

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Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief 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 see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The post Book Review: Infinite Suburbia appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Joan Busquets with Pablo Perez-Ramos, Nikos Katsikis, Christina Crawford, Dingliang Yang (Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2016)

Former MIT Professor of the renowned Theory of City Form course Julian Beinart, once described the grid as the closest things cities have to a universal language. The grid has been seen across all cultures around the world, since the earliest days of settlement. From the Bronze Age Harappan cities of India to 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan, the rigid discipline of the Heian-Kyo (modern day Kyoto, Japan) to the Laws of the Indies, the urban grid—and its variants—has demonstrated an incredible ability to adapt to a diversity uses, while maintaining an order that is easily replicated. In the face of such resilience, there is no doubt that the grid will be equally important in the future. It is with this understanding, and hands placed firmly at both ends of the temporal spectrum, that Redesigning Gridded Cities: Key Examples was written.

Created as a 4 volume set by Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Professor Joan Busquets, the series focuses on four different urban grid archetypes.  Each city is given an individual book and written with a different co-author: Barcelona: Manifold Grids and the Cerda Plan (done with Pablo Perez-Ramos), Manhattan: Rectangular Grid for Ordering an Island (done with Nikos Katsikis), Chicago: Two Grids Between Lake and River (done with Christina Crawford) and Hangzhou: Grids from Cnala to Maxi-Block (done with Dingliang Yang). Without a doubt, Busquets is one of the more prolific contemporary authors that analyses the physical structure of cities—his Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City being one of the most comprehensive works I’ve read on a city—and this set is a wonderful addition to his many publications.

Although each book covers a different city and can be bought separately, the overarching formats of each are similar. All publications are based on GSD studio courses and are divided into two broad sections: each book opening with a rigourous analysis of the historic and present-day urban structure (from block to hydrology, lots to infrastructure and beyond), followed by design proposals created by GSD students based on their research. This format is also used from his book on Savannah that, unfortunately, is not a part of the this set but could have easily been included given its unique urban structure.

As is standard-fare with Busquets and many similar products out of the GSD, the content is dominated by a wide diversity of strong visuals and drawings, with text used sparingly. As such, readers will find everything from historic photographs to exploded paraline drawings, network diagrams to cross-sections, block diagrams to translucent paper overlay maps…and everything in between. This being the case, over and above being a great resource on urban structure and morphology, the series is an excellent reference guide for different city visuals across a variety of scales, ranging from buildings to regions. Although some of the drawings are a bit small, the extent of the information included makes up for the drawback.

Despite the fact that books on cities have exploded over the past decade, publications that critically analyze and dissect settlements remain relatively rare. Within this context, Redesigning Gridded Cities: Key Examples is an excellent and essential addition to the libraries of urbanists, architects and planners interested in urban morphology and methods of analysing urban form.

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For more information on Redesigning Gridded Cities: Key Examples visit the Applied Research + Design Publishing website.

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Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief 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 see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The post Book Review – Redesigning Gridded Cities: Key Examples appeared first on Spacing National.

The distribution of wealth and the shape and form of cities are intimately related.  As such, Thomas Picketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty First Century has as much to say about cities and settlements as it does about the nuts and bolts of wealth over time. If his rigorous analysis of economic history is accurate, it brings to light a number of dilemmas. It challenges contemporary urban planning thought and practices founded in the belief that submitting to ’market’ forces work towards equality. This, however, requires situating urban history, current planning beliefs and urban design practices within Picketty’s observations on economic history. This series will attempt to do this in the hopes of questioning popularly held myths and highlighting the importance of critical dissecting the logic that underpins contemporary city building practices.

For those who do not know Picketty’s work, his amazingly accessible 700 page book analyzes one of the most comprehensive collections of economic data—going back three centuries, across more than 20 countries—in an attempt to find the underlying mechanisms around the concentration of wealth. Simply put, he asks: do the dynamics of capital accumulation lead to inequality, with fewer people having more wealth, or do balancing forces of growth, technological progress and competition serve to create more equality among classes?

His main conclusion is deceptively straightforward: in the absence of mediating mechanisms (progressive tax policies, etc.), if the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth of income and output, (social) inequality increases. Furthermore, those who currently seek to acquire wealth through work and education will fall further and further behind those who are already wealthy.

This runs counter to the reality of the past few generations who have witnessed a vast reduction in inequality and have been able to accumulate wealth, rising in social class through hard work and proper education—a belief that pervades in all facets of daily life to the point that it is argued now as a veritable law of nature.

But according to Picketty’s analysis, the reduction in inequality that wealthy countries have experienced since roughly the 1920s is a rare anomaly. It is an illusion-one that resulted from a perfect storm of larger global events—the World Wars, in particular, and a series of political shocks and policy adoptions that took place in their wake.  This served to effectively redistribute the wealth held by those with great fortunes to the classes below. As this process took place over decades, the belief in capitalism’s tendency towards equality became established.

Picketty’s data shows, however, that this rare moment in history has been reversing since the late 1970s, as a result of changing political, economic and social attitudes towards taxation and finance.  Since that time, the promise of accumulating wealth through work and education that is a foundation of our belief system has been decreasing, while a select group of people—such as CEOs and others he calls “super managers”—have been earning a disproportionate share of national income. In the absence of checks and balances, “the return on capital increases with the size of the initial endowment”, allowing the few with increasing wealth to pull further from the rest.

Picketty’s conclusion: “There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.” To be sure, he convincingly shows that inequality has been the norm for most, if not all of human history, with wealth distribution not decided on the basis of merit or any personal effort by the owner, but by virtue of the initial capital, through mechanisms such as inheritance. The old adage that money begets money is as true now as it has ever been.

In 2015, OMA Partner Reiner de Graaf wrote an excellent piece using Picketty’s insights to put forth the challenging idea that the “enlightened beliefs in progress, social emancipation, and civil rights”  of the twentieth century are perhaps nothing but a brief footnote in the “systemic logic of capitalism, in which the inherent accretion of capital through capital remains an unbreakable cycle”. Similarly, he describes the alignment of the social ethos and ideologies of the modern movement in architecture with Picketty’s economic history and how the real estate narratives of the recent decades frighteningly mirror Picketty’s accounts of the growing divergence in equality. As someone intimately involved with one of the most successful architecture firms in the world today, he is well situated to comment on the realities of our contemporary system.

If Picketty is correct, and connection between architectural and economic history described by de Graaf is more than just coincidence, the spirit of many contemporary urban planning practices—and many other larger social and political beliefs on which they are founded—lie on shaky ground. In fact, some of the most sacredly held urban planning and development narratives of the present, such as those that condemn the suburbs and tout the merits of the high-rise development, are called explicitly into question. We will take a closer look at these issues in Part 2 next week.

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Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief 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 see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The post The City of Illusions – Part 1 appeared first on Spacing National.

Spacing and Evergreen proudly present The Future Fix: Solutions for Communities Across Canada, a special podcast series.

THIS EPISODE: Mapping Arctic Sea Ice

Not all technology has to be disruptive, it may actually be most useful as an extension of our ways of life, instead of as a replacement. In the arctic, the Inuit have extensive traditional knowledge of traversing sea ice for hunting, gathering supplies, and travelling between communities. SmartICE is a social enterprise which uses technology to build on this traditional knowledge and map the ever-changing sea ice, so people can make informed decisions about how and where to travel.

Andrew Arreak is SmartICE Regional Operations Lead for Qikiqtaaluk Region, and explains the benefit this technology provides to northern communities.

“Every year the ice conditions are different… if we knew what was coming in terms of ice conditions, I don’t think we would need a SmartICE at all up in the north. It is a great adapting tool that we are able to use so we can provide the information for our local people.  Since I’ve started working there has been less people falling through the ice, less search and rescue callouts, and people are more confident on how long they should be out at certain times of year before the ice starts to break.”

Listen to the episode to hear more about SmartIce. “SmartQAMUTIK run” image by Michael Schmidt, courtesy of SmartICE.

The Future Fix is a partnership between Spacing and Evergreen for the Community Solutions Network: a program of Future Cities Canada. As the program lead, Evergreen is working with Open North and partners to help communities of all sizes across Canada navigate the smart cities landscape. The Community Solutions Network is supported with funding provided by Infrastructure Canada.

The post The Future Fix: Mapping Arctic Sea Ice appeared first on Spacing National.

In 2019, Canada adopted the National Housing Strategy Act, which commits all governments in Canada to “progressive realization of the right to adequate housing,” with an emphasis on “improving housing outcomes for those in greatest need.”

But many recent mid-way evaluations of the current National Housing Strategy make clear that all levels of government — local, regional, provincial/territorial, and the federal — have failed to provide new homes that are affordable or suitable to those who are unhoused or in core housing need. A growing consensus is reflected from sources as diverse as the Canadian Housing Renewal Association (the industry association for non-profit housing providers) and Scotiabank, which concluded that doubling non-profit housing is a necessary jump start towards the homes Canadians need.

Central to the problem of steering the right supply is the absence of shared, replicable, comparable and equity-focused data to measure housing need, as well as a lack of understanding of the best policies that can provide the right supply for who needs what kinds of housing where.

The Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) project, based at the University of British Columbia (UBC), aims to solve that problem. On Wednesday March 29 at 10am PST/ 1pm EST, we will be launching our new website with three tools that can help governments, community organizations and developers better address the affordable housing and homelessness crisis facing Canada. Register your place here.

The Housing Need Assessment Tool: a new way to plan for affordable homes

This tool will allow the analysis of census data on core housing need by income category, household size and priority populations. Currently, most government programs do not use the CMHC’s standard definition of “affordable housing,” which is no more than 30% of pre-tax household income. They also do not focus on low- and moderate-income categories, as did affordable housing programs from the 1940s to the 1990s, when the federal government abandoned responsibility for national housing policy.

We use five income categories, each based on area median household income or AMHI (since incomes vary so much by community):

1. Very low income: These households, earning less than 20% of AMHI, are mostly on fixed incomes.
2. Low income: Households earning 21- 50% of AMHI, the Low Income Cut Off or poverty line. Many are reliant on minimum wage.
3. Moderate income: These households earn between 51-80% of AMHI and have also benefitted in the past from public and other non-profit housing.
4. Median income: These households earn between 81-120% of AMHI, and have traditionally been able to afford homeownership. However, first time homeownership is unaffordable in most Canadian communities, forcing long commutes for many young families.
5. Higher income: Households earning over 121% of AMHI. In many of Canada’s larger cities, even higher income households who currently rent find homeownership unaffordable.

The new housing need assessment tool allows calculation of affordable housing costs for every community in Canada.

Our data shows that most households in core housing need are very low-, low- and moderate-income households. There is simply not enough housing supply available for both one person and multiple person households at the costs these households can afford.

If the federal government wants to achieve its targets of 530,000 households removed from core housing need by 2028 (out of a total of 1.7 million households in 2016), halving the number of those chronically homeless (at least 25,000 people, not included in census calculations of core housing need), and addressing the needs of students, people in congregate housing such as long-term care homes, and farm workers (none of whom are included in census calculations of core housing need), it will need clear targets for housing costs and household sizes.

The current federal government has committed to a gender and intersectional equity approach to housing targets, but it has not analysed need for these groups. Ottawa has also announced sub-targets, for instance, 33% of all federal housing funding for women-led households. Those with physical, cognitive or mental health issues and household heads over 85 may have additional support needs. Lastly, the federal government has pledged to support separate For Indigenous, By Indigenous housing and more recently, created a fund for Black-led housing initiatives. Data would help in monitoring equitable outcomes.

Our Housing Needs Assessment Tool will provide data on priority populations in core housing need for every community in Canada, to allow the development of provincial/territorial, regional and municipal targets and sub-targets.

Land Assessment Tool: the most effective way governments can address housing need

International evidence agrees that use of publicly-owned land for non-profit and affordable housing is the most effective way to meet the needs of low- and moderate-income households. Indeed, the combination of free land (either donated or free-leased) and non-profit development can deliver up to 50% of the cost of new homes.

Our Land Assessment Tool shows how to identify well-located government land that is suitable for scaling up non-profit housing, including “housing on top” of existing infrastructure like health centres, libraries, and fire stations. Working with 12 government partners, we have identified thousands of sites that could be used to develop new affordable, transit-oriented homes to meet the needs of those who are homeless or in core housing need, and jumpstart the kind of supply that is most required for the socially, economically and environmentally sustainable communities of the future.

Acquisitions Tool: stopping the haemorrhage of affordable homes

Between 2011 and 2016, 15 affordable homes renting at $750 or less a month were lost for every non-profit home created in Canada. The reason is that the federal government has been largely absent in the development and acquisitions of affordable housing since the 1990s. There are growing calls for a national acquisition strategy that transfers rental homes at risk of losing their affordability to the non-profit sector. Several governments in Canada, including B.C., Nova Scotia and the City of Toronto have launched their own acquisition strategies.

Our Acquisitions Tool analyses Canadian and international best practices to provide easy-to-use fact sheets for governments considering supporting acquisition of low-cost rental. It covers the identification of suitable properties, financing rapid acquisition of properties on the market, and considerations to maintain affordability of the homes while improving their condition and environmental sustainability.

For more information on how the Housing Assessment Tools can work for your community, please contact us at HART@allard.ubc.ca, register for our launch, or attend our session at the CHRA Congress in Winnipeg April 18-20.

Carolyn Whitzman, expert advisor for the Housing Assessments Resource Tools initiative, is Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, at the University of Ottawa. Follow her on Twitter at @CWhitzman.

The post Tools to address the affordable housing crisis facing Canada appeared first on Spacing National.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In Spacing #29/2013, photographer Jesse Colin Jackson and anthropologist Lindsay Bell wrote about MacKenzie Place, the tallest residential building in Canada north of the 60th parallel. In support of Jackson’s new exhibition “Mackenzie Place” at Pari Nadimi Gallery (254 Niagara Street, Toronto, opening Thursday, March 23rd, 6-8pm) and the launch of Bell’s book Under Pressure: Diamond Mining and Everyday Life in Northern Canada (Saturday, May 13, 2-4pm), Spacing is republishing their feature, “Arctic Rising”.

ARCTIC RISING

Heading north from Edmonton, it’s a 975-kilometre drive to the 60th parallel. Travellers pull over and snap self-portraits with the polar bear sign: “Welcome to the Northwest Territories.” Between May and September, tourists drop into the 60th parallel visitor’s centre to claim their “Order of Arctic Adventurers” certificates. From here, the natural wonders of the Northwest Territories beckon: the Aurora Borealis, highway-blocking bison, world-class fishing and hunting, and more.

Keep driving due north of 60 to the shores of Great Slave Lake and you’ll arrive in Hay River, the second largest town in the Northwest Territories, population 4,000. Rail, river, and road meet here in what is known as the transportation “Hub of the North.” Marking the centre of town is an unlikely urban icon: the Mackenzie Place high-rise, the Territories’ tallest residential building. Like many places in Canada, the north is increasingly urban in nature — a quality that goes unnoticed by many southern visitors as they seek out the expected natural wonders.

Completed in 1975, the construction of the 17-storey high-rise residential tower was highly anticipated. The 80 units were to be filled by an influx of workers and residents that would accompany the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. The pipeline would carry oil and gas from the Beaufort Sea southward to the railhead in Hay River, where it would leave for refineries farther south. The pipeline project was defeated due to a mix of Aboriginal activism, changing Canadian policy towards Aboriginal lands, and a substantial drop in the price of oil. The building has never been filled to capacity.

While a postwar tower jutting up from the sub-arctic landscape may seem unusual, northern Canada has been the site of many experiments in planned urbanization and modernization. Inuvik, known for its above-ground “utilidors” and brightly painted homes, was planned in the 1950s as part of larger Cold War efforts to develop and protect the north. Frobisher Bay, now known as Iqaluit, began as a military base and was expanded to become an administrative centre during these same years. The Mackenzie Place high-rise was part of a planned relocation of the original settlements, which were located along the lakefront on both sides of the river. The original town was prone to seasonal flooding when river ice would break up every spring. In 1963, federal administrators for the region decided that a “new town” would be developed farther up the river. Its centrepiece was the high-rise.

Physically, the Mackenzie Place high-rise has reached its best-before date. Its recently repainted exterior belies its inadequate insulation and tired mechanical systems. The original tower design included shops on the ground floor, conference facilities on the second, and the first coin-operated laundromat in town. These spaces have been repurposed many times. Most recently, the bottom floor was used as remedial classroom space for the nearby high school. Hay River’s lone radio station has been broadcasting from the second floor for the past 20 years. As in many towers, the residential units are stratified vertically, with the nicest units on the upper floors. They’re also stratified east to west, with the river side units seen to be more desirable than the town side units, both because of the view and because of their superior satellite television orientation.

Tower life is not part of most people’s vision of the north as an unruly and unspoiled wilderness. This view is part of our national mythology, but this unlikely northern icon disturbs our collective sense of place. However, from 
almost every vantage point, the tower is the standout feature in Hay River. It is the only building of its type for over 1,000 kilometres, and yet, by virtue of Hay River’s isolation, the tower is by and large a sight unseen. Those who visit will find that many locals don’t know what to make of the place. For locals, the high-rise went from being a promise of a modern future to an all-too-present eyesore. Unlike many urban towers down south, however, this one singularly dominates in the centre of town and the surrounding landscape, serving as a constant visual anchor of the Hay River experience. Visually, it’s Hay River’s CN Tower.

Locals claim the high-rise is an epicentre of drug activity and complain about the owner’s failure to contribute to the town’s beautification efforts. When the buildinghas garnered outside attention, the focus has been on violence and tragedy. A young woman who moved up from Alberta suspiciously fell from the 16th floor. This was shortly followed by reports that a jealous ex-partner killed a local fisherman and his wife there. These anomalies easily overshadow the everyday life of those in the tower.

Those who move into the high-rise see it as a stepping-stone. For Ivan, Hay River wasn’t supposed to be his “forever home.” In 1978, his family fled Chile just as military dictator Augusto Pinochet had come to power. Ivan arrived just as a nearby lead and zinc mine was moving into full production, and getting work proved easy. Ivan explains: “Being an immigrant and coming up here is like winning the lottery. When we arrived, they were desperate for help. [My] dad took a job as a janitor for $1,000 a week and could not believe it! Although my father had been wealthy in Chile, we became servants, but we were well-treated, so that was confusing to us.” What was supposed to be a brief stay before moving to Miami lasted much longer.

Other residents still are eager to go home. Adore, an engineer from the Philippines, moved north to save money in the hope of returning sooner to his home country. He uses his second bedroom as a mini–recording studio. On any given Saturday or Sunday, you can find him behind an electric piano, wearing headphones, recording songs he has written or adapted, so he can send home CDs to his wife and children. He came to Canada seven years ago and has yet been unable to return to visit them.

Destiny, a 22-year-old Dene woman from the nearby First Nation, folds baby clothes she buys each week at the town’s local thrift shop. For her, the high-rise means doing things “her way.” Like many young adults, Destiny wants to feel in charge of her life. With a baby on the way, she hopes that moving to a bigger town in the Northwest Territories will offer her more job prospects. For Mary, a nurse practitioner originally from Ontario, the high-rise is the road out of many more years of work. She came north to save for retirement. She sits at her dining room table painting pieces of driftwood she collects at the beach on her morning walks with her pug, Oscar. “This place has everything I need. At my age, you have learned that it doesn’t take much to keep on,” she laughs.

The modern concrete residential tower — and its associated physical and existential problems — is no longer an image associated with progress in Canada. Nevertheless, understanding the evolving function of these multi-unit dwellings is fundamental to understanding a community’s strengthening — or weakening — heart. Hay River is no exception. The Mackenzie Place high-rise is threaded into the fabric of the town. Hay River, the north, and even Canada in the broadest sense, cannot be understood without understanding the high-rise and the stories it holds.

photos by Jesse Colin Jackson

Jackson has spent much of his career looking at tower apartment buildings, mostly ones structured of reinforced concrete. The buildings, the material, and their ethos emerged in the early modern period, seemingly without precedent, and have since proliferated beyond our wildest imagination. His new show Mackenzie Place is derived from extended consideration of a unique example of the type. Hay River’s unique concrete tower is far from its typical urban home, rising alone on the south shore of Tucho (Great Slave Lake), in Canada’s Northwest Territories. In 2013, Jackson and Bell began a research-creation collaboration at the intersection of art and anthropology that has now come to fruition. Mackenzie Place will immerse you in what the building sees, how it is seen, and the lives lived within its walls.

“Arctic Rising” was originally published in Spacing #29 (fall 2013)

The post Mackenzie Place: The tallest residential building in Canada’s North appeared first on Spacing National.

Spacing and Evergreen proudly present The Future Fix: Solutions for Communities Across Canada, a special podcast series.

THIS EPISODE: Smart Cities, Reconsidered

The term “Smart Cities” has been kicking around for about a decade now. When we began The Future Fix series, that term was headline news. Everyone, including multiple levels of governments, was being asked to imagine a new kind of urban space, where data and technology were woven into the very fabric of the neighbourhood. Since then, the Smart Cities conversation has evolved, important questions have been asked, a global pandemic happened, and we have more examples, from communities across Canada, about what works, and what to avoid.

John Lorinc is a Spacing senior editor and author of the book “Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias.” He’s been researching data and tech as it relates to cities and urban politics and planning for years now, and his book earned the Writer’s Trust of Canada Balsilie Prize for Public Policy.

“Because of the pandemic and because so much of our lives had to go online for this period of time, and in many ways stay online, a lot of the ideas around Smart Cities and this hyperconnectivity and this use of big data became actually part of the way our cities our cities function. Except we stopped calling it ‘Smart Cities’.”

Martin Canning is executive director of government innovation at Evergreen. He tells us about what he’s learned about data and technology projects in communities across the countries, through his work with the Community Solutions Network, and what makes a “Smart” project successful.

“There’s a dark side and there’s a light side, and I’ll stick to the light side, when we’re thinking about the future and where technology is often driving us, sometimes pulling us. But when it comes to cities, and public sector markets, and government innovation and community innovation in Canada and around the world, what I see […] is not just an appetite, but a culture that is opening to allow for multi-sectoral partnership like we haven’t seen before.”

Listen to the episode to hear more about the future of “future fixes.”

The Future Fix is a partnership between Spacing and Evergreen for the Community Solutions Network: a program of Future Cities Canada. As the program lead, Evergreen is working with Open North and partners to help communities of all sizes across Canada navigate the smart cities landscape. The Community Solutions Network is supported with funding provided by Infrastructure Canada.

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Edited by Ulrich Knaack, Rebecca Bach, and Samuel Schabel – Berkhauser Verlag, 2023

To identify industrial solutions in the building industry, missing basics such as material parameters must be worked out and verified depending on the area of application. What requirements do buildings and components impose on the material and its manufacture? What standards result from the material and its use, and where can it be used for what purpose? In parallel, it will be necessary to investigate how existing materials from the paper industry can be used in architecture, how technologies from paper production can be transferred and to what extent they can be adapted for building objectives.

• From Chapter One, ‘Paper in Architecture’

Just like mass timber, which has faced challenges in establishing itself as a viable option in the construction industry, paper also encounters similar obstacles. Building With Paper, a thorough research and development account authored by three doctoral scholars who are presently practicing and teaching in the paper industry, sheds light on this issue. Released at a time when embodied carbon has become the new buzzword, the trio reminds us in the opening pages that paper has always been at the forefront of recycling. For this reason, paper stands to provide one of the most sustainable cradle-to-cradle materials with a long proven track record—as they point out, “technologically, it is mature.”

Told over eight chapters looking at the history, science, and biases against the use of paper as a building material, the authors cite the work done by “BAMP! – Building with Paper” as the fountainhead of the book. Funded by the State of Hesse, Germany, they note that “the interdisciplinary composition of the participating scientists made it possible to map and investigate the entire value chain of a building made of paper.”

With the first three chapters looking at the history and science of building with paper, chapters four and five delve into its structural and life safety aspects. Touting paper as “Wood 2.0” given its exceptional ability to be 3D printed anywhere, the book’s authors also point out its greatest liabilities—fire and moisture. While wood too is susceptible to the same, it can use its rigidity and mass to still withstand limited exposure to the elements. As demonstrated here, paper too can be treated to withstand some degree of moisture and heat, or can be used as a hybrid used in combination with some other materials.

The book also reminds us that the paper industry has for some time been contributing to business and commerce, serving the packaging and publishing industries since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The invention of the continuous paper machine in 1799 by French inventor Louis-Nicolas Robert was akin to Ford’s revolutionary Model T assembly line. Several other innovations in the paper industry are here noted as well, including the invention of corrugated cardboard in 1874.

Chapter six is the book’s star attraction, showcasing twenty-five case studies of paper construction, including several pavilions by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Most notable of these is his 1995 Paper Log House, which was mass-produced to provide shelter housing after the Great Hanshin Earthquake which devastated Kobe and left 320,000 people homeless. It was a pivotal moment for paper as a building material, as the attention brought by this Pritzker-winning architect prompted the research and building industry to up its paper game.

Included here are also several Tiny Houses using paper as a part of a composite wall assembly, with several prototypes looking at the best use of paper as it is currently produced in sheet and tube forms. This extends to full-on experiments where it is literally stretched to its limit when used in tandem with steel cables, as best demonstrated here in Shigeru Ban’s KUAD Studio in Kyoto. Ban also fabricated a summer pavilion for himself using paper in 1995 which he still spends time in. Simply called Paper House, it looks much as if Mies had used paper tubes instead of plate glass and I-beams in his Farnsworth House.

The case study chapters also demonstrate how paper is being explored all over the world as a building material, from the Wikkelhouse in Amsterdam—which was the first mass-produced paper-based residential building—to the fantastic Cardboard Bombay restaurant in Mumbai which provides a unique dining experience with its parametrically sculpted cardboard striations. Yet another case study provides us with a test of paper’s resiliency, featuring a showroom in LA constructed from cardboard tubes that have been estimated to last between 10 and 20 years.

The final two chapters of the book provide some outlook and reference for those looking to seriously consider using paper in their next building project. As noted in the book’s opening pages, paper has been used as a building material in Japan since the first century. While our present buildings require much more thermally, structurally, as well as acoustically, looking at a material that is seldom seriously considered provides an opportunity to reexamine the materials we are currently using, especially concrete and steel.

The book’s authors appreciate that their research is unlikely to be as disruptive as mass timber has been on the construction industry, yet they quickly point out in the opening pages that paper production is not unlike laminated veneer lumber (LVL) technology. Given that LVLs are only limited by the size of truck that can transport them to a job site, we may be headed to a future where paper can be fabricated on-site the same way as poured-in-place concrete, with the difference that paper could be made from post-consumer waste without the massive carbon footprint associated with the production of fly ash, lime, and Portland cement.

A superbly detailed book, right down to its no-frills hardboard paper cover, this is a must-read for new building developers and contractors and is an indispensable reference for architects and engineers interested in this new innovative building science. As it was before for the regulation and adoption of engineered wood products like LVLs, some of this will be already familiar territory, but overall it is here clearly explained for the benefit of government and building officials’ public safety concerns. Pushing the envelope, paper is most surely set to be part of the conversation in how we future-proof our buildings, and this new book is a roadmap for how we might get there.

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For more information on Building With Paper, visit the Berkauser Verlag website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: Building With Paper – Architecture and Construction appeared first on Spacing National.

This past month in Calgary, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada held its first in-person conference since 2019, showcasing the recent opening of several new buildings in and around the downtown core. The City has become a recent hotbed of architectural activity, starting in 2012 with Santiago Calatrava’s Peace Bridge, and leading up to Norman Foster’s Bow Tower, along with a recent Canadian Architect article by Trevor Boddy, who in reviewing Bjarke Ingels Group’s new Telus Sky tower, noted the city is having a bit of an architectural renaissance, with the addition of two new important civic buildings—the library and concert hall—just recently opening on the east side of the Central Business District.

Having grown up in Calgary in the 80’s, I can remember when the Calgary Tower was the tallest building on the skyline, when the then newly opened Saddledome was the only building of note east of City Hall. The buzz in the City ahead of the 1986 Winter Games was similar to that which I experienced in Vancouver ahead of 2010, but still back then in Calgary the large architectural monuments were few and far between. Today’s Calgary skyline is in marked contrast, presently being built out at a staggering rate, with the Bow by Norman Foster now sharing Centre Street with BIG’s Sky Tower in the city’s core at 7th Avenue. The two towers seem to be performing a frozen dance, spatially separated as per zoning but calling to each other across the transit corridor.It is a new look for Calgary, especially along the Bow River which has been totally transformed, made necessary by the devastating flooding 10 years ago, and of which Calatrava’s Peace Bridge forms an exclamation point along this new river promenade. Stretching between 8th Street and St. Patrick’s Island, separated pedestrian and cycling paths were filled with people on the sunny Friday afternoon I was there. However, getting to Stephen Avenue Mall from the riverfront is still not a smooth pedestrian experience: the Plus 15 experience Calgary is famous for in the winter but does not translate so well in the summer. Traversing the 4-5 blocks to get to 8th Avenue on the west side of the CBD while not unpleasant as a pedestrian still could use much improvement.

With 8th Avenue downtown known locally as Stephen Avenue Mall, many of the City’s early banks and other notable buildings remain located here, mostly due to the Bankers Hall incorporating many of them into their building design in 1989s. Of all these building the most notable remains the Hudson’s Bay, built in 1913 and added to in 1929 at which time its distinctive arched colonnade was added along Stephen Avenue Mall. But it is a collection of new buildings at the east end of the Mall around City Hall that have recently turned some heads. The first – Studio Bell – opened to critical acclaim in 2016, which as Canada’s new National Music Centre is already a new hub for Calgary’s performing arts scene along with being an eye-popping addition to the downtown’s east end.

Following on the heels of the Bell has been the opening of the new main branch of the city library, designed by Snohetta with DIALOG as Architect of Record. This stunning new space includes a vast swoop of wooden soffit at the building entry, framing east or west Calgary depending on your vantage point. Through the doors and into the great atrium, this great space according to the architects has had its geometry derived from the shape of an Egyptian oil lamp, an ancient symbol of wisdom. It is indeed a great contribution to the City’s public realm, a delightful civic space for both locals and visitors alike.

The new library and Bell Centre alone are worth the price of admission for a visit to Calgary, which along with the announcement of a new replacement for the aging Saddledome, will continue to see the City grow skyward. Construction on its C-Train is ongoing, especially as the City continues to expand out from all four of its quadrants. Growing up in NW Calgary, the foothills of the Rockies were always within sight, and development to the west of Calgary is also ongoing, especially in and around Banff. No visit to Calgary is complete without a quick side trip to Canada’s first national park, the township of which grew at a lightning pace following the discovery of its hot springs in the late 1800’s.

And no visit to Banff is complete without a quick stop at the Banff Springs Hotel, with its accompanying Falls at the confluence of the Spray and Bow Rivers. The first hotel was almost built on the wrong spot, as its original announcement by Canadian Pacific Railway in 1888 spurned a local Banff resident to personally write to Van Horne and tell him he knew a better spot. This incited Van Horne to travel out to Banff and day hike to the location with the local resident, discovering the confluence and realizing he would have to redesign the hotel. Further disarray ensued as the local builders had the north arrow upside-down on the drawings once construction was underway, giving the hotel’s kitchen windows the view of the river and the guest rooms the side of the mountain.

Banff has over the years also been the site of ongoing arts and architectural dialogue, home to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as well as hosting the AAA annual conference every other year at the great hotel. The sleepy little mountain community also caught the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900s, as he designed a park pavilion with one of his apprentices who went on to work at Canada Parks in Ottawa. Unfortunately, the site to the south of the town centre was prone to flooding with the Bow River close by, and every year the building required costly maintenance to keep it habitable. As the story goes, Parks Canada gave instructions to a demolition crew to raze a nearby structure to the Banff pavilion, and when they accidentally started to knock down the pavilion, it is said the orders from Ottawa were to finish the job once and for all.

The grounds are still used for recreation, with a well-used skateboard park and baseball diamond on the site where the pavilion once stood. A new community centre facility on the grounds has recently been built by the township, to include change rooms and washrooms, and which was almost completed during a recent visit. Given the history of FLW’s structure on the site, one cannot help but notice the similar roofline of the new structure to the original. The design-build contractors are perhaps paying homage to the great master architect, though with a more modern and utilitarian facility, bereft of the multitude of stained glass doors that graced the original structure, and of which only a few black and white images remain.

The news from Calgary and Banff then would appear to be good, and whether you are an urbanite looking to live in the hustle and bustle at the centre of Cowtown, or you prefer to head to the hills and hike the trails in Kananaskis Country, there is much to see and do along the banks of the Bow and Elbow Rivers.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post News from Calgary and Banff appeared first on Spacing National.

Spacing and the Balanced Supply of Housing research node proudly present The Overhead: Understanding Canada’s Affordable Housing Crisis, a special podcast series.

THIS EPISODE: Evictions

Evictions can completely upend your life. At best, you have to begin the search for a new home in an increasingly expensive and competitive housing market. At worst, you can’t find an affordable replacement. It’s a scary situation, even in the best circumstances.

In this episode, we get into why evictions happen, how frequently, tenant rights, and “bad faith” evictions.

First, we speak to Adam Mongrain, director of housing policy with the Quebec advocacy group Vivre en Ville about an online rental registry, which would provide renters and governments about changes in rental prices, and prevent unfair price hikes:

If we’re going to be in the housing market, then we should apply rules and conditions that make sure that market works out to the interest of the consumer, and having all the information available so that you know what the fair price is for what you’re about to buy or rent is a key component of making sure that the market is working properly.

Julie Mah is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, who has done a lot of work on gentrification and urban displacement, and tells us about how that can cause evictions:

I’m creating a neighbourhood change map, so I’m looking at what has happened in terms of neighbourhood change over time, from 2001 to 2021 in the city, then seeing how that relates to evictions.

Finally, Alexandra Flynn, associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Allard School of Law talks about the high eviction rate in B.C. municipalities, changes to the provinces “Residential Tenancy Act,” the housing as a human right, including for those living in encampments:

The federal government passed a piece of legislation called ‘The National Housing Strategy Act,’ which was passed in 2019… That piece of legislation has a lot of potential to shape where we see obligations of governments. If it extended to the municipal scale, municipalities couldn’t just rely on bylaws, they would have to figure out a different way of ensuring that people had basic rights to housing.

Why do evictions happen, and what can we do to prevent them? We get into it.

Listen here for The Overhead:

The post The Overhead: Evictions appeared first on Spacing National.

THIS EPISODE: The Financialization of a Housing Crisis

The days of the “mom-and-pop” landlord are largely behind us. Now, housing units are being snapped up or developed by large corporate entities and private equity firms. It can be hard to figure out who  actually owns a building. Homes being treated like major sources of capital, instead of places for people to live.

This is a major factor in the housing crisis, pushes people who are renting out of their homes and neighbourhoods, and changes the physical and social fabric of communities.

Erika Sagert, policy manager for the BC Non-Profit Housing Association, has been trying to identify just how many people are affected by this financialization of housing:

It’s really hard to be a renter in Canada. The numbers, in terms of sheer volume, really stand out. We talk a lot about proportion, so we’re looking at one third of renter households in Canada are spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. The number that stands out to me is 1.6 million rental households.

When it comes to the types of private equity shaping the rental market, and their effect on Black and other marginalized communities, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Dr. Nemoy Lewis and research assistant Dimitri Panou have been tracking just that. As Dr. Lewis says:

When we think about the term ‘displacement,’ it gives us the idea that we can just go down the street and move into the next apartment. But that next apartment might be owned by… a different financialized landlord who are also engaged in the same practice. So, as such, these landlords are causing folks to be expelled and banished from major urban centres.

Finally, Cloé St-Hilaire, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, is researching financialized rentals in Montreal, who owns what, and who is impacted the most:

We saw there was a strong positive correlation between the percentage of financialized landlords and the percentage of households that were living in high-density areas, and there was also a strong correlation with renters’ housing stress. So the more the renters were housing-stressed in the census tract, the more there was a propensity of having financialized landlords.

What do we do when big capital has taken over the landlord business?

Listen here for The Overhead:

The post The Overhead: The Financialization of a Housing Crisis appeared first on Spacing National.

Written by Harold Kalman & Robin Ward, Fifth Edition (Harbour Publishing, 2023)

This fifth edition of Exploring Vancouver brings the city’s architectural and social story entirely up to date. Ten tours highlight significant buildings from all eras of the city and its metro region, including new projects that are transforming the skyline more radically than ever before. Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, both longtime chroniclers of Vancouver in evolution, describe the city’s extraordinary urban environment, its buildings, monuments and landscapes. This highly readable text explains how the city was created, by whom and why, including the important roles of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in the narrative.

• From the book’s preface

Evidently, a lot can happen in ten years, which is the time since Harold “Hal” Kalman and Robin Ward last updated their popular Exploring Vancouver—a now longstanding institution in Metro Vancouver that has been published nearly every decade since 1974. Having four of the five editions in my library, it is remarkable to look at this new book in comparison to that early black and white edition from almost fifty years ago (which I bought from MacLeods Books, a second-hand bookseller close to Victory Square in Vancouver). What is clear is that past decade has seen an astonishing amount of new entries to the book, from a plethora of new residential high-rises by an international cache of architects, to several new buildings at UBC along with new developments by local First Nations.

It is this last entry in particular that the book’s authors call out in their introduction to this edition. With Vancouver’s pledge to Truth and Reconciliation in 2014, this is the first edition that is able to call out some grievous histories that have been perpetuated since the founding of the city—that the downtown peninsula was not “empty land” as the land commissioner of the CPR declared and had immortalized on the downtown corner of the street named after him. As clearly noted on the first page of this book’s introduction: “The land was not ’empty’ – First Nations had been here for millennia.”

For this reason, the book no longer begins with Gastown accompanied by a picture of Gassy Jack’s statue in Maple Tree Square as had been the case in 2012. Instead, this new edition now puts False Creek at the start, as the book’s authors have chosen the time since Expo ’86 as the event to frame the book’s narrative and nearly four hundred buildings. The introduction is perhaps one of the most comprehensive histories of planning in Vancouver and its region to-date, even more than Frances Bula‘s recent introduction to Larry Beasley’s Vancouverism, specifically because this new edition followed the release of the controversial Broadway Plan. The authors have been documenting the city’s history since the sale of the Expo lands in 1987 when Vancouver planner Ray Spaxman and City Council worked with the developer and local constituents to create what would become one of North America’s most vibrant, walkable communities.

From CityPlan to EcoDensity, from Vancouverism to the new Broadway Plan, Vancouver has seen seismic shifts in its planning sensibilities, and these two have been chronicling the landscape along the way—from the new communities growing up in Olympic Village (now just the Village) to the bustling campus in the False Creek Flats where Emily Carr University has made its new home. As well, since the 2012 edition of Exploring Vancouver, there have been a tremendous amount of new buildings constructed at UBC, including Tallwood by Acton Ostry Architects, which at the time of its construction in 2017 was the tallest hybrid mass timber building in the world.

Other new buildings at UBC include the Nest by DIALOG and B+H Architects, along with Formline’s Indian Residential School and History and Dialogue Centre, a new aquatic centre by MJMA and Acton Ostry Architects, a biodiversity museum and research center by the Patkaus, and a pharmaceutical sciences building by Saucier + Perrotte with HCMA…and the list goes on with an additional ten pages in the UBC chapter. The next edition will also have to provide an update on the recent seismic upgrades to the Museum of Anthropology, the great masterwork by Arthur Erickson which anchors the west side of the campus.

By presenting False Creek as the starting point for the book, the usual suspects of Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona are able to follow next without much ado, with the downtown CBD and West End still rounding out the book’s core framework as it has for close to five decades. As a past architectural walking tour guide for the AIBC who led variations of these six walks, I have been watching the transformation of the downtown and environs with interest since the late nineties and was very curious to see which recent buildings the authors would be able to include at the time of the book’s publishing (Vancouver House, Butterfly, Alberni, Vancouver Art Gallery).

By combining some of the chapters from the previous edition (Gastown and Chinatown), the authors have been able to reduce the previous fourteen walks to ten, though the tenth walk in the book (Tour J) would require a car as it covers a wide area geographically, including Surrey, Richmond, New Westminster, Port Moody, and Burnaby. This section in itself is a substantial addition to the book, as it now provides for several new buildings atop Mount Burnaby at SFU, along with a number of buildings in Surrey’s growing civic precinct, including its new main library by Revery (Surrey didn’t even make it into the 2012 edition of the book).

As a resident of New Westminster, I appreciated the inclusion of the Anvil Centre by HCMA and MCM, along with the new Sapperton District adjacent to the Royal Columbian Hospital, an often overlooked TOD in the Metro Vancouver region. Like its older cousin at New Westminster Station, Sapperton will be home to four new residential towers at its build out and has turned the area into a vibrant, walkable community. Likewise, the area around New Westminster Station is also about to grow as several new residential towers will shortly be completed nearby, including one which is set to be one of the tallest residential towers in all of Metro Vancouver.

The Expo Line like the story of False Creek similarly provides for the book’s narrative thread, as its expansion to include the Millennium, Evergreen, and Canada Lines has allowed for Metro Vancouver to remain a fifteen-minute city. The new Broadway Line is also mentioned several times in the fifth edition, certainly as the Broadway Plan is being enabled by it. As the book’s authors make abundantly clear in the book’s introduction, this new plan will potentially affect some 500 blocks along the Broadway corridor, currently home to twenty-five percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Given the recent lessons from the past, they recommend caution in implementing the plan’s rollout. Perhaps the game changer here will be the arrival of Indigenous development at the Heather and Jericho lands, along with the Squamish nation’s Senakw which has already broken ground at the southern foot of the Burrard Street Bridge.

This more than anything else is what Hal and Robin have noted as the most unprecedented result of Truth and Reconciliation: “…unforeseen by CityPlan and EcoDensity (or previous editions of this book) is that First Nations would assert their rights and initiate development. Will these initiatives shift the dynamics of real estate development in Vancouver? They will certainly test the sincerity of the City’s 2014 pledge of reconciliation.”

Until the results of these new developments can be documented in a future edition of the book, the fifth edition of Exploring Vancouver has updated its narrative to one about moving into the future together by building upon the lessons of our past, which along with the spirit of Expo ’86 will continue to propel this city forward into a place in which we can all call home.

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For more information on Exploring Vancouver, go to the Harbour Publishing website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: Exploring Vancouver – Ten Tours of the City and its Buildings appeared first on Spacing National.

THIS EPISODE: Community Land Trusts

Last season, we talked to a group of people from the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT) in Toronto as part of a range of options for non-market housing. Over a year later, we check in with the state of land trusts across the country: where are they, what are their impact, and what do they need to succeed and even scale upward to other communities?

Susannah Bunce, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Human Geography, has been researching the KMCLT. She has insight into how land trusts can grow and succeed, and the role they play in combatting displacement:

It removes land from the speculative market and holds land, in trust, by the non-profit organization for the purposes of keeping housing and land prices at a lower level for community benefit. That principle of community land trust organizing and the model itself is fundamental to combatting gentrification.

Nat Pace is network director for the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, and provides a look at trusts across the country, in communities large and small, urban and remote, and the role they play in increasing equity:

Right now in Canada, we have quite a few examples of equity-deserving communities using the model. There’s a very interesting cluster in Nova Scotia of African-Nova Scotian communities who are looking to develop their own localized community land trusts as a way to create land bases for their communities, and also reclaim land titles that have been lost.

What can land trusts do to provide affordable housing and increase equity in this country?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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