Inside Vancouver
Sad City - continued
By Charles Montgomery published Sep 2, 2008
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Ours is one of the most beautiful, vibrant, and livable cities in the world. Why aren’t we happy?
The project represents a combined effort by the city, the province, residents, activists, and developers to heal the neighbourhood. You could call it an exercise in altruistic urbanism. None of it could have happened without the big bucks from condo sales. That should warm the hearts of condo buyers, suggests Helliwell. But he insists that their engagement with poor neighbours will determine if the project will meet its happy potential.
This is where the competing values of status and engagement play out in design. The condos, family housing, and singles housing will have three separate lobbies. It’s what each user group wanted, architect Gregory Henriquez explained. If studies on status identification are correct, this lobby segregation may not be so bad for poor residents: it will spare them the sting of judgment every time they step in their elevator.
Meanwhile, the great getting-together is supposed to happen on the public plaza and atrium in the heart of the block. Henriquez gave the atrium a train-station-like roof so that the neighbourhood’s poor, who are regularly removed from the nearby Tinseltown Mall, can hang out, even in winter. “It will be a symbolic hub, a mixing bowl, a place where all can come together,” Henriquez said as we scrambled around stacked rebar and plywood forms on the site.
But will condo owners and arts students share space with the unfashionable poor? Or will the unwashed be ushered away by security guards? If happiness means not feeling inferior, will the poor shy away from the intimacy of the plaza altogether? Helliwell’s insistence that we all get together presupposes that we all have something to share. Can we bridge the city’s status gap?
“ We live in Babel; we are all so different,” said Henriquez. “But in the Downtown Eastside, people tell me that their fundamental desire is not for money but for a feeling of connection and community. People crave that. It’s common to all humans. So in our public spaces, people are going to have to look past the surface. They are going to have to give each other a chance.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge will be for the rich and the poor to get over their fear of one another. “You don’t get trust and maintain trust,” Helliwell told me, “without reaching out to other people, taking risks.” It’s as true of Point Grey as it is of the Downtown Eastside. Cities can bring us together, but that’s where the real experiment begins.
