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?
Peñalosa cancelled plans for a new network of highways and poured his budget into a vast array of parks, libraries, pedestrian “freeways,” and bike routes. He handed prime road space over to a rapid bus network. He forced neighbours to tear down the fences they had erected on public land, and installed tens of thousands of bollards to free up sidewalks from parked cars. All this so the city’s poor would feel more like equals.
By the end of Peñalosa’s term, in 2001, feelings of optimism in the city had shot up. There were fewer car accidents. Amazingly, the murder rate fell by 40 percent. When we cruised across town through a network of linear parks, it no longer felt like the Bogotá of infamy. It felt easy. People smiled and waved as we passed. I was robbed only once, and gently at that.
IF CHANGES IN urban form can cheer up blighted Bogotá, surely a city like Vancouver can also benefit from a design intervention. City councillor Suzanne Anton picked up the torch after witnessing one of Helliwell’s happiness barn-burners down at Robson Square a couple of years ago. On a rainy day this spring, Anton led me up and down the south end of Fraser Street, extolling the virtues of the walkable village, the public plaza. “If we’re asking neighbourhoods to accept more people,” she said, “then the city has got to create more public space to bring them together. These spaces don’t need to be big. They just need to be positioned right smack in the middle of the community.”
Anton described a recurring image she has of old fogies drinking coffee in a cobbled square in Europe. It was a strange narrative, coming from a woman who had recently championed big-box-store proposals on Marine Drive. But Anton swore she had seen the light. Having squeezed a directive for more “gathering places” into the EcoDensity Charter, she’s got proof of her conversion to happy.
At 45th and Fraser, Anton paused to rattle the chain-link fence outside the adult education centre. That yard could be her imagined plaza; its rooms could be used for gatherings, she said. “The idea that school buildings should be used just for school has got to go! These spaces can help connect people.”
Helliwell’s own EcoDensity pitch combines seniors’ centres with child daycare. Get the generations together. Let them help each other. After all, it’s not just getting together that makes us happy. It’s how we get together. Public space means nothing without human interactions; the more generous, the better.
