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Your opinion on shaping Vancouver kindly requested

December 22nd, 2009 · 1 Comment

Being a media person, it only takes two instances of something happening for me to spot a trend. In this case, it’s activist architectural firms. Earlier this year, Bing Thom moved into the arena of hiring researcher Andy Yan to do research on city planning issues. So far, the firm has produced two interesting reports: one on the reality of “empty condos” downtown, the other on neighbourhoods that are losing children in census stats.

Now I see that Peter Busby’s firm is getting involved in the kind of work that used to be the preserve of Vancouver city planners. Here is their survey that they’ve initiated and are encouraging people to respond to. Being you are all the kind who love to respond, I’m posting it here for your Christmas downtime pleasure. (As for me, I don’t have any. I’ve taken up knitting, which is occupying most of my intellectual reserves at the moment. Who knew it would be so difficult to figure out how to knit beads into a scarf??)

The Busby survey:

Vancouver is growing, and we feel strongly that environmental issues should be one of the factors at the forefront of the discussion around the future of growth and density in the City. Over the last 2 years we have developed public discussion pieces on EcoDensity, our national sustainable Cities Initiative, and our recent 10 Big Ideas to Make Vancouver the Greenest City in the World that was shared with the Mayor’s  Green Team.  On the same theme, we have researched and developed a website called Shape Vancouver 2050, link attached.

Shape Vancouver is  an online poll that allows individuals to have their say on the future shaping of Vancouver’s downtown peninsula and see how their manipulation of the City’s skyline and density affects  energy consumption, infrastructure costs, automobile use, and  carbon savings. The objective is to show how powerful densification is an environmental tool.

We are interested in what the public has to say about Vancouver’s skyline and density and the effects on the environment, and we hope that this website can contribute to the discussion. We have begun collecting data and plan on releasing initial findings the week of January 11th. Please go to www.shapevancouver.com and have your say.

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