There was a packed house on Tuesday last week as the Vancouver Public Space Network launched its new design competition, Where's the Square? Open to both professionals and the public, the competition solicits designs for something Vancouver presently lacks: a prominent, popular, public square.
The winning design, to be unveiled next May, won't actually be built. But some time next summer, the VPSN will bring it temporarily to life in the space where it was imagined by its design team. That, combined with the obvious early interest in the competition, seems sure to raise a lot of public awareness around the issue of where Vancouverites spontaneously gather.
And, judging from crowd response last week, it seems clear that a lot of Vancouverites are dissatisfied with how their city contributes to this aspect of public life. In fact, if a single conviction united the audience, it was probably captured by urbanist Lance Berelowitz, who said that such a public space in Vancouver should be considered "a necessity, not an amenity."
I agree, with caveats. First, depending on your situation, everything beyond a dry place to sleep is an urban-planning amenity. But more importantly, as good an idea as a public square might be, it contains an anachronism that will have to be overcome if the idea is ever to gain real traction.
Certainly these places of assembly seem to work in other cities. As the slide show rolled before the speakers came on stage, you could feel the entire room having fond travel memories together: Place des Vosges in Paris, Piazza Navona in Rome, Old Town Square in Prague.
Any historical equivalents in Vancouver, meanwhile, have faded or disappeared. The open area north of the Vancouver Art Gallery is now forbiddingly closed off by Vancouver's busiest streets on three sides, and by the closed doors of the gallery on the other. Robson Square has morphed away from its original vision. The ice rink is closed. The restaurants are gone. Both places still attract lunch-hour brown baggers. But they don't act as the "obvious centralizing grand space" that Mr. Berelowitz argues all cities need.
It's tempting to retort that Vancouver's parks are its "grand space," but speakers took pains to say these are not quite the same thing. "Edge" phenomena such as the seawall and Stanley Park serve a "centrifugal" function, Mr. Berelowitz argued, that work against one of the chief benefits of a public square - its capacity as a "social condenser." Renowned landscape designer Cornelia Oberlander (who helped design Robson Square) echoed the idea, arguing that in Vancouver, we hedonistically cater to our own individual social and recreational needs. "So maybe we haven't been coming downtown," she said. "Then we have to rethink how we live."
Achieving density and its benefits will require just such a rethink. But if a public square is going to be part of the solution, we'll also have to rethink the original motive for these "grand spaces." The models flashed up on the screen were almost invariably the product of imposing institutional forces with which few of us want to live as dominant social condensers today: cathedrals, Stalinist facades, etc. When we visit those places abroad, what we encounter as visitors may be quite misleading. Density may never have been the objective of the space. It may just be a pleasant contemporary byproduct.
This doesn't mean the Grand Piazza of Vancouver is a bad idea. But it does mean entrants in the VPSN competition are tasked with designing structures that condense people without much agreement on what the driving force behind that condensing might be. And maybe nothing captured that more emphatically than the way the conversation kept returning to the Robson Square/VAG site. Since the gallery probably won't be there in 10 years, this place of public gathering, the civic structure for condensing the populace, was being (mentally, provisionally) slated for installation in front of an empty building.
I noted with a smile that the biggest audience response of the evening came when architect Bing Thom flashed up an overhead he'd worked up that afternoon. It showed not a town square at all, but a densely greened artery running from Stanley Park down the new "Champs Élysées" of Georgia Street and linking it to a horseshoe of waterfront public space in False Creek, all anchored on a new sand beach just north of Science World.
It looked great. People went "oooh." And viable or not, his follow-up comment may lead some creative mind to the solution, so it bears repeating.
"Let's not be like Europe," he said with a shrug. "Let's be like Vancouver."
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