Rain Stops (CityStudio #3)

Last night I decided to leave enough time to walk to meet friends for dinner rather than rush and hop on the bicycle as I typically do. I am wholly aware of the healthfulness of downtime, but it never seems to win the day for me as much as it should. I am glad I gave it a rare priority last night.

As I strolled through the alleyways of Mt. Pleasant and across the vast lawn of Robson park, I watched my breath for the first time this year. I also smelled the damp earth underfoot and could not help being brought back to the days of field sports, under lights, as a young male. It wasn't raining as it had been these past few weeks. Winter seems anxious to arrive early this year.

Halfway to some southern Indian cuisine and the epicenter that is Broadway and Main, a thought I had this summer while researching water conservation for the city resurfaced. I asked myself: "What is an implementable project that can provide a teaching opportunity to the public, a potential for relevant data collection, and a spreading of awareness throughout the Vancouver community regarding the ten Greenest City goals?" And not long after, thoughts of bus stops revisited my mind.

So here's the pitch…I would choose three bus stops in Mt. Pleasant that would reflect as diverse a sampling of the local demographic as possible. I would transform each of these shelters into rainwater harvesting (RWH) stations by designing a means to capture its roofwater into a transparent cistern. The overflows for each bus stop would then feed into a raingarden planted with flowering plants for bee forage or with berry producing shrubs for human forage. 

The key would be to create a design that involved, in some way, each of the ten goals. I aim to tell the story of how water impacts or is impacted by all that we do and aspire to do, especially these ten altruistic goals. I cannot think of a better location to tell this story than in Rain City.

The shelters would be painted a blue-grey-green shade to match the iconic color of lakes fed by glacial melt. The cisterns would be transparent so that those waiting at the stop can watch the falling volume grow before their eyes. (Just 1mm of rainfall falling upon on a roof surface measuring 1 square meter in area yields 1 litre of harvested water. Vancouver receives about 1,155mm of precipitation annually.) The water captured would have its quality lab tested to help support harvested rainwater as a viable source to offset our city's potable water use and spread practices of conservation. The riders would be interviewed prior to the bus stop retrofits and after to try and understand behavior change and the assumed power of design.

Bus stops are owned and controlled by Translink, the transportation partner with the city. Rainwater, as soon as it hits any surface, is under the jurisdiction of the city. Of my concluding recommendations made to the Water Design branch this summer regarding RWH, I recommended they lead by example by implementing several visible RWH projects, introduce RWH incrementally, and supplement water conservation efforts with green infrastructure. This idea could achieve all three.

Adaptive (Ecosystem) Management (LP&M #2)

The theory/practice dialectic strikes again. In our second four hour class, we spoke of a need for better management throughout all aspects of professional practice. The most relative precedent for this exists and is known as Adaptive Management (AM), or Adaptive Resource Management. Adaptive Ecosystem Management is the term used by our guest lecturer, ecologist Dr. Glenn Brown.

Regarding how the natural world has historically been “managed” there is only room for improvement. To date, we have yet to break from from a Newtonian Mechanics mode of thought regarding our relationship with natural resources and systems. Nature is not a mechanical system. As the findings from Buzz Holling, the founder of AM and the systems theory of Panarchy, have taught us, nature is a complex adaptive system. With such systems, the relationships between its parts are nonlinear, often nested, and have unknown thresholds. Any forces acting upon such systems can interrupt a system we have grown accustomed to and throw it into a new paradigm altogether. A common example used to explain this phenomenon is the North Atlantic Cod fisheries crash of 1992.

The primary difference between management practices of old and those of the Adaptive model is simple. AM requires constant modeling and checks of questions and assumptions. Because nature is dynamic and a complex adaptive system, and because we are of that system and not separate from it, we cannot apply mechanical thinking to it. When we do, fisheries can crash. When we do, recessions, like the one the globe has been experiencing since 2008, can hit hard. Yes, economies are complex adaptive systems as well.

Professional practice makes its profit from standardization. AM aims to account for the inevitable variabilities that arise with complex adaptive systems and recognize gaps in knowledge before they irreversibly impact the system. For professional practice to adopt AM as its management model, projects will require increases in funding. Standardization will be limited with any projects working directly with complex adaptive systems such as environment or economy. Approaches cannot remain the same from project to project. Furthermore, with AM, approaches should expect to shift several times within singular projects. Humans are capable of this approach. However, the elephant in the room–the bottom line–currently keeps tightening its belt.

Taking Back the Land (CityStudio #2)

I had the privilege to speak about water with Tilo Driessen, a planner with the Vancouver Park Board, after our dialogue session about creating access to open space. Water, by many accounts, has an impact on each of the Greenest City Goals. And while I am patient and aim to learn as much as I can from the cohort to inform my ways of thinking and understanding the challenges and their potential interventions, water will be my focus throughout my work with CityStudio. Water, specifically water conservation as it relates to Goal 8 of the Greenest City goals, was my research focus with the city during my summer employment with them. Water, specifically how it can be embraced by design intervention and used to create healthier, more resilient communities, will be the focus of my eventual thesis. 

Concerning our first goal focus PLAY, when asked, Mr. Driessen explained that Vancouver’s parks currently embody a negative role with water. Due to their consumptive practices, including provisions for summertime irrigation and potable water supply for water features such as fountains and lakes, parks are not particularly seen as positive. They are not equally as positive with their consumptive practices as they are with their abilities to provide amenities benefiting health and healing for the public. How, then, can we expect people to change behavior and adopt water conservation practices if the places we create to help them find respite through the experience of nature practice over-consumptive habits?

Vancouver, like every city, could increase its greening efforts throughout its underutilized and forgotten pockets. Anywhere there is soil, or could receive soil, should also receive plants. We could expound upon this and take back some of the land from cars and decommission roads. Turn double-lanes into single lanes; turn single lanes into multi-modal non-automobile pathways; turn verges and bumpouts into gardens; turn laneways into wildlife habitat and pedestrian “escape routes” to the larger network of city park space. Approximately 30% of Vancouver’s landmass is covered by roads. If Shanghai uses 7.4% of their entire landmass for roads…New York City: 22%…Paris: 25%…Vancouver should be able to work with less and do more with greenspace. 

Before increasing greening efforts, or even while increasing its greening efforts, there is a fantastic opportunity to improve upon Vancouver’s existing green open spaces. This opportunity is through water. Rainwater harvesting, raingardens, integrated stormwater features––any of such elements could be used to turn the negative aspect of our parks into something positive. Such a design intervention would teach creative water use, habitat restoration, and above all, a contagious conservation ethos. 

During the walk the line exercise last week, I learned much more about my neighborhood, Mt. Pleasant. Judging by the ways marginalized spaces were used for growing food, the slogans of bumper stickers on cars, the subject of community event posters on telephone poles, the ways by which the traffic circle islands were planted…all of this, as I was able to more intimately witness during my walk, solidified my belief that this neighborhood is rife with folks ready to aid with the implementation of any these ideas. The key to success will be community engagement. I still have much to learn about this art form.

Tackling Ecosystem Services, Part 1 (LP&M #1)

This course, taught by my advisor, Patrick Mooney, is going to be challenging. I am not speaking of the work load, but specifically to the challenge for me to overcome my preconceptions about the concept of ecosystem services. To help frame the importance of ecosystems for human well-being within the current economic paradigm, the United Nations pulled together 1,360 scientists from around the world in 2001 and published the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2010.  Ecosystem services–the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems–grew from this assessment.

If the goal of this course, the UBC Landscape Architecture program, and ultimately the entire profession is to improve upon the status quo and elevate the profession to a new paradigm in which “doing the least bad” to the environment with design becomes “improving the environment” to a status healthier and more biodiverse than currently realized, taking must be replaced by giving. The very word “services” in the context of ecosystems and the natural world implies an absolute anthropocentrism. It infers taking from the land, rather than giving back to it.

I understand that this reframing is wholly intentional and means to give greater clout to nature in the eyes of those who consciously despoil it for profit, but I fear our time requires a more drastic action. Our time pleads for a shift away from the measure of the natural world in terms of quantifiable resources towards an embrace of biocentrism. We know that we have surpassed Earth’s carrying capacity. Our race’s population boom, thanks exclusively to the resource of cheap and abundant stores of ancient sunlight, has surpassed a sustainable threshold of resource consumption. Those concerned with the unsustainability of this, and with developing a voice for nature, have not yet found a way to slow this runaway train and have now decided to meet the opponent on the same playing field.

I will give this course my undivided, but I do so with a dose of skepticism about trying, yet again, to work within our fatally flawed consumerist paradigm. Perhaps ecosystem services might help begin building a bridge to a better world. I aim to at least hear its argument as I know it will teach me something. Hopefully that something is galvanized hope.

Redefining Quality of Life (CityStudio #1)

In just nine years, Vancouver hopes to be the “Greenest City” on the planet. It plans to get there by addressing ten goals–Green Economy…Climate Leadership…Green Buildings…Green Transportation…Zero Waste…Access to Nature…Lighter Footprint…Clean Water…Clean Air…Local Food–by developing strategies informed by its citizens and outlined by the 2011 Greenest City Action Plan. Becoming the “greenest” is a political goal. It is a marketing campaign. Therefore, one can understand, even expect, a level of skepticism and reluctance from the public throughout the process of getting us to 2020 in the shape we hope to. We are bombarded with marketing campaigns daily that, as most are aware, typically weigh sales over health and happiness. Why, then, believe another?

If asked, the general public would welcome any of the ten goals by title. However, engagement beyond this can often butt up against the measure of quality of life that most in North America enjoy. After all, a policy action that grew from the Clean Water goal did regulate how often property owners can water their lawns.

To understand how a collective society such as Canada could arrive at a point where developing and implementing such a green action plan for even its healthiest of cities is crucial, it is important to understand how contemporary quality of life is measured. It turns out that the current measure can be attributed largely to the work of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Dr. Sigmund Freud. In 1928, Bernays wrote Propaganda, in which he argued for the importance of manipulating public opinion within a democratic society in stating:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

After the industrial revolution gave rise to machines that supplemented workers to produce all the goods needed within a less amount of time necessary to keep laborers busy for an entire work year, marketers such as Bernays himself helped to rethink the model for consumerism as not a model for a reduction in working hours (and an increase in leisure time) but as a rise in productivity so that more goods could be consumed. Today more than ever, the North American culture, both domestic and exported, is steeped in a subjective attachment to consumerism. 

Most of us are beyond busy, trying to keep up with the race to finding wealth to afford us relaxation. Most of us are growing more immune to marketing campaigns and yet, find it hard to imagine the means to escape the consumerist paradigm in which we live. Despite a rise in a public adoption of the phrase "sustainable development," society still remain a helpless glutton and appears unable to change, perhaps until a redefinition of quality of life is forced upon it. Perhaps preemptively working out this definition is the key to Vancouver realizing its coveted green celebrity.