Lessons From a Zen Master (LP&M #7)

A week ago, Shunmyo Masuno, the head Zen priest of Kenko-ji temple in Japan, came to speak at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. At first, I found this location for the event to be a bit strange. Having not visited this building before, I anticipated something on par, with all its colorful facets of stimulation for children, as Science World. Yet, after reflecting upon his presentation, I understood the particular suitability of this choice.

The sun had set by the time I arrived, but the uplighting of the formal modernist structure gave it a royal prominence reminiscent of some holy mitra pretiosa. The modesty of a monastic life was certainly not embodied in its form. The space within which Shunmyo Masuno spoke however, was adorned by wood paneled walls and a low stage, and evoked a more appropriate simplicity. He opened with such sentiments as, "if the shape is perfect, there is no room for culture or beauty."

That night Shunmyo Masuno came to Vancouver to speak of his zen dryland garden creations and of "imperfect beauty beyond perfection." He spoke of how beauty is not fixed but rather changes over time. He shared the majority of his 17 projects and when it came time to answer questions, he stepped away from the podium and the comforts of his scripted presentation and proceeded to answer our queries with eloquence greater than our assumed mastery of a tongue barely second to him.

I left understanding the juxtaposition between his words and images and the forum in which they were delivered. The stark symmetry of the architecture offered only a proud and static snapshot of the era in which it was built. It was during an era that commonly embraced humankind's theoretical decoupling from the environment. The modernist ideal helped usher in technology as the new savior and a harbinger of utopia. Shunmyo Masuno reminded us of a truer wisdom.

"If the snake drinks the water, water becomes poison. If the cow drinks the water, water becomes milk." As designers, the work that runs through us has the power to either destroy our surroundings or nourish them. We are of nature, embedded and wholly reliant upon the health of the ecosphere. If we designers are our work as the Zen priest reminded us, our creations should be nothing but nourishing and biocentrically aligned.

Greenest City Junkie (CityStudio #7)

This week we were graced with the presence of Sean Pander, the Assistant Director for the Sustainability group with the City of Vancouver. We typically pair our guests to balance and broaden perspectives, but this guest did not need any accompaniment. The first ninety minutes passed without him missing a beat, thoroughly filling the air with inspiration and all things related to making this city live up to the expectations my classmates and l each have for it.

As part of the discussion, he gave each group pointed and inspired feedback regarding their ideas. When it came time to discuss our project, now the synthesis of two previously separate ideas, Mr. Pander struggled. His inability to visualize it had much to do with how we presented the idea to him. Each member in our group felt compelled to supplement the initial description. Such clarification would not have been needed if we had our elevator speech nailed and our spokesperson anointed beforehand.

In a way, however, our inability to deliver conciseness forced Mr. Pander to question us with more of a critical disposition. Discouragement could have been received as a result of his struggle with envisioning Water Table: A Long Table Event, but since four of the five members of my group are designers, we all welcomed it. After all, a strong critique most often leads to great leaps in the growth of ideas.

As with any public event, Mr. pander explained how the city learned to always "go to the public" rather than "expect the public to come to them." Furthermore, "water is not sexy," he stated and explained how it might be more difficult to rally people around that topic than it was around, say, food. Lastly, "behavior change never happens in information rich environments." Rather, people need need simplicity and to not be overburdened with data...and after they are behind the singular idea, they need to take the next step on their own soon after, or the idea has a strong chance of being lost on them.

My group took each comment and each criticism to heart, and we are now galvanized in a way that should drive us through to the end. I feel confident about where we are headed. Likewise, my confidence regarding where I might be headed in the year or so beyond this course is also growing. After our discussion with Sean Pander, a few of us had a moment to chat with him as he prepared to head home by bicycle to his young family for dinner. I thanked him for gracing us with his presence and as a response, he looked at me with recognition from one of the few times prior to this where I had met him and said, "you are becoming a bit of a Greenest City junkie, aren't you?" He knew me as the graduate student who worked with Jennifer Bailey and the topic of water conservation this summer as a Greenest City Scholar. Perhaps he will eventually also come to know me as the Vancouver water guru who helped bring about a sea change around the reverence to water. Maybe I will even figure out how to make it sexy.

Tackling Ecosystem Services, Part 3 (LP&M #6)

If global climate change is the game changer, the planning focus of cities needs to be building capacity for resilience. The adoption of ecosystem services (ES) by the planning departments of cities could foster an increase in biological diversity within their boundaries and, in turn, improve their capacity for resilience. Despite the constant existence of unknown unknowns, planning efforts would be more appropriately spent concerning the known unknowns–the fact that there are unknown thresholds with regards to natural systems.

There is a reciprocal relationship between ES and community resilience. ES are the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems. Resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance, or pulse of energy that threatens a departure from its current state (the state that humans have grown accustomed to), by resisting this force and rapidly recovering. To ensure resilience, ecosystems need to maintain a high level of ecological function. Likewise, the level of ES provided to humans is directly related to the level of ecological function that ecosystems maintain.

To demonstrate this relationship, one could take a look at Apis mellifera, the honey bee. Honey bees are commonly known to provide the regulating ES of pollination, an added $15 billion value ES in the United States alone. Pollination, is an integral component to the productivity of the urban food system. If colony collapse disorder was to spread further and wipe out the honey bee species, urban food systems would become fragile and less productive, having to rely upon the more ineffective pollination services from the likes of hummingbirds, butterflies, and wind. This fragility equates to lower resilience and a greater potential for susceptibility to crossing the unknown threshold of the ability for the natural system, pollination from the Apis mellifera, to ever provide its particular ES to the human race again.

While honey bees are just one species, planning efforts could benefit other species by planning with them principally in mind. Providing a diversity of bee forage spread throughout a region, while supporting natural beekeeping on a broad decentralized scale, would build resilience into the systems upon which boney bees need to thrive. In return, this would support an increase in resilience in the pollination services upon which agriculture depends to also thrive.

Water Table: A Long Table Event (CityStudio #6)

At the heart of the Rain Stops concept was the goal to connect everyday people to information regarding the Greenest City Goals. The information, supplemented by palpable demonstration projects, would be portrayed in a fashion to empower action. Therefore, it assumed: Information + Demonstration = Action.

Missing from this empowerment equation however, is one key ingredient: community. Phrases like "sea change" and "tipping point" and "paradigm shift" all come to mind when considering behavior change. And while an idea might originate in one person's mind, the spreading of that idea cannot take place without community. Community spreads, strengthens, and supports ideas. Where places such as bus stops exemplified insularity, places such as long gathering tables evoke the opposite. They inspire meeting, talking and learning. For this reason, I have agreed to join forces with another group at CityStudio working towards the installation of a Long Table in various public outdoor locations throughout Mt. Pleasant.

With our powers combined, WATER TABLE: Long Table Event No. 1 has been created. It aims to primarily do two things: 1. Connect people to people and 2. Connect people to ideas. This project takes its first step as an event to introduce a social artifact–the Long Table–to the neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant to test its feasibility as both a temporary metaphorical artifact and one with potential physicality and permanence.

One of the challenges of Vancouver becoming the greenest city is its ability to connect its residents to action. The goals are high level and often do not offer sufficient methods to connect Vancouverites to meaningful actions they can perform in their daily lives to contribute to achieving the goals' targets. Therefore, the programming of this table will be structured around each of the ten Greenest City Goals and its several targets.

WATER TABLE: Long Table Event No. 1 will focus upon the Clean Water goal as well establish visible connections to other goals, as was proposed by Rain Stops v.1.1. The event will have two visually inviting components to it to facilitate connecting people to people and people to ideas. The table event will bring people together, whereas the various water demonstrations will bring implementable ideas of water conservation to the people. Visualize a map of the sewers, a map of Vancouver's lost waterways, a demonstration raingarden, glass jars housing water specimens from various waterways of the city, an umbrella art installation, demonstration rainbarrels, a portable public drinking water fountain…it is due time programming of this event begins.

Salmon, An Ecosystem Service (LP&M #5)

Vancouver is situated amidst a temperate rainforest and thus receives more precipitation than most of the planet’s major cities. The water we drink comes from one of the three protected watersheds to our north. Our water comes from snowmelt. It comes from trees transpiring and rain falling. It is some of the purist freshwater in the world.

Because it rains for nearly 9 months each year, we can easily fall for the myth of infinite water. However, the other 3 months experience drought…while all 12 months face greater uncertainty each year as global climate change takes hold. Yet, concerning ourselves with how much we use is just as important with knowing how we use it. Because Vancouver is covered mostly by impervious surfaces, the toxics pollutants left by our vehicles and materials we use to build things is delivered by runoff that finds its way into the streams and sewers that run beneath our feet, into False Creek, off to the Burrard Inlet, and out into the Pacific Ocean.

The pollution we leave today has a direct affect upon the spawning salmon of tomorrow. Over 190 species of plants and animals, from algae to humans to whales, depend on the livelihood of salmon. For salmon to thrive, these creatures need clean water in both freshwater streams to spawn and ocean depths to grow into adults.

By taking a look at salmon through the lens of a cascade diagram, we can quickly surmise that the upper two tiers of the diagram consist of the natural features and ecological functions of the clean water habitat(s) of the salmon. The lower two tiers, those that reflect directly the benefits to humans–ecosystem services and the benefits derived from them–are the salmon.

Not only this, salmon can fall into each of the four categories of ecosystem services, as outlined by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. They are a provisioning service in the form of a food source. As a third-tier carnivore, salmon can act as a regulating service in the form of biological control. They provide cultural services regarding spiritual and religious views, educational value, recreational and ecotourism value, and a sense of place to the Cascadia region. Lastly, they can be seen as a supporting service through their stature as a keystone species and their ability to help provision the region's temperate rainforest habitat.

Salmon therefore are an ecosystem service. In order for this to remain, keeping our waterways clean must be a priority for sustainable development. Clean water means life for both salmon and humans.

20x20, PechaKucha (CityStudio #5)

Last week we hosted the first ever CityStudio PechaKucha event. If we were able to successfully impose purity upon our presenting guests, everyone present would have witnessed 20 images total, each for 20 seconds, from each of our 9 partner course presenters. Instead, some presented none, while others yet: videos. The idea of PechaKucha was invented by two architects in Tokyo. Architects, very much like the designers who have adopted this presentation format worldwide, like to package things particularly prettily. Not long into our night, it was made clear that other ways of thinking were present – ways that package themselves differently (or not at all).

As the presentations wound to a close, we heard various takes on words of wisdom from each of our honored guests. They ranged from praise for our abilities to push the boundaries in such a short amount of time…to warnings of our need to know policy for any idea to work…to various accolades shared between people who have helped to make CityStudio a reality. I watched. I listened. I took pictures, mostly, as a volunteer photographer for the evening, and throughout it all, I thought back to my idea of Rain Stops. It was no longer sitting right with me.

As a graduate student with an agenda, it is often easy to lose sight of those who came before you and those running in stride with you. It would be ideal to constantly be engaged with dialogue and exchange as we are each Thursday evening at CityStudio, but reality often finds me spending most of my time in my own head. Bus stops embody a physical manifestation of this insularity. We have all experienced the lack of interaction with others in such public spaces. Looking forward or at one's mobile while minding business only your own is easy. Interacting with others takes effort…working with others also takes effort. How, then, might this project become stronger by working with others? What have others started that I might be able to contribute to with my ideas?

I am reminded of a lesson taught to me when I was a fourth year undergrad. I was studying industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology and was an officer for the student chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). Our regional conference that year was at the Rhode Island School of Design where Eva Zeisel was our keynote speaker. (She is now 104 years old and still designing.) One of the first things she spoke of was regarding the title of the IDSA professional publication: Innovation. "Innovation," she warned, "is defined as creating something entirely new out of nothing. Such a thing is impossible and trying to achieve it is naive." Instead, "everything we make comes from somewhere," she shared. By recognizing this, we revere the past and all the essential thought and work that led to the ideas of the present.

For Rain Stops to sit right with me, I need to better understand that which has come before me and that which I am working alongside with. There are people and groups in this city who care deeply about water. Whatever grows out of my original idea will be enriched by working with others. If there was one lesson to be gleaned from the PechaKucha event, it is that there are many people working towards the singular (sometimes elusive) goal of sustainability and that by working together, we can go further, faster.

Tackling Ecosystem Services, Part 2 (LP&M #4)

We know that nature is a complex adaptive system. Systems theory has taught us that with such systems, the relationships between its parts are nonlinear, often nested, and have unknown thresholds. Any forces acting upon a complex adaptive system can interrupt its processes, have its ecological threshold surpassed, and deliver it into a new paradigm altogether.

Enhancing or maintaining biological diversity is the best we can do to address the potentially dire case of a surpassed ecological threshold. Because they can only be identified once they are surpassed, the key to increasing a city's resilience and making it more sustainable is to reduce its demands and strain upon the biological diversity (and subsequent ecosystem services it supports) within its geographical limits while recognizing and drawing upon its regional assets. This is about relocalization. This is about shifting the contemporary model for quality of life to one that embraces one planet living and frugality over consumption.

Despite the wholly anthropocentric definition of ecosystem services (ES), they currently offer the greatest hope to raising the stature of nature in our current economic paradigm. If ES can grow as a model to drive sustainable development, while they grow with richness in definition and understanding, biological diversity could be maintained and enhanced. If not for its rapidly changing climate, such an approach might maintain this planet's ecological thresholds within their current paradigms.

Global climate change is still the game changer. We could succeed at all of this–using ES to maintain biological diversity to, in turn, achieve resilient cities–and yet, a changing climate could tip any number of ecological thresholds into paradigms unfit for human existence. How, then, might ES be used to help human settlements transition into this era of great uncertainty? What might they teach us about transitioning into a post-fossil fuel world? Because of global climate change, ecosystem services must address mitigation and transition.

Rain Stops v.1.1 (CityStudio #4)

By now, the idea of Rain Stops has had a full week to, well, soak in. Audits were made by classmates, professors, and friends and all have helped to remove the idea from any vacuum. In the case of this idea, version 1.0, I was warned that, as a designer, I might gravitate immediately to a form before working out the idea. And because this idea is to be a demonstration project, a live research lab, form should be secondary. I mulled this over, but still feel a bus stop is the most appropriate form.

This project needs to happen immediately. Taking an existing form, rather than creating one anew, is a simple choice. We as humans have already made enough stuff. Since the industrial revolution, we have taken countless volumes of raw minerals and, with the help of stores of ancient sunlight, we have transformed these elements into things that are designed to make our lives better. It is due time we repurpose some of these things.

Bus stops are the most numerous of public shelters in this city. And in this city, public transit is accessed by all classes, races, and genders. Schools and public spaces such as parks are obvious examples for permanent installations. Schools would provide education to those most prone to absorb it and foster future change, while parks would provide a direct physical link to that which our actions towards sustainability might secure and protect. These two typologies of spaces would not, however, provide the rapid, routine and diversity of exposure that bus stops can.

Vancouver's Greenest City program has many important voices and aspires to do many important things. However, it lacks a singular concrete voice. Green is foremost a color. Greenest in its modern context implies many things that could be perceived as positive, but now that greenwashing has entered the scene, the word greenest has grown to be as ambiguous as the word sustainability.

In the context of being green or sustainable, our world faces many challenges. The most important however, and those which impact all of us, are the effects of a changing climate. Global Climate Change (GCC) is the worst-case scenario. Every Greenest City goal, not just the Climate Leadership Goal, is, or will be, impacted by GCC. Right now, it has the loudest voice.

Water is the most visible measure of GCC…shrinking glaciers equate to less drinking water and less power generation…drought equates to lessened food security and an increased risk of wildfires…stronger weather events equate to a change in and a loss of habitat and biodiversity. Water, in the form of demonstration projects, could provide the unifying narrative for the Greenest City goals. The need for an increase in a water conservation ethic, as called for by SFU's Adaptation to Climate Change Team, does not only stop wasteful practices with water. It can promote every Greenest City practice. Rain Stops could help educate and promote ways to stop all of our unsustainable practices as addressed by the Greenest City goals.

The Greenest City goal for Clean Water calls specifically for a “reduction of per capita water consumption by 33% over 2006 levels.” Vancouver-wide rainwater harvesting and grey water reuse would complete the work needed to achieve this goal. Harvested rainwater can provide irrigation to food garden plots, community orchards, and pollinator forage gardens, contributing to the Local Food targets. Harvested rainwater could provide irrigation needs to establish the remaining 150,000 trees of the Vancouver urban forest or to any of the green spaces proposed within a 5-minute walk for every resident, contributing to the Access to Nature targets. Implementing Rain Stops would help accomplish the remaining seven goals as well, by providing green jobs by employing people to build them, supporting a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging electric bus ridership and a reduction personal miles driven, demonstrating carbon neutral construction, and demonstrating zero-waste and a lighter ecological footprint.

Beginning in the test neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant, each Rain Stop would not only physically exemplify all the goals, it could advertise the success of each of the goals as implemented throughout the city…while demonstrating to the rest of Canada what a new water conservation ethic could achieve.

Lessons in Central Park (LP&M #3)

As one who worked as a professional designer for the decade between this and my last university experience, I have the luxury, and the burden, of a first-hand understanding of the disconnects between theory and professional practice. In my second reflection, titled "Adaptive Management," I spoke of one of the largest challenges facing its adoption. Adaptive Management (AM) can work if projects receive enough funding to implement programs that track and help anticipate the inevitable variabilities that arise with complex adaptive systems.

One of the strengths of this course is its application of the ideas presented in class to the 2010 Surrey Bend Regional Park Management Plan. This plan is for an ecologically sensitive 348 hectare site on the Fraser River to the southeast of Vancouver. Upon re-reviewing the 116-page plan, I came across a bit of inspiration that could provide an insight into addressing costs associated with AM practices. In the conclusion of the section titled, "Protecting Natural Area Integrity," recommendations were made to implement a research and monitoring program to study the site, especially its hydrology and bog ecosystem, as well as providing phasing and adaptive management strategies "to test and observe the environmental impacts of trail and facility development and to adjust the program as necessary" (P. 35). Such recommendations could be costly to implement if it is a sub-consultant who is to perform the work. However, I am instead reminded of the idea of parks conservancies, specially Central Park Conservancy, and the more affordable and creative model they provide.

Central Park Conservancy was established in 1980 to return Central Park to its original Olmstedian splendor from its decline and peak of squalor in the 1970s. The new model, as public-private partnership, enabled the organization to raise over 70% of the funds needed to restore the park from private sources. Currently it is seen as the model for sustaining parks and provides fundraising and management advice to anyone seeking assistance with parks throughout the world.

In the case of Surrey Bend Regional Park, a conservancy could be established as part of its plan (the original agreement between New York City and the Central Park Conservancy was for 18 years, and was reaffirmed for another 8 years in 2006) as a means to fund the monitoring and research programs needed to implement adaptive management of the site. A park conservancy largely runs as volunteer organization with a board of directors and a few staff. Instead of hiring sub-consultants to provide the work needed for monitoring and maintaining the park, volunteers could perform a large percentage of the work once programs are established.

In our current economic climate, where funding streams continue to constrict, it might become a best practice to adopt the time-tested practice of asking for help in new and creative ways. It might be in the best interest of those working out the details of the 2010 Surrey Bend Regional Park Management Plan to consider the establishment of a Surrey Bend Regional Park Conservancy to help ensure the park is born with sustainable footing.