Tuesday Topics

Because blogging on a schedule is how it’s done…mostly…

To the Polls?

~ Teresa ~ 6 Comments

There are swear words included in this post, so if it’s not your thing, be warned.

On May 2nd, Canada is holding a federal election. Voter turnout, according to Elections Canada, has been declining for decades, particularly amongst young voters. Youth may not feel connected to our electoral process, but they are not the only ones. Our Prime Minister went so far as to say that Canadians don’t want to go to the polls, even framing an election as a dangerous risk to our economy. Though I’ve always believed that voting is only one part of what it means to be an engaged person (and that it might even be the least important way to work toward change or to protect the values and institutions you believe in), it’s depressing to think that elections have come to mean so little. Even worse, politicians know that they have very few people to answer to electorally.

Into this morass of apathy, a group of young artists, opposed to our current government, is reaching out to disengaged young people with a series of YouTube videos:

They also started a web page.

Following their lead, or perhaps Rick Mercer’s, students are organizing vote mobs on University campuses across the country.

It makes sense that youth are using these Wired Age tools to reach out to each other on these issues, but it remains to be seen if it affects voting behaviour. At the very least, both campaigns seem to have generated a lot more conversation and controversy, for Canadians of all ages, than the two federal leaders’ debates have done.

Cuppa

~ Teresa ~ 7 Comments

I am a tea drinker. Though I’m not indiscriminate, I’m wide-ranging in the sorts of tea I’ll consume. A few months ago, I had a conversation with a tea aficionado, who spoke of provenance and visits to tea plantations. I replied that I like tea of all sorts, except for orange pekoe. I don’t think I passed muster. My tea cupboards (yes, there’s more than one) are full of a variety of teas, mostly mid-grade, with a small quantity of quite good tea. I tend to buy organic and fair trade teas now, though there are still some exceptions.

I’ve had very good tea and very bad tea (orange pekoe, I’m looking at you), but I can’t say that I am only willing to drink the best. Some of my favourite tea-drinking memories are of sitting at my grandparents’ table, playing double solitaire with my Grandma and working my way through a pot of strong, black tea. It may have come from the supermarket, but she made it properly and it tasted just right.

Here are a few of the places I love to go for a good cuppa:

The Empress Hotel (we celebrated my mother’s 70th birthday there)

Shaktea

The Secret Garden

T

Murchies

I haven’t been to the Hotel Vancouver for their afternoon tea yet, but I hear it’s fabulous.

Where are your favourite tea rooms? If you’re not a tea drinker, tell me about your favourite haunts.

Tales From Terminal City

~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

I take this city for granted, sometimes. I know that I often write about my neighbourhood and its amenities, but I don’t explore the rest of Vancouver enough. Sometimes, I even forget to look up.

So it’s good to get a reminder of all that this city has to offer, along with a call to become more involved in its evolution. This past Saturday, I went to Granville Island to take part in Tales From Terminal City: 125 Years of Vancouver, presented by SFU’s Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue. The students developed a program of three workshops – a walking tour of Granville Island, a collaborative public art project and an urban agriculture presentation. Participation was open to anyone and each participant could choose two of the three workshops to attend. I chose the walking tour and the gardening presentation, feeling that art was better left in the hands of, well, people who are not me.

Each of the workshops was framed around a model of storytelling. For the walking tour our guides, Breanna Kato and Ryan Stewart, told us stories from the history of Granville Island, while pointing out places where new stories are being created. During the gardening workshop, each participant told stories of their connection to gardening and growing food and discussed the possibilities for food production in the city. Those who chose the art project worked together to create a visual story of their connections to Vancouver.

The entire group convened before and between the workshops and we listened to the students from the Dialogue program, as they told their stories of Vancouver. At the end of the afternoon, we broke out into groups for open discussion around questions posed by the students. They were interested in our connections to Vancouver, but were also gathering our thoughts around how to become more engaged citizens of this place. We came together one last time, to listen to one of the semester’s mentors, storyteller Naomi Steinberg, talk about the role of listening and storytelling in creating, as she put it, community awareness, individual validation, collective support and civic engagement.

It was a stimulating day, full of listening to people’s experiences and thinking about our city in a number of different ways. It’s exciting to see youth who are so engaged and articulate. I encourage you to go visit the program’s web page at the link above. The concept is fascinating and I can only imagine how rewarding the experience must be for the students who participate.

Sprung

~ Teresa ~ 9 Comments

Spring is in full force now. In my garden, the snowdrops are fading away, leaving mysterious clumps of foliage behind. Other bulbs are just starting to poke spears through the soil, while bleeding hearts and rhubarb are beginning to unfurl. Out in the neighbourhood, blossoms are appearing on the trees and the crocuses are still in bloom.

Spring is my favourite season in Vancouver. There’s something about the quality of the air, composed of sea and mountain breezes, along with the early foliage and flowers that makes me feel more alive at this time of year than any other.

The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival is taking advantage of all this beauty and is organizing a number of events. My pick is Velopalooza’s annual Bike the Blossoms ride. I’m also excited about Simon Fraser University’s Tales From Terminal City project at Granville Island this coming weekend, in celebration of Vancouver’s 125th year.

That’s not all that’s going on in the City, of course. If the outdoors isn’t your thing, you could always hide inside the CBC Studios for a few hours. The Debaters are taping their television series until April 1st.

I also wanted to mention a couple of events that have been organized to help the relief effort in Japan. This weekend is the Vancouver Japan Relief Walk for Hope. In late April, there will also be a bake sale to raise relief funds for Japan.

That’s just a smattering of what’s going on here in Vancouver. I’d love to hear about how your community is waking up to spring.

Transition City, Part III

~ Teresa ~ Leave a comment

I’m (finally) wrapping up my series of posts about Moving Through. After the walks were finished, the groups convened at the new Woodward’s Building for a wrap-up moderated by Gordon Price.

The various tour leaders gave summaries of the three mini-walks and were then asked to identify what they would like to see addressed in the conversations around Vancouver’s future development.

Here are a few of the ideas were raised:

– Michael Green kicked things off by asking why the most successful neighbourhoods were the least developed. He also spoke about the need to incorporate the street in the used or “activated” space of neighbourhoods.

– Rather than simply building concentrations of dense residential buildings, create nodal communities, with amenities, residential, retail and office space in walkable sectors around transit nodes and cycling infrastructure.

– Extend the principals used in laneway housing zoning to create infill office and retail space.

This discussion, and the MOV project of which it is a part, are very timely. Vancouver residents are starting to demand to be part of the conversation around future development, because it’s our existing neighbourhoods that are being targeted. What we value about this city is at stake.

MOV recorded the speakers during each of the walks, along with the wrap-up discussion. You can find the podcasts here.

Transition City, Part II

~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

Last week I wrote about development trends in Vancouver and the Moving Through walking tours arranged Museum of Vancouver (MOV) as part of their Not an Architectural Speaker’s Series. As promised, here’s a little more about Moving Through.

Three different mini-walks took place in the morning, with a wrap-up discussion for everyone afterward. One walk focused on the role of the viaducts in the evolution of downtown Vancouver, another (using Commercial/Broadway station as a jumping off point) explored the role of transit hubs in shaping the city and the third looked at the impact the Cambie Line has had on those neighbourhoods’ development.

I chose the first walk, which was called “The Path(s) Not Taken: Viaducts, Expressways, and Almost Vancouvers.” The walk was led by architect Michael Green, one of the instigators of MOV’s Not an Architectural Speaker’s Series, along with Brandon Yan and Demian Rueter of Vancouver Public Space Network .

This walk started underneath the viaducts, near the stadiums downtown. The viaducts were built in anticipation of a larger freeway network that was planned in the 1950s and 1960s. A thriving black community, Hogan’s Alley, was destroyed to make way for the viaducts. Project 200 would have also razed Chinatown and Gastown and replaced them with (mainly) office towers. Brandon and Demian of VPSN showed us artists’ renderings of what might have existed if the plans had gone through, then as we toured the neighbourhood, our hosts led a discussion on how Vancouver has developed, what might have been and the changes that are on the horizon. We were supposed to move through Chinatown, the Downtown Eastside and Gastown, ending at Granville Square (the only Project 200 building that was actually erected). The discussions were too interesting, so we only got as far as Gastown.

As we walked through Chinatown, Michael Green discussed the ways in which the heritage low-rise buildings interact with the street, which many newer buildings don’t successfully achieve. He spoke about the architectural challenge of making the street usable, active space, rather than being solely concerned with what happens inside buildings.

Green also pointed out that the stadiums and viaducts have acted as a physical barrier to density moving east. There is talk of removing one or both viaducts, which will open up space for more development and erase any clear density boundary between downtown and the eastern neighbourhoods. Near the end of our walk, in Gastown, Green discussed the neighbourhood’s mix of social housing and social services co-existing with market housing and mid to upscale business.

This walk illustrated the tensions between planning departments, developers and existing neighbourhoods. It also brought up a number of questions:

What makes a successful neighbourhood?

What role should citizens have in neighbourhood development and preservation?

What are the criteria local governments should follow when redeveloping existing neighbourhoods?

I have one more post for you on this subject. I’ll be posting a short piece about the wrap up discussion after the walks.

Transition City, Part I

~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

A couple of weekends ago, I took part in one of the Museum of Vancouver’s Moving Through walking tours, part of the Museum’s Not an Architectural Speaker’s Series. The three tours explored aspects of Vancouver’s built environment, topics that are especially fraught now, as the city is in a period of significant transition.

The downtown core of Vancouver has been transformed over the last twenty-five years, particularly in the last decade. What were once business districts, light industrial zones and commercial waterfront properties have become residential towers, retail districts and entertainment zones. The City has embraced the concept of EcoDensity, which is meant to create a walkable live/work cityscape that limits the environmental impact of an increasing population by concentrating utility use and reducing the distances that residents travel for work and shopping. The reality is that more lucrative residential development has eliminated much of the office space downtown and has reversed commuting patterns, as downtown residents travel to and from jobs outside Vancouver proper. This new urban environment has been described as a vertical form of the dormitory suburb.

Now that much of the development downtown is complete, the City has begun looking beyond its core. The Cambie corridor, the West End and Vancouver’s eastern neighbourhoods are all areas targeted for increased density. The eastern neighbourhoods are particularly attractive, as they’re directly adjacent to the city’s core. As I’ve described elsewhere, the travel time from downtown to my East Vancouver neighbourhood is about an hour by foot, past the viaducts and through the Downtown Eastside (DTES), Chinatown and Strathcona. Though the distance is relatively short, the character of each neighbourhood is distinct. The DTES and Chinatown, along with Gastown, have some of the oldest buildings in the city. Strathcona has the character of an old-fashioned city suburb, with houses, walk ups and corner stores. Between Strathcona and my Commercial Drive neighbourhood, there’s a light industrial zone, which is also home to the artists’ district that comes alive for the yearly Eastside Culture Crawl. Commercial Drive is like a younger version of Strathcona’s mix, with some mid-rise apartments thrown in, and anchored around one of Vancouver’s major thoroughfares. What you don’t see, with a few very visible exceptions, are high-rises in much of Chinatown or most of Strathcona and Commercial Drive.

All of these neighbourhoods have seen waves of change. The DTES, which has been described as Canada’s poorest postal code, is being transformed into a mix of residential tower development alongside social housing. Gastown was until recently primarily a tourist zone, but is now home to condominiums and upscale dining and shopping. Chinatown is becoming a hotbed for new restaurants and stores, along with controversial plans for condo development. Strathcona is now famous for its renovated houses, many of which carry heritage designations, while Commercial Drive has been transformed from a working-class neighbourhood into a mixed income cultural district. It’s not as if this is the first time that Vancouver’s neighbourhoods have dealt with demographic change. For good or ill, this is part of urban life.

What’s different about this wave of development is that the neighbourhoods targeted are already residential, the pace of change is likely to be much faster and the form of development is much more invasive than in previous shifts. In the DTES, it’s feared that social housing reform is being pushed aside in favour of expensive condominiums. In Chinatown and eastward, the fears are that mixed income housing and affordable retail space are going to be lost, along with the character of each neighbourhood’s built environment.

It’s in the context of these changes and anxieties that the Moving Through walks took place. Next week, I’ll tell you more about the walk I took part in and the discussion that took place afterward.

Canada Winter Games

~ Teresa ~ 10 Comments

I’m a proud aunt right now. My niece is competing at the Canada Winter Games and today she won a silver medal. Here’s a link to an interview with her (and her teammate, Erin) after their win today: Team BC Newsletter. The Games take place every four years and have launched the careers of many professional athletes. Unlike the Olympics, though, they seem more inclusive, with less damaging impact on the communities in which they take place. Many of the sports that appear in the Games aren’t part of the international sports scene and are thus truly amateur sports, pursued for the love of it.

Amateur sports are a big part of many kids’ lives, either through school or (if their families are lucky enough to afford it) as an evening or weekend activity. When I was a teenager, my sport was curling. I didn’t have any pretensions that I would ever play at the elite levels, but practices and bonspiels were an important part of my high school years. Even though curling has an international following and it’s now an Olympic sport, it has never had the flashy appeal of sports like hockey or skating. It’s one of the things I liked about it. Though it was a team sport, and competitive, manners mattered as much as precision on the ice. I thought of it as a sport for the quiet, studious kids. A kind of playground for underdogs, if you will. A place where atypical athletes can experience the kind of community that’s usually reserved for the jocks.

I think the Canada Games accommodate more kinds of athletes than the Olympics, or many of the international competitions, and for that I’ve always loved them. If you’re interested, you can watch some of the Games live online.

Not Quite a Seamstress, Yet

~ Teresa ~ 11 Comments

You may recall that last month I wrote about overcoming my fear of learning to sew. Well, I took an introductory sewing class at Spool of Thread and it went pretty well.

I went into Spool of Thread on a weekday evening before the class to pick out my fabric and met Henry, one half of the couple that owns the shop. Lili, who taught the class I took, is the other half. Spool of Thread carries a range of colours and retro inspired patterns, making it hard for me to decide which fabrics to choose for the double-sided totebag I’d be attempting to make in class. Henry told me that they put a lot of work into curating a collection of fabrics that you won’t necessarily find elsewhere in Vancouver. They’ll be adding more soon, including some Liberty prints. I was impressed with the large, open space, sales goods in the front and sewing machines, ironing boards and a big worktable in the back. This was intentional, as Lili and Henry wanted to make the workspace a central part of their store, where those who rent the machines can interact with the owners, customers and each other.

This welcoming ethos fits in really well with the rest of the businesses that inhabit the tiny, unprepossessing strip mall near Fraser and 15th, including Ruby Dog’s, Collage Collage and the fantastic Les Faux Bourgeois. It’s a corner of East Van that I wish I could pull a little closer to my own neighbourhood.

But, back to my adventures in sewing. The introductory class had only five members, which allowed for a lot of one on one with our instructor, Lili. We spent the first part of the class learning how to use the sewing machines and doing some test runs on scrap fabric. I noticed the speed control had a turtle at one end and a rabbit at the other. I had my suspicions about which animal I’d most resemble. We also shared our reasons for taking the class and, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t alone in having had a Home Ec. teacher scare me away from sewing.

Lili walked us through each step, thoroughly explaining everything as we went along and checking our progress at various stages. Two students, who’d never touched a sewing machine before, raced through the pattern, while the rest of us…took a bit longer. We were definitely divided into turtles and rabbits. Still, it was wonderful seeing the bag come together. My lines were (basically) straight and the finished product is actually kind of nice. It helped that Lili had developed a straightforward, forgiving pattern that hides many of the sewn edges. The sewing that shows is done late in the process, when you’ve had time to improve.

At the end of the class, I picked up a stamp card (at a post-class discount) for using the sewing lounge. I’m going to go back and make a few more tote bags before attempting anything else, which will have the added benefit of making me more prepared for Christmas that I’ve ever been before.

Spool of Thread regularly offers Sewing Machine 101 classes, along with a range of project-centred classes. They also rent on site use of their machines and equipment by the hour. They take music requests while you’re there sewing, too.

By the way, I’m going to update this post with a picture of the finished product – I forgot my camera the day of the class (go me!) and only have a couple of iPhone pictures to show for my day’s sewing.

The Roots of Homelessness

~ Teresa ~ 5 Comments

Two weeks ago, I wrote about an investigative series that CTV British Columbia was conducting on the subject of homelessness. Today, I want to follow up on that post. The series, called Off the Streets, covered a number of issues, including drug and alcohol addiction, as well as the special problems faced by homeless youth and single mothers. Mi-Jung Lee and Jon Woodward explored a number of solutions as well, focusing on supportive housing, sobering centres and programs to keep single mothers and youth off the streets.

Throughout the series, we heard that youth who had been through the foster care system, single mothers and First Nations people are particularly at risk of becoming homeless. What wasn’t mentioned is that these groups also face a higher risk of poverty or that as poverty increases in this country, so does homelessness.

It’s not easy to discuss poverty without running up against political and ideological differences. It can be safer to stick to the necessary work of finding strategies to help the people who have already found themselves disenfranchised.

Discussions about poverty in Canada are happening though, in the context of homelessness, but also in relation to poverty’s other consequences, like the toll poverty takes on the health care system and societal productivity levels. Here are a few links to some of these discussions:

Housing and Homelessness – CCPA
Child Poverty Statistics – CCRC
Poverty in Canada – The Economist

I hope that we can, as a culture, really commit to eradicating poverty and reducing income disparity, thus attacking the roots of problems like homelessness, crime and illness.