Architecture critic Trevor Boddy, who curated the current exhibit Vancouverism, says the Olympics have shown how increased use of public spaces can make the city more vibrant.

Credit: supplied

NEWS: Public gatherings the real Olympic legacy, experts say

In a lot of ways, the Olympics are like The Wizard of Oz,” says Trevor Boddy, over an afternoon pint in a Gastown bar. The architecture critic and curator, unmistakable thanks to his mop of curly, greying hair and paisley scarves, has just finished giving an enthusiastic tour of his exhibit, Vancouverism: Architecture Builds the City, on display in the Woodward’s atrium across the street, to a group of Olympic visitors.

“Finally, we get to meet the wizard, and he’s a dried-up old coot,” Boddy continues. “Finally, we realize that we were Oz. We thought it was the wizard. We gave credit to the Olympics, but now we know he’s not there.”

What Boddy’s analogy means is that the 2010 Winter Games have revealed to Vancouverites something many — but not enough — of us already knew: that this city can, in fact, be home to a vibrant populace that parties in the streets and gets around without a car. We don’t have the Olympics to thank. It was us — the people of this city — all along.

“Diverse publics have come to enjoy Granville Street and Robson,” Boddy says. “If merchants downtown and City Hall had half a brain, they’re going to learn from this and find ways to program it so that we don’t just turn Granville into a bar strip for singles between 25 and 40.”

Key lessons the city can learn from the Olympics, Boddy says, are that Vancouver’s public spaces can be animated, inclusive environments for people of all ages and backgrounds; and, perhaps more importantly, that public transit can and should be used by people from all walks of life.

“The theatre of the streets is probably the biggest legacy of the Cultural Olympiad, even though it wasn’t an Olympic event,” he says. “When cities are diverse and vital, when a poor person knows and sees and talks to a rich person, when different races and language groups get to hang out and see each other, you always get the healthiest cities.”

Boddy is among a number of Vancouver urban experts who have pointed to the city’s unprecedented use of public spaces and public transit as two of the most valuable outcomes of the 2010 Games. Former six-term city councillor and SFU City Program director Gordon Price refers to the Olympic transportation strategy as “probably the most significant controlled experiment in traffic management in North America.

“I think it’s taken a big argument off the table: ‘You won’t get people out of their cars.’ Well, yeah. Apparently, you can,” Price says.

Any holdup for future public-transit improvements, he adds, will be due to a lack of investment from the provincial government. “This is going to be the embarrassment now, I think, when they dock the third SeaBus [put into service for the Olympics], when they start removing bus service,” Price says. “What they want, from the provincial point of view, and the [Minister of Transportation Shirley Bond] has said this continually — her marching orders, I presume — is, ‘No, we paid for the Canada Line. That’s it, folks.’”

Retired transportation planner Stephen Rees agrees. “If we close streets, we will need a lot more money from the province and the feds to get an adequate transit system, but senior governments are stupidly obsessed with freeways and port expansion, neither of which will meet the needs of the future,” he says. “Now is the opportunity to make real changes — which we must seize — or we go back to doing what we always have done and wondering why we get the same result. “

For Erick Villagomez, a sessional faculty member of UBC’s School of Landscape Architecture and co-founder of Regarding Place, an online urban-issues publication, Vancouver’s increased public-transportation use during the Olympics goes hand in hand with increased use of public spaces. “There’s always been an apprehension in Vancouver about having outdoor gatherings,” Villagomez says. “I’m not sure why that is — whether it’s a distrust of the public or what — but it’s played itself out in a number of different ways. That has been totally obliterated by the Olympic Games... The old saying that people want to see people is true.”

People may indeed want to see people, but close monitoring of those people in public spaces through the city’s many closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) needs to stop, says Andrew Pask, director of the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN). “We’ve been told publicly that the installation of surveillance cameras is a temporary measure,” Pask says. “They need to come down after the Games.”

Members of the VPSN have mapped and documented Games-related CCTV installations in the city, and, taking the position that CCTV is an ineffective security tool, have advocated for the expensive cameras to be taken down when the Olympics end.

With regard to the crowds flooding the city during the Olympics, Pask says those numbers are a sign of what’s to come. “Our Games-time population has increased by a reported 150,000, taking us up to about 750,000. Population projections suggest that we will hit this sort of increase through ‘normal’ rates of growth somewhere in the early 2030s, which isn’t that far away,” he says. “What that says to me is that we have to plan very carefully to ensure that we maintain the public spaces we have, and plan aggressively to ensure we have a sufficient amount of quality new spaces.”

Back in Gastown, Boddy is worried that the experience of the Olympics will hasten the wrongheaded goal of turning downtown Vancouver into an exclusively high-income neighbourhood. “We have to be very careful to keep our balance,” he warns. Social housing, for example, should be built in more urban neighbourhoods outside of the Downtown Eastside. “It’s only in the past five or six years that we’ve been building [social housing] projects in other parts of the city. There’s been very great push back, but we’ve got to keep doing that...

“You’re less likely to be afraid if you’ve met people and talked to them. A city sorted by micro-publics is dull, dull, dull.”