I know people who read this blog are getting a little fried with real-estate discussions these days, which all seem to end in stand-offs and abound in contradictions.
In spite of that, you likely want to retain some space in your calendar for an interesting effort being put on by the Museum of Vancouver and Urbanarium, a cluster of academics, planners, architects and so on who want to have more productive discussions about Vancouver’s future. My Globe story is here with the organizers talking about why they thought this was a vital event to put on.
The museum is putting on a four-month show, Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver, starting Jan. 21, looking at the city’s past, present and future, with eight scenarios visualized by eight groups of professional planners and architects from the city, along with much more.
As part of that, Urbanarium is staging a series of debates on some of the city’s touchiest issues — densification, affordability, towers, and more.
A little insider tip. (Don’t tell anyone else.) Although all the tickets to the first debate, Jan. 20, “Densify Every Neighbourhood,” are taken, according to the website, those were free tickets and likely a certain proportion of the people who snaffled them early won’t show up if Vancouver event trends prevail. So, if you’re a gambler, come down anyway and hang around waiting for seats to open up.
P.S. Here is the CityHallWatch response to the Urbanarium debates so far, which some may see as Exhibit 1 in the whole problem of having a dialogue about these issues. I had thought the group might give the organizers more credit and been softer in their response, given that their current ex-planner heroes, Ray Spaxman and Scot Hein, are intimately involved in this project, but apparently I am wrong, as happens so frequently.