LISA ROCHON: CITYSPACE

Sherbourne Common: Clean, Green, Brainy and Blue

LISA ROCHON

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 29, 2011 5:00PM EDT

Sherbourne Common marks the end of the park. Or, at least, the end of the conventional park. Here is a beguiling landscape, injected with rays of electric blue at night, that sits atop a vast, brainy infrastructure. Below a splash pad, where kids frolic by day, polluted water from Lake Ontario pours through ultraviolet cleansing tanks before being pumped up through celebratory water sculptures. A park of this kind may be a first for Canada and even North America, but it surely will not be the last.

2011 Walk21 Conference, Oct 3-5

http://www.walk21.com/vancouver/

Montréal — The Neighbourhood RevivedNational Film Board 1974

Trevor Boddy — An Appreciation of Bing Thom in Canadian Architect

A look at Bing Thom's career presents an argument for an oft-overlooked and misunderstood West Coast architect.

"… one of the most underpublished key Canadian buildings of the past few years (is) Bing Thom Architects’ (BTA) Sunset Community Centre for a park on Vancouver’s south Main Street, near the Punjabi Market.

Weddings in the Punjab crucially include a parade of bride and groom around the village or neighbourhood, and local families were forced to book wedding halls in Surrey, 25 kilometres away,because there was no adequate facility nearby. A large room on Main Street was Thom’s key addition to the standard Vancouver community centre recreation-related program (the half-century string of these buildings are one of Vancouver’s undersung marvels of social integration and healthy living).

Diagonal pedestrian desire paths across the park site informed Sunset’s crossed pair of internal streets, which double as avenues for wedding processions on even the rainiest of days. Thom’s favoured organic forms are evident here and are rationalized by him as being inspired by the flowing forms of silk saris, drifting above the park’s greensward of a summer’s evening."

Walking Home — The Life and Lessons of a City Builder

Ken Greenberg, author of a new book 'Walking Home' and one of the world's foremost urban designers, shares his passion and methods for rejuvenating neglected cities.

Urbane Renewal: a Life in Cities

REVIEWED BY ALEX BOZIKOVIC

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Jul. 01, 2011

Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder

If you’re a native of suburbia (and many millions of us are), it’s easy to feel that the divide between city and suburb has always been there. But that’s not true. With Walking Home, urban designer KenGreenberg shows how much the North American city has changed just within his lifetime – and why. In plain and modest language, he explains some of the great shifts of the past half-century, from the ravaging of downtowns by “urban renewal” right through the present-day renewals of dead industrial lands in places such as Toronto.

For City Builders, 

There’s a New Model in Town

SIRI AGRELL URBAN AFFAIRS REPORTER

Globe and Mail, Saturday, Jul. 09, 2011

If you’re a native of suburbia (and many millions of us are), it’s easy to feel that the divide between city and suburb has always been there. But that’s not true. With Walking Home, urban designer Ken Geenberg shows how much the North American city has changed just within his lifetime – and why. In plain and modest language, he explains some of the great shifts of the past half-century, from the ravaging of downtowns by “urban renewal” right through the present-day renewals of dead industrial lands in places such as Toronto.