Category: Vancouver

Home isn't someone else's investment unit

9/17/2024

New modular building blocks create a visual for more humane density

I blame my dream-home fantasies on that OG influencer Martha Stewart.
When the thick, slick Martha Stewart Living was queen of the magazine racks I was there for the Crafts: the rustic doorstop animals made of French linen tea towels; the velvet lavender sachets for drawers and for gifts. Soon I was sucked into the glossy paper vortex of step-by-step tableaux of Martha — in cropped jeans and crisp Oxford shirt — engaged in various Good Things like washing her paned windows using vinegar from a glass sprayer or sweeping her freshly-painted porch with a birch-twig broom. I was led to believe that people who weren’t already trained pastry chefs or architects could create the Halloween gingerbread haunted mansion, and that one day I too would have a fireplace mantle to display handmade snowglobes nestled between mason jars of glittered cedar boughs dangling with tiny crocheted snowflakes. Never mind that my wreath of pinecones tied with tartan ribbon and tacked to my apartment door wasn’t adding any rustic Christmas vibes to the purple-and-teal common hallways. This was all temporary.

By the time Martha finished doing her five months for fraud, I was half way through 20 years in the same apartment, engaged in the more practical project of trying to live a creative life in a small space (sprawling in comparison to the majority of new builds in Vancouver). I ended up writing a weekly newspaper column on the subject and even partnered in a home re-vamp service that funded four years of art school. Dwelling design remains one of my Special Topics so when I heard first thing this morning (at the time of this writing) that the provincial government had released some free modular plans for small-scale multi-unit housing, I jumped onto the site for a look-see.

Streetscape concept of multi-unit integration with single-family homes, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Because when it comes to affordable housing in this town, things can’t get worse (barring, of course, the imminent earthquake a.k.a. “The Big One”). According to one report, last year Vancouver’s median home price was more than 12 times the median household income, making it the third most expensive housing market in 94 cities around the world. Many of the investment units in Vancouver’s soaring glass towers are now languishing on the market, because even if they were affordable, “home” does not conjure up visions of 35 floors of stacked 500-square-foot rectangles with one wall for windows and no outdoor space.

The customizable building blocks are an attempt to provide an option to this modern-day warehousing of humans, a step toward addressing the missing middle between standalone houses and condo towers. They were developed following recent zoning changes that allow three or four units on the standard city lot, to the horrors of NIMBY owners in those single-family-home neighbourhoods and to cheers from developers. To curb design and construction costs and expedite the permitting process, the limited options of modular blocks are basic. One shows two bedrooms with a shared bathroom. The common-area block shows a surface that is both dining table and kitchen island with sink, with the rest of the kitchen along one wall. No balconies are indicated and there are not a lot of windows. Every unit shows stairs.

Placement options on various lot sizes, from the Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Common space options, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Multi-family dwellings on a standard city lot, Standardized Housing Catalogue

On the upside, they are connected to the earth and integrate into established communities. They open up the possibility of having a baby, aging in place, living with or beside other relatives or families of choice. They are the kind of home that might incline a crafty type to collect pinecones from the mature trees in those longstanding neighbourhoods and glue-gun a wreath to hang on the front door.

It’s a Good Thing.

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.
Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

6/13/2022

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending.

These hands do much less flailing when they're taking up loose ends, making something out of nothing anybody wants or repairing the damaged, discarded and disregarded. But the pandemic has hit hard and for the first time in ages, I am compelled to fall back on something cozy and familiar, for the body — any body — in need. I need to make a big ol' quilt.

Even as the fleeting thought was bonking around my distracted, pandemic-disturbed brain I worried I was regressing. Are a dozen queen-sized quilts — each a barely-passed test of my patience and endurance — not enough for one lifetime? Have I gone circular?

This (and much more) mental pummelling has manifested in the not-yet-completed "Current Conditions" quilt, a weighted blanket in a bluesy palette and undulating pattern of strips of discarded, freely available jeans. Too thick and heavy to wrestle through my vintage Pfaff, I've taken a page from the Japanese traditional "boro" method and hand-stitched long waves of white cotton sashiko thread through the layers of denim, cotton batting and denim whole-cloth backing.

BORROWING FROM BORO: The "Current Conditions" quilt in progress, after hand-stitching through the layers and before the growing roster of pandemic-era hashtags are embroidered.

Soon another layer emerged: hand-embroidered text in the form of some particularly heavy hashtags over the course of this making. Working each of those hashtags into the strips of found textile has become both a meditative activity as well as a meditation on the meaning of those words of these times. This is my physical engagement with the world, one stitch, one block at a time.

Weighing in at more than 10 hot pounds, "Current Conditions" is an unwieldy beast of a blanket but my stitching encounters with the latest hashtags seem far from over. (Should #monkeypox be included? Do I need to reserve a line for #heatdome2022?). Like the global pandemic at this point, it's not clear whether the beast is finally done or will demand more from me.

Homemade masks are not all about you

4/3/2020

We who turn to rote hand-making activity to quell our anxiety have been knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting and needleworking up a storm. My go-to, like countless others stuck at home, is making masks. As the death tolls roll in, I am on auto-pilot.

The thing about busying the hands with tiny repetitive motions is that it opens up time to think, to reflect on the incoming: the unfathomable graphs, reports, studies and scandals. What I’ve been reflecting on as I rotary-cut those squares of cloth, feed them into the machine and steam-press in the pleats is the great homemade-mask debate: to wear or not to wear. To that question I have no doubt: it’s a hard ‘wear’ if you are in the vicinity of others.

Sure, there is a tsunami of science that proves that the three-layered, tight-weave cotton reusable mask that I’ve been making won’t protect you — the wearer — from catching the virus but this is not about you and you alone. This is about us, about keeping our own damn germs to ourselves, a civic duty seen in east Asian nations that have been-there-done-that with SARS. As pointed out in today’s (at this writing) article in The Atlantic, a store full of shoppers in masks may be seen by those on this side of the Pacific Rim as a sign of the coming apocalypse but one of assurance on the other side: I’ll protect you if you protect me (Check out #masks4all and #youprotectmeIprotectyou).

At Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where I’ve spent the last two years, masks suddenly appeared on some student faces as Covid-19 hit the news, far before any social-distancing policies were set. My personal observation is that those taking these early precautions were likely international students from Asian countries where mask-wearing is a norm for anyone contending with even a cold or seasonal allergies. The sudden sight of all these masks in class and corridors may have unsettled the rest of the student body but it inspired me to design something I’d like to wear: reusable, washable, of natural felted fibre, sculpted so it didn’t touch my mouth, infused with my favourite “Panic Button” essential oil blend.

I wasn’t always cool with milling around with the masked ones. When I landed in Japan for what would be an 18-month stay in the late-’80s my first snapshots were of all kinds of people in masks in Kyoto, from little kids in black uniforms on their way to school, to teens picnicking under the blooming cherry trees to old ladies in the narrow streets of Gion. I came to appreciate all the masks worn while cheek to jowl in the infamous Midosuji subway in Osaka, starting with the official charged with gently pushing the commuters into the cars. Reflecting on this (now, while I sew), I wonder what those socially-responsible commuters must have thought about being stuck up against these gaping, mouth-breathing, sniffling foreigners.

I’m reflecting on the real, insatiable need for masks in my own vicinity, right now, for those who are jammed into shelters and squalid hotel rooms with shared bathrooms. While I await reports on how this pandemic is hitting the sick and homeless, I’ll assume masks are a basic need. And until I am tested, I’ll assume that I am an asymptomatic carrier.

I mask up for your protection when I go out for my essential business and when I return I disinfect it, put it back in its baggie, then get back to the task at hand. See my simple three-ply pleated pattern below, or, for you non-sewcialists, check out the T-shirt version at bottom.

No sewing machine? This can be hand-stitched too (46" total stitching). No elastic? Cut 1-inch-wide strips from an old T-shirt, stretch to curl, then replace the elastic directions with two 7" strips, to be tied by user.

Tripping on this troublesome rug

12/6/2019

In the final critique of my final work in this second-to-final semester of graduate studies, I could see that there was going to be trouble.

From the start, there was the trouble of actually getting a full view of this sprawling, chaotic, twisted mass of deconstructed jeans. It required everyone to stand around the perimeter of the low-lit white-cube gallery, in a circle, facing in, looking down at this problem child.

There was the troubling of its position: Why not on the wall or hung from the ceiling? Since it’s sprawled out on the floor, does it invite being walked on?

There was the troubling of method: Why the knotting and weaving and braiding? Why the obvious waistbands and labels? Why spend all this time and labour? Why not just a pile of denim strips?

And there was the troubling over concept: Is it too obvious? Too simple? Too many signifiers? Not enough points of entry? Or too many? Is it art or craft? Who is this talking to? And to what end?

And those are just my questions.

I question everything, especially as I work, with my hands, intuitively. But my first line of questioning is directed at the material itself. What do you want from me? (Or, to borrow from my then-eight-year-old nephew, in an inexplicable situation: What are we even doing here?)

As much as I could have sat and gazed at the striated piles of folded jeans collected, machine-washed and line-dried by my mother and hauled to my studio by my others, now those jeans demanded more of me.

Seams, the index of the work by mainly women in foreign factories, needed to be exposed, so I cut them away from the yardage, bound them up in my own hand-stitching into tight, potent fast-fashion/slow-craft units. For what? For now, just for today: my daily reminder not to overthink or force solutions.

The labels and tags required daylighting, too, and the more collisions the better between fonts and texts and all that those brands try to stand for.

That left the denim textile, the fabric of this whole fraught, toxic industry. Shucked from their constraints of style and function, I ripped them into strips and watched them fall from my cutting table into heaps on the floor like tidepools.

Image-searching "jeans industry" produces a blue-stained global-reality horror show.

As much as I love the immersive works of minimalist textile installations, more would be more here. I would be mining all my own making methods and circulating them into this circles-within-circles piece, in allegiance with all of those who work with their hands for a living or for the love of material. Or both.

Like most makers I know, I love the challenge of constraining the work to some specific rules of material engagement so I limited mine to a single material, a knotting/binding additive process and two tools: scissors and sewing needle (well, three, if you count my hands).

I intrinsically start from the centre in an almost innate process learned over a lifetime, from macramé plant-hangers (1970s) to braided rugs (1990s) to crocheted giant doilies (2000s) created to cover and protect in the public sphere.

The work begins with a gathering of material-energy into a tight nucleus of force (I’ve been mixing up issues of astrophysics and making over the last year) and spreads outward, finding pattern then breaking that pattern toward new horizons. It’s a process of allowing the material to ebb then roil up again into forces that break into near disintegration, a rhythm that keeps me in the swim of things. As it flows outward into small tsunamis, then eddies, I feel an oceanic, topographic, geologic personality wash over this thing.

And this definitely wants to be a thing, not an immersive installation. This is an object that requires some finishing, a symphony of soundwaves that started with a bang but wants to end in a hum, in the round. It is a rug you can’t walk on, borne of Seismic Rug that emerged while I was confined to the floor with sciatica, watching footage of the horror of the 2011 Japan Tsunami flood in.

It is a resurgence of that making, and that fear of that flood and of the oncoming higher waters, but also the resurgence of my ability to grab hold of physically-challenging handwork after falling on the low-tide foreshore this summer and breaking my ‘good’ arm in two places. I cast aside those fears of not being able to make/do from the cast-offs of this unsustainable era of human history.

Resurge feels right for the piece formerly known as the Monster that raises issues from the ground up, this fuzzy menace.

Left: A colleague lists initial reactions during critique; right: pattern and collapse seen in one section.

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

11/5/2019

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I have this idea for building healthy community in this pretty/cold city through hand-making. It’s a process of making peace with ourselves and connecting with others, transforming individualized desires (thanks, capitalism) into shared desires for a sustainable life and world.

Vancouver artist Jenn Skillen — collaborator No. 1 — beta-tests a freeform, no-measure hand-stitched log cabin block method. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

That's the idea. 'How' is the big question.

I start with a few rules of thumb. (I love that phrase for its controversial origin that is a deep-dive into human history and etymology, but also for the visual of the hand-as-tool.) First, the activity must be low-barrier enough to open it up to as much collaboration as possible — no need for special skills or equipment or fees or even shared verbal language. Second, the project must use only found material: freely available, with no better use (because there's already too much stuff in the world). Third, the project must spark interest, otherwise, why would people bother?

A decade ago, these rules of thumb resulted in The Network, an ever-growing public fibre-art piece engaging a wide variety of folks around Vancouver, co-created by Debbie Westergaard Tuepah. That knotty piece continues to weave through my work, mummifying a perfectly good painting practice, winding around ideas of alternative space-making, shelter, and safety nets. Now it's needling into my current project: the Safe Supply collaborative quilt.

'Safe supply' were the two words on the lips of the crowd at a CBC Town Hall gathering two months ago. Providing a safe supply of opioids would go a long way to addressing all the problems and fears raised by everyone from student activists to local businesses, from concerned politicians and developers to Indigenous elders: the toxic-drug death epidemic, violence, homelessness, sexual exploitation, theft, vandalism, mental illness. A safe supply is inherent in the view of addiction as a public health issue, not an individual, moral failing.

'Kettling' homeless people into Oppenheimer Park has resulted in a colourful display of a national humanitarian crisis. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Ground zero of this humanitarian crisis is the colourful, chaotic tent city crowded in Oppenheimer Park straddling Chinatown and the old Japantown. The sight of all those bright, tenuous shelters layer up with this history of racism and injustice, stolen land and lives, and soon I am binding up ideas of found colourful material and that call for Safe supply!, embedding it all in a design, with designs for this as a group project destined for exhibit in more privileged spaces. It is planned as a comforting activity in this often ruthless, discomforting city: a dis-comforter.

Historical clipping from the llinois State Museum website reveals the log cabin quilt has ties to ending slavery.

I begin this overarching theme one block at a time, and that block is, fittingly, the traditional 'log cabin.'

There's a long history of the log cabin block, ingenious for its simple construction that makes use of even the smallest, thinnest available scraps as well as its history as a vehicle for social justice.

I am attracted to the name that stands as aspiration for home and all that that entails, beginning with the hearth, the centre of the block. From the hearth, the block is built in a spiral of connected scraps to form a foundation for countless quilt designs (traditional examples below).

The work has not yet begun but like all collaborations it begins with faith in people and trust in my practice. Something will emerge. We will engage. We will generate some heat in this log-cabin community.

Some useful how-tos and overall pattern examples:

Traditional quilts made from colour variations of the log cabin block (clockwise from left): Straight Set, Barn Raising, Light & Dark, Courthouse Steps, Courthouse Steps Variation, Amish Crib Quilt. (From http://www.museum.state.il.us)

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A useless thing with many functions

4/10/2019

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The brilliant part about being an aging female is your growing self-acceptance. Maybe this is because you don't feel that ever-present gaze anymore so you’re not feeling as judged. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just had enough of all that and it’s tiresome and dammit you like to be cozy so screw them.

Part of my self-acceptance is stepping out of the ‘should-storm’ of art-making and doing what I love to do with my hands: hunting down materials that have already had their first use and playing up their inherent qualities through knotting, weaving, tying, stitching and binding. I want to work repetitively, easily, without technological assistance and without haste or waste. And in doing so I’m carving out space and time to calm down, reflect and to think deeper — more crucial as the distractions threaten to take over.

Nate Yandle photo

In this way the work is not just in the form or connotations but the well-being and challenge that is relatable to makers who may or may not self-identify as artists. Wrapped up in there are issues of endurance, innovation, history of labour, the learning of the skill, dedication (and frustration), the specific culture and history of the method, the muscle memory that extends back to childhood, and the relationships built through the gathering of the materials.

Through this making I make some hay over the established boundaries between the privileged art world and real life, between craft and sculpture, between tactile and political action.

Scaffolds is composed of found spun-polyester building wrap, tarp and nylon cord over an armature of waste construction materials including caution tape, PVC piping, rebar, conduit, baling wire, and junction boxes, all attached through simple knots.

Special thanks goes to the construction workers who delivered these materials from their many jobsites to my studio for my useless work with many functions.

Nate Yandle photos

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My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

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The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

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Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

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It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

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Urban design lesson for Vancouver: Life in full colour blooms in car-free streets

12/10/2016

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The steps of the Teatro Juarez transform by day and night for the benefit of the walking public. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A month after I landed in Guanajuato, Mexico it finally dawned on me: there are no traffic lights in this bustling city. You'd think that would be obvious from the outset but those kinds of details are not readily apparent when you're gawking at a guy hoofing it down the narrow city streets with a side of raw beef on his shoulders, or a teenage girl unfurling her frothy pink ballgown from a truck parked at the end of the pedestrian zone.

Not only are there no traffic lights, there are no pedestrian crossing signals or any restrictions on the walking public. The downtown is teeming with people but with such narrow, winding vehicle thoroughfares, topas (speed bumps) and gloriettas (large versions of Vancouver's "traffic-calming circles") you learn quickly to go with the slow flow. Pedestrians zig-zag with ease across streets, almost brushing the rear of a slow-passing car so the vehicle behind doesn't have to shift down to super-slow. This is not a town to venture into if you're a driver in a hurry. Cruising speed is such that you could start a conversation with people on the sidewalk. Road rage is inconceivable.

So how are all the goods and services delivered? Most of that happens under the plazas and winding streets in old floodwater-diverting tunnels. Parking lots are also mostly situated under or outside the city centre and on-street parking is a rarity. There are no filthy downtown back alleys dedicated to dumpsters and delivery trucks. No urban blight of parked cars flanking both sides of every street.

A narrow 'calle' is transformed into a weekend-long wine-tasting venue. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

As a result, the major calles (streets) are in constant transformation, a jumble of bakeries, cafes and newsstands in the morning, market stalls in the afternoon, and music-filled evenings and special events like a recent wine-tasting weekend along a red carpet through to the historical centre. The previous weekend saw a chalk-mural draw-in where local art students were down on their knees, working their ideas into the surface near that morning's bike race finish line.

These are the possibilities for streets where pedestrians come first.

Art students take to the (permanent) car-free streets. (Carlyn Yandle and photo)

Narrow spaces invite humane activity. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Street musicians head down to the outdoor restaurants. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

I fail to see the downside in squeezing out cars in heavily populated areas. In contrast, pricey Vancouver's sketchy, rat-infested downtown alleys and acres of meter parking look like a colossal waste of potential commercial and cultural space. How impossible would it be to conceal dumpsters in locked building bays and restrict garbage pickup to, say, 2 a.m., and then entice tiendas (street vendors) and the mom-and-pop shops that have been all but banished to the fringes due to high rents?

The more I wander and wade through all this colourful human activity the more I resent the privileged position of the private motor vehicle in North American urban "planning." Cities in their relative infancy like Vancouver could learn a lot from organic urban centres like Guanajuato that came into their own before there were cars.

My hometown is already teetering on the edge of becoming a boring luxury resort city; a bold directive towards people and away from the private motor vehicle could pull us back from that precipice.