SCARP students present their findings at Downtown Van

 

On May 31st,

SCARP students Sheree Emmanuel, Maureen Long, Maya Korbynn, Molly Barkowski, and Stephanie Grondin represented SCARP and the rest of their PLAN 587A (Introduction to Physical Planning and Urban Design) team members—Graeme Clendenan, Ken Man, Sara Pavan, Taryn Plater, Jasmeen Side, and Kathryn Wu—

in presenting their term's work to Downtown Van at their downtown office.

What is Downtown Van?

Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, or Downtown Van, is a non-profit organization that represents 7,000 business and property owners in the central 90-block area of Vancouver’s downtown core; supporting them, and making Downtown Vancouver a place where everyone feels welcome. 

The project was done in collaboration with Downtown Vancouver, its focus being to explore opportunities along Harbour Green Park's waterfront. Each of the three teams chose a theoretical lens from which to explore design opportunities for the site in question — Sensorial Urbanism, Landscape Ecology and Plural Urbanism. 

This project is part of SCARP's approach to present students with real-world questions to answer and problems to plan and partnerships to forge.

SCARP's Urban Design course is designed to expose students to the fundamentals of urban design, such as issues and skills in physical planning, designing with hands-on graphic tools, verbal and graphic communication, as well as the development of conceptual tools to understand the built landscape.

PLAN 587A's instructor Erick Villagomez said of the project:

PLAN 587A courses are always done in collaboration with organizations and municipalities looking for help with envisioning future possibilities for specific locations. In this case, Downtown Vancouver was wonderful in collaborating with and supporting the students. So, over and above the fun of coming up with design ideas, this collaboration format is exciting in many ways: not only do students get a chance to work with organizations on present problems and contribute to ongoing discussions about the transforming city, but also, in years to come, they might see fragments of their work realized or directly influencing urban design changes.

The SCARP student team's Urban Design presentations were given to 10 highly-interested staff members, deeply engaged with the ideas they introduced.

The presentations:

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Student presenter Stephanie Grondin said of the day:

We had a great time going down to the office and meeting the rest of the Downtown Van staff! We presented to a group of 10 staff members or so and they asked a lot of great questions and were highly interested and engaged in the presentations. 

Congratulations to all involved!