This rainy place needs covered spaces
As COVID-19 alters the world's urban environments in different ways, one new adaptation in Vancouver will be good news for the city's outdoor wintertime ping-pong lovers.
Vancouver has rolled out four new “rain-friendly plazas” in recent weeks, covered areas where people can sit, socialize and play table tennis outdoors during the rainy months, all 10½ of them. While a welcome development, it poses the question: in such a wet, temperate city, why don't we already have more of these kinds of spaces?
Vancouver's manager of street activities acknowledged the “gap” when it comes to covered public spaces, but didn't directly provide an explanation for it. Others, however, say the reason is rooted in urban planning's historical hostility, both here and in other cities, toward the homeless, and poor people in general.
But regardless of the cause, the lack of dry public places has been highlighted by COVID-19, as Vancouverites try to spend less time indoors, while more of us live in apartments and condos without backyards or, in many cases, even balconies.
Vancouver isn't San Diego, where wintertime picnickers rarely need worry about rain. Nor is it Winnipeg, where the wind and cold make open-air socializing less appealing even under cover. The mild climate of Vancouver and other cities on B.C.'s southern coast make it pleasant to be outside for much of the year — as long as one is out of the rain.
On rainless spring and summer evenings in normal years, picnic tables in Vancouver's beaches and parks are filled with people grilling on portable barbecues, playing dominoes and cards, and dining al fresco with family and friends. It's fun to imagine if a big pagoda in your local park could enable such activity on a drizzly February evening too.
“The city knows there's a gap in this, and there is a big demand and need for these spaces,” said Lisa Parker, Vancouver's branch manager of street activities.
For these four, new, rain-friendly plazas, the city started with “low-hanging fruit,” Parker said, targeting spaces underneath the Cambie and Burrard bridges. This allowed for quick, inexpensive creation of dry, sheltered spaces without the need for new overhead infrastructure. These new moves build on council's direction and other public-space experiments last year responding to COVID-19, including pop-up plazas on side streets and expanded restaurant patios.
Now, city hall is soliciting public feedback on these pilot spaces while planners consider activating other already covered areas or possibly building new covered public spaces. Residents are encouraged to email pop-upplazas@vancouver.ca, or visit vancouver.ca/pop-up-plazas.
In September, as Vancouver actor and event producer Sara Bynoe braced for the wet winter ahead, she put out a call on social media.
“Hey Vancouver, I'm compiling a list of public covered outdoor spaces to meet up with friends as our weather gets gross,” Bynoe wrote on Twitter. “I like the covered benches south of the Bloedel Conservatory at the top of Queen E. park and Granville Island's BBQ pit. What are your favourite spots?”
Bynoe's call-out got a lot of attention online, and she even ended up on CBC Radio with Stephen Quinn. She compiled the responses she received from the public and shared the list online.
Bynoe's list includes a few great covered public sites, like Robson Square's underground and North Van's new Shipyard Commons. But many spaces on her widely sourced list are less than inviting, like the awning outside Mountain View Cemetery's office or an East Van breezeway between a laundromat and a Polish deli.
Bynoe was “pretty disappointed by the whole state of affairs,” she said this week.
Asked why she thinks there's such a dearth of covered public spaces, Bynoe didn't hesitate: “It's 100 per cent an anti-homeless deterrent.”
Vancouver Public Space Network chairwoman Paola Qualizza more or less agreed with that assessment.
Many features of urban architecture, including in privately owned public spaces, are intentionally designed to “discourage people from resting for long periods of time,” Qualizza said. “It makes public space hostile to everyone ... when design is made to prevent one thing, it also ends up hurting everyone else.”
But making public space inhospitable to homeless people “is not solving the problem,” Qualizza said. “If you build architecture in a way that keeps people from taking shelter overnight, that doesn't mean that less people are going to be taking shelter outdoors overnight. It just means they're moving somewhere else, and it could be more dangerous places ... it's kind of sweeping things away.”
The real problem, in other words, isn't that homeless people might sleep in nice public spaces where they can keep dry. The real problem is they don't have homes.
Even after the pandemic is over, the creation of some dry public plazas could benefit all Vancouverites, including residents without private outdoor areas, and especially those without much of their own indoor spaces.