Did Olympics Make Vancouver Better?
Two noted urban thinkers, Lance Berelowitz and Matt Hern, conduct a free-wheeling back and forth about the future of their city and the legacy of the 2010 Games. Berelowitz is an urban planner, critic and author of Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination. Hern is a rabble-rouser and author of Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future.

'The Band,' winner of the Jury Selection Award in the Where's the Square? design ideas competition sponsored by the Vancouver Public Space Network.

Search for the city’s missing, true public spaces yields fascinating ideas.

If we build it, they will come. Or will they? And does it matter if they don’t? What is the importance of having a public square in the 21st century city, whose citizens are more likely to commune electronically, in virtual space?

Vancouver’s planning and design community has long bemoaned the lack of a major public open space in the centre of the city, like those great squares that so many other cities are identified with. Meanwhile, critics have noted the city’s eccentric emphasis on public life at the periphery. Vancouver has always had more intense public spaces at its edges than at the centre: Centrifugal City.

It seems that Vancouver’s true public spaces are its beachfront parks, plazas, walkways and associated strands. Meanwhile, the centre seems curiously absent of such a social condenser, where the citizens of this city can come together to celebrate, commiserate or demonstrate as they do in other cities. The centre — to paraphrase Yeats — does not hold.

Source ↑ www.thetyee.ca/…

V.c » Yeah man, this city needs a public space, a great public square where we can hang out and protest and be a real city and … yeah whatever, in politically blasé Vancouver (Canada) with our indifference to causes and conflicts, our materialism and self-interest, for what do we need a great public square like the great cities of Europe that were built during times of strife, upheaval and even revolution? And who is going to build this great public square? We can pay for things like the Olympics because they bring in tourist dollars but who is going to build a place for people to either slack off or bitch?