Barclay Heritage Square: An Introduction To Gordon's Philosophy

I'm going to post some of the 90 billion pictures I took (only a handful of which, as expected, came out), with what I can remember of what we learned at each stop.

We started at Barclay Heritage Square, which was pretty and offered seating, for which we were grateful. Robert answered all of Gordon's questions, which included, among others, "Why are we not speaking Mandarin?" (a question that left me in an existential haze for the rest of the day). The answer is, I think, that Asian societies could very well have gotten to Vancouver and established outposts before the British ever got around to it, but they were prevented by politics.

The Square was originally to be developed as a park, but the city ended up preserving some of the historic buildings and using them as, among other things, "social housing." Below is an example of this - Canadian public housing!












There are still, however, people sleeping on porches. Also, the streets do not run with milk and honey.












Then we went out to the street next to the Square to talk about density.











Gordon walked into the street for a few minutes to make the point that a high-density neighborhood (the West End) does not necessarily have to have lots of traffic.











He argued that a dense neighborhood, if supported by good transportation options and land uses, will have less traffic because people will walk and bike and take transit, and stroll to the corner store for their groceries. We also looked at a corner store that was grandfathered in, but would be illegal to build under current zoning.