10x10 Challenge: making the world a better place locally and overseas

by Patricia Schultz, VIA Architecture

The first thing you see when you go to the 10x10 challenge site is that "you are joining a community of we thinkers around the world who are working to create a better global future."

The idea of the "10 x10 challenge" is to list 10 commitments publicly on their site that you plan to follow that will make the world a better place. In return, $10 will be donated to Free the Children, an organization that helps create schools and offers clean water to children in under-developed countries.


Here is a list of the most popular commitments for the challenge:
  1. Turn off the lights (22,712)
  2. Drink water from a re-useable water bottle (20,025)
  3. Clean out my closet (16,869)
  4. Hug, hug, hug (16,589)
  5. Re-connect with an old friend (13,655)
  6. Read about a new social issue (11,586)
  7. Give a donation on someone's behalf (8,864)
  8. Volunteer somewhere new (8,806)
  9. Say thank you -- in writing (8,495)
  10. Buy organic products (8,437)

I urge you to take a few minutes to go to their site, take a look at what it's all about, and list your own 10 commitments that you plan to do.

I've already gotten a head start on my #7 commitment: Tell more people about 10x10.

Just Trans It!

by Naomi Buell, Marketing Coordinator for VIA Architecture

It is shocking to think that the average person is exposed to between 600 to 3,000 advertising messages a day. Whether it be a banner ad on a website, a giant product ad on the side of a bus, or that catchy jingle you can’t get out of your head about Sprott- Shaw Community College…since 1903, we are exposed to advertisements everywhere we go. Some companies are even branding golf holes so that when you take out the flag it reveals a hidden logo in the hole.

So why is it that some of the most important services don’t market themselves?

In an interesting article about LA’s push to market its transit services, the author dispels the notion that money spent on marketing means less money for improvements to the service. Rather, he argues that marketing the service leads to more usage and therefore more efficiency. This is what Clayton Lane, a transport expert for EMBARQ, calls “the virtuous cycle.”



AND



The “virtuous cycle” begins with a marketing campaign that increases awareness of the benefits of transit, or a campaign that aims to dispel the negative images of transit. This usually leads non users to try the service. The increase in demand is met by an increase in supply, which means new routes and more frequent bus or rail services. An increase in the number of routes and frequency of service leads to more efficiency, which encourages use by another wave of patrons, which starts the cycle all over again.

Environmental agencies that spend a substantial amount on marketing could donate some of their resources to help with a transit marketing initiative. The benefit to them is that increasing transit use not only creates a more efficient system, it creates less dependency on cars and thus less traffic, which also means less idling in stop and go traffic (which we all know would be a good thing for the environment).

After reading the article, I tried to reflect on whether or not I had ever seen a transit advertisement in Vancouver and I came to realize that I had seen a few, but that they had all been on the bus and were often for the U-pass, a bus pass available to university students attending certain institutions.

Although it is nice to know that there is some marketing effort being put forth, these ads are not especially effective when it comes to the larger goal of increasing transit use and targeting non-transit users. Advertising a service to the existing patrons does very little to increase the user base for the obvious reason that it’s not targeting people who don’t use the service already.

The Metro, on the other hand, (LA’s transit service) is focusing their efforts on increasing their user base and improving their image by having an in house marketing department that re-brands and cleverly markets their services. It is perhaps one of the most effective transit marketing campaigns, albeit perhaps one of the only transit marketing campaigns out there. Their website could use some better navigation and graphics, especially in comparison to ours but their ads, logo and slogans seem to be getting people’s attention.

By re-branding and marketing their transit service, “discretionary riders, (those people who have the choice to commute by car or transit) have jumped from 24 to 36 percent.”[2] With a recognizable M inside a circle as their logo, they have created a number of effective campaigns as shown below. In addition to these ads, they have used vibrantly coloured buses to heighten the image of their fleet, something which is extremely important in an image conscious society, such as LA. They have also incorporated the local culture by using California poppy red as one of the colours of their fleet.





Of particular importance is their “Go Metro” campaign which is a great way to emphasize fitness, and with the arrival of the new year, I imagine the timing is not a coincidence as people try to implement their resolutions. Slogans such as “bike the cycle: go metro” or “take the first steps: go metro” focus on increasing activity by using transit in combination with walking and biking. This in ingenious as it takes a potentially negative view of walking all the stairs or the long distance between stops and turns it into a great, affordable alternative to a gym membership.

Their website is full of helpful hints and suggestions. This would be another great campaign for Vancouver as we Vancouverites have such an interest on health and fitness. I can see it now…TransLink branded pedometers being given out and perhaps even fitness groups getting together to walk the stairs or go for a run and then catch the bus home.

The current users of Vancouver transit appear to take it because they have to, either because they cannot afford to drive or the commute is too strenuous. My experience has been that once people have taken transit, however, they realize how effective it is. Of course there are still a few inefficiencies, which according to the virtuous cycle, would diminish with an increased ridership. The challenge is to change the perception of those that don’t already use transit, which is where a marketing strategy becomes integral.

As “just do it” is to Nike, we need to find a memorable message to encourage new transit users….Just Trans It?

There’s an “us” in every b“us”?

Transit: because finding parking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?

Or perhaps a pedometer that says “you are less then 1000 steps from a bus stop: help yourself and help your environment.” Whatever the tag line, a more efficient transit system awaits, which will certainly help with Gregor Robertson’s goal of becoming the Greenest city by 2020.




Image Credits: RLR Bus, BC Billboard, Cruel/Kind, Superhero, Green City

Monday News Roundup

High-Speed Trains Return to U.S. Fast Track (Wired)
Passenger Rail is becoming a viable option as President Obama calls for heavy investment America's rail infrastructure. Michael Dukakis has been a long time advocate for mass transit + high speed rail; the post includes an interview on Dukakis' thoughts on the future of rail in the US.

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke (Wired)
A discussion of the concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation and the political appeal in the US.

Big City, Small Condos: 'Micro-lofts' to come to Vancouver (The Vancouver Sun)
Reliance Properties Ltd and ITC Construction are behind new mini market rental suites in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Thirty 270 square foot units will be constructed in a 6-storey heritage building on West Hastings Street.

Axial Mapping (Digital Tectonics)
A short post by a Welsh School of Architecture student who is doing Transport Interchange Modeling. The axial model and isovists grids that he mentions were recently outlined by VIA's Lydia Heard on her city walker blog.

Taking transit saves you LOTS of money! (APTA)
APTA study shows how much.

Architect Barbie in 2010? (Daily Dose of Architecture)
Go vote! (+ empower young women)

New Energy Hubs: Transit-Oriented Development Meets District Energy
(WorldChanging)
TOD meets District Energy: "This is a vision for a New Energy Hubs, a comprehensive community development model that meshes transit-oriented developments (TODs) with emerging energy technologies. Deploying advanced transportation and energy concepts in one geographically defined location provides synergistic benefits, making for the most effective use of energy and resources."

Shape Vancouver 2050
An online survey for shaping the skyline of Vancouver that is fun to complete and shows the connection between density + carbon footprint reduction.

Vancouver 2010 Olympics Free Events Guide (City Caucus)
A site that lists all of the free events during the Olympics. Check out the daily laser show over English Bay that you can contribute to designing.

Our First Blogger Meet up

We had our first blogger meet up on Wednesday at the Roundhouse Community Centre. This project, which won a Gold Nugget Grand Award and the Lieutenant Governor's award, was the perfect place to host our Vancouver meet up as we did the architectural design and heritage redevelopment. We had a great time meeting a great group of diverse bloggers -- conversations around the room included local transit + planning ideas, the Southeast False Creek neighborhood, US politics, energy districts, the olympics, and even fashion.

The goal of the meetup was not only to learn more about some of our local bloggers, but also to continue the dialogue we started back in June when we produced the Great Urban Debate (Seattle vs. Vancouver). Instead of comparing Seattle vs Vancouver, however, we hope to facilitate conversation between cities in the Pacific Northwest, including Portland. We believe this will enable us to discuss important issues while getting feedback from those that are local, as well as our urban city counterparts.



As we continue our blogger meet ups, we invite any bloggers who attended or who write about Vancouver to join us for the Seattle meet up, scheduled for Wednesday, February 17th (more details coming soon). A big thanks also goes out our social media consultants at Banyan Branch for helping organize and run the event.



 Thanks to all those who attended, including Capsule Designs, Planning Pool, Yaletown.ca, Pricetags, Thirteen Cent Pinball, Stephen Rees, City Caucus, Just a Gwai Lo, Counti8.ca, Re:placeFashion Forward 40, and others. 

We look forward to continuing the conversation.

What happens in Hagen stays in Hagen

by Jihad Bitar, VIA Architecture

Recently, I’ve been having some trouble understanding what truly happened in COP15 (Conference of the Parties). Everything I have read or listened to thus far has described a piece of this elephant but nothing has given me any clear explanation of what really happened in Copenhagen. How successful was this expensive environmental party? How did it fail? Even the final accord fell short of what was expected from world leaders.

To make this post short, I’ll use the words of the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, to outline the issues that Copenhagen was supposed to address:
“The four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are:
  1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
  2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
  3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
  4. How is that money going to be managed

If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer. [source]
But Mr. de Boer wasn’t made happy because none of those essentials were discussed. Yet strangely, another accord emerged from a last minute meeting held behind closed doors between only 5 out of the 192 countries represented at the conference. These select countries include USA, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Without getting too political, the key points of the ‘historical’ accord included:
  1. To keep the maximum temperature rise to below 2°C
  2. To list developed country emission reduction targets and mitigation action by developing countries for 2020
  3. $30 billion short-term funding for immediate action till 2012
  4. $100 billion annually by 2020 in long-term financing
  5. Reiterating past intentions such as providing mechanisms to support technology transfer and forestry.[source]

I believe that our environment is intricately related and directly affected by economics and politics so if we can’t figure out a way to utilize these elements to improve our pressing climate problems then nothing will ever get fixed.

I also think that as long as the price of oil stays low, all renewable and green energy resources, like wind and solar, won’t develop into easily usable and attainable resources that we’re expecting it to become. So unfortunately we may be doomed to live in a fossil fuel culture until the next international summit. Let’s hope that ‘what happens in Mexico 2010 doesn’t stay in Mexico’!

Monday News Roundup

Accessibility vs. Mobility Redux (Planetizen)
In planning work, mobility is often wrongly assumed to mean automobile usage. Mobility is just about “moving people and goods from place to place” by any mode. Accessibility means that something is “easily approached, entered, obtainable or obtained.” That’s why we work so hard to provide multi-modal Accessibilty to our Mobility Hub designs.

Obama Administration Proposes Major Public Transportation Policy Shift to Highlight Livability (FTA)
Ray La Hood issues a promise at this year’s Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting that the new round of Federal New Starts projects will be judged by their contribution to livability and environmental benefits rather than just shorter commute times (a Bush administration policy), making way for transit projects to better respond to their land use context. Hooray!

Turning sewage into heat in Vancouver (Planetizen)
Thursday, the switch was flipped on a generator that will serve the heating needs of 16,000 residents of the Olympic Village in Vancouver. The generator transforms sewage into heat. We are really excited that our early planning work for a sustainable Southeast False Creek has now transformed from vision to reality in the opening of the district's sewage heat recovery plant.

Amazing photographs of cities (from dangerous heights) (Urbanophile)
Stunning photos from an urban photographer, whose site "No Promise of Safety" is aptly named. Although this photographer tends to use graffitti at these sites, here is another link to a photographer who shoots "the often forgotten and abandoned history of the city of Cincinnati" and leaves the site as he found it.

Street trees increase home prices in Portland (Oregon Live)
"In a paper published in Landscape and Urban Planning, Geoffrey Donovan of the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station found that, on average, street trees add $8,870 to a home's sales price and reduce its time on the market by 1.7 days."

Azteca Multimodal Transfer Station (Archidose)
Nice project review about a multimodal transfer station in the municipality of Ecatepec in Mexico City, Mexico.

Bicentennial Room, Chilean National Library (ArchDaily)
Great reading room created in unused space in the Grand National Library in Santiago, Chile -- scroll down to see a 360' panorama of this unique space.

THE JOY OF LESS (Harvard Design Magazine)
Here is Wendy Steiner in Harvard Design Magazine No.30 in an article titled Joy of Less. The article starts out with this from Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), as he shops with his family in the mall:
“When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki…. They were my guides to endless well-being…. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake…. I began to grow in value and self-regard. […] Brightness settled around me…. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums…. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit."
Two neighbourhoods face change as Woodward’s, Mt. Pleasant centre open (State of Vancouver)
A look at the changes coming to 2 Vancouver neighborhoods as a community centre and a new "Woodwards" development open in the area.

Haiti Quake (Architecture for Humanity )
A for H takes a look at the quake in Haiti and what's needed for long term reconstruction in the area.

Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics from a foreign perspective

by Jen Kenefick, VIA Architecture
Part 1: Pre Olympics



When one thinks of the Winter Olympic Games, Ireland is not a country that would be at the forefront of one’s mind. This is not particularly surprising. We have a more unpleasant version of the weather in Vancouver, where seasons are not so well defined and where most precipitation falls as rain! So it stands to reason: no snow, no winter sports.

Having said that, Ireland has entered a team (small though it may be) in the Winter Olympics ever since the 1992 Games in Albertville, France and this year is no different. There will possibly be up to 8 Irish athletes competing in Vancouver in events such as bobsleigh, skeleton bobsleigh, slalom and cross country skiing.

Since arriving in Vancouver last June, it has been hard to avoid talk of the Olympics. Every time you pick up a paper or watch the news, there is something about it. And why wouldn’t there be? The Winter Olympics is a huge global sporting event.

Being at home for the Christmas Holidays, I was interested to see how much coverage of the Games there would be in the media. During the almost 2 weeks I was home, I cannot recall any. But people were definitely aware of it. Almost everyone I talked to mentioned it at some stage in conversation about Vancouver.

I guess a ‘foreign perspective’ depends largely on said foreigner’s origin. Being from such a small a country as Ireland, (especially relative to a country the size of Canada), and if estimations of the number of people expected  to come here during the Games are correct, I am imagining the number of people in and around the city to be absolutely outrageous! With talk of leaving town, working from home, offices closing and general avoidance of the downtown area, it sounds like the locals are expecting a tidal wave of Olympic revelers! So, I for one am looking forward to seeing just how accurate these predictions are and just how ‘crazy’ things are going to get!  

I have found interesting too, the many different opinions that are held by Vancouverites in relation to the Games, from great anticipation to absolute hatred. So as an outsider, with no allegiance to one side or the other, I am genuinely interested to see how it all pans out in the lead up to and during the Games.

Maybe a small note of irony to finish my little blog is that while Vancouver (and the rest of the world) is praying for snow, Ireland is ‘gripped’ in the biggest freeze it has experienced in 50 years and there is record snowfall in most parts of the country! 


While Ireland’s medal predictions may be slim, I plan to embrace the Olympic spirit and hope I will be proud to say that I lived here during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

Monday News Roundup

We're starting a new feature where every Monday, we'll do a post on news or other blog posts that we found interesting from the past week.

Architecture Doesn't Hide Bad Planning in Dubai (Planetizen)
An article from the Chicago Tribute that discusses the magnificent buildings and creations in Dubai, but the lack of an urban connectivity.

Adobe Headquarters Installs 20 Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Inhabitat)
"The electricity generated from the turbines will eventually power an electric vehicle charging station in the garage below"

Deep Walkability (WorldChanging)
"The true test of walkability I think is this: Can you spend a pleasant half hour walking or on transit and end up at a variety of great places? The quality of having a feast of options available when you walk out your front door is what I'm starting to think of as "deep walkability.""

Fed-Up Commuter Fixes Freeway Sign Himself (Planetizen)
Great recounting of a Los Angeles commuter/artist who became fed up with poor freeway signage, and designed, constructed, and installed changes to the sign himself.

It takes a community to sustain a small farm (Grist)
"as anyone who has ever raised grain or livestock can tell you, the farmer is not the only person in the chain of players from her farm to your fork. In addition to producers, your food chain includes processors, distributors or transporters, and retailers. In other words, to have a truly local food system, we also need local butchers, bakers and millers, local truck drivers, local grocers, and a community that supports them in all their efforts."


Vancouver Is Cascadia's Greenest City, Who Is Second? (The Tyee)Vancouver is announced as Cascadia's greenest city, but then the question for second place is: Seattle, or Portland? The writer notes that most people assume that Portland will take second places, but wants to dig into the individual issues deeper. No spoiler alert, but the city that takes second deserves it.

Popular posts from 2009

If you only started reading our blog recently, here are the top 10 most popular posts from last year that you may have missed:
  1. The case to abort LRT (in Vancouver) - a newspaper clipping saved from 1982 that talks about the new SkyTrain system coming to Vancouver, and why the government should "scrap" the system and go back to more conventional methods.
  2. Rethinking Highest and Best Use - discussion of cycles of urban decline, the decay of neighborhoods, and how urban agriculture can help.
  3. Uptown, meet your old neighbor, South Lake Union - 3 projects that are changing these two neighborhoods; Mercer Street, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Alaskan Way Viaduct (SR99) Bored Tunnel)
  4. New Meaning to Eating Local - Why low income neighborhoods suffer from higher levels of obesity
  5. How Green is your Transit System? - Architects designing transit systems sustainably have few guidelines to follow today.
  6. Conscious Consumers -- one staff members goal to reduce her impact on the environment (after watching "No Impact Man")
  7. Less Carbon, More Footprints - a discussion of walking in cities and a review of the Walk21 conference
  8. Vancouver Streetcar: We've Missed You - The history of the streetcar and the possibilities of reintroducing it to Vancouver
  9. The Salvation of our Environment Lies at the Feet of the Poor - A discussion about giving the poor full rights over the illegal properties they live on (discussion based on ideas of Paul Hawken)
  10. EcoDistricts 101 - the What, Why and Hows of EcoDistricts