Using our table-sized iPad-like device that’s pre-loaded with Google Maps and digital renderings of buildings, we bulldozed Southside Market and Mt. Begbie Elementary School and replaced the surrounding Fourth Street strip with dense apartments and townhouses featuring retail on the ground floor. The more we shoehorned residents in, the more a built-in transportation and greenhouse gas emission calculator approvingly dials down. And when we were done, we threw in a park for good measure.
That was the outcome of my team’s morning session with researchers from the University of British Columbia, here conducting research as part of the My Revelstoke 2030 project. My teammates were mayor David Raven and Jill Zacharias. We were specifically tasked with designing and envisioning the Southside core as it might be 20 years from now, while about 50 participants on other teams focused on other areas of town during three days of sessions. While we worked, about six researchers videotaped and recorded our every move with a battery of recording devices.
So, is Southside slated for gentrification in the coming years? Not really, explained Ronald Kellett, professor of Landscape Architecture with UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The ongoing ‘My Revelstoke 2030’ partnership between the City of Revelstoke and UBC is primarily an exercise in researching (and improving) how communities engage and visualize planning and change. Specifically, the research team is being partially funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS). That University of Victoria-based institute seeks to partner with government, academia and the private sector in order to study climate change and develop solutions to mitigate and adapt to the change.
“This funding is trying to understand how people engage with issues of climate change in their lives,” Kellett explained. “The integration between energy and emissions and the way communities are planned – that’s our expertise. What PICS wants to know is are there better ways to engage communities in conversations about that relationship.”
Through the series of exercises, we explored paper planning and the new large, multi-touch screen device that assisted us with visualizing the changes we proposed. The plan form was shown on the digital table, while the overhead projector showed a 3-D overhead view.
So, if this is just an academic study, are we more than just Guinea pigs? What’s in it for Revelstoke?
Maged Senbel, an Assistant Professor with the University Of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, said the research is intertwined with ongoing planning efforts in the city. The city’s Official Community Plan (OCP) has recently been revised and the new Unified Development Bylaw is hot off the press.
These documents enable “a range of options for neighbourhoods and neighbourhood centres. And people don’t necessarily have a deep sense of what that entails, what are the different options that are possible within those new arrangements,” Senbel said. “So this is an opportunity to have people experience some of the choices within that new policy and to visualize these choices in a three-dimensional way that enables them to actually imaging the neighbourhood.”
He hopes the research study this week and a follow-up session in September will facilitate a deeper understanding of planning in Revelstoke.
“Even though the rates of change are slow, if you look at Revelstoke over a couple of generations, it has changed quite a bit. And plans last easily that long,” Kellett said. “The clock might be ticking at a slower rate than Skytrain routes in Vancouver, but stuff is happening and the need to steer that in ways that create value for everyone in the community is just as huge in a slow-growing community as it is in a fast-growing community.”
Getting planning right now is also key for two other reasons, they said. Firstly, Revelstoke won’t likely get a ‘do-over’ in the future. The change that comes as a result of resort development will be more or less permanent, Kellett noted. Secondly, the economic downturn can be viewed as fortuitous in the sense that it threw cold water on an overheated development scene that was happening on top of under-developed planning infrastructure.
Senbel said now is the time to prepare: “This is the ideal time to do planning, when growth is slow, so that you can take the time to really weigh your options and have a measured vision to what you want to undertake – to how you want to imagine your future.”
Kellett said the planning is not just about growth and development, but steering change. “You could think of it as a remodel, not a growth strategy,” he said. He notes the walkable grid in the downtown core as an example; do we want to focus efforts on paving and servicing new subdivisions or repairing infrastructure already in use?
Even though the focus of the My Revelstoke 2030 exercise is academic, the case studies undertaken are based in reality. A series of recently-revised and new city planning documents envision several community hubs, including a revived Southside commercial district and new retail development in Arrow Heights.
The UBC team will be back in September to report, present their analysis and look at opportunities for emissions reduction through planning.
