In Creating A New Happier Vancouver we highlight how The Museum of Vancouver and Vancouver Urbanarium will be presenting Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver where they explore challenges and solutions relating to citizens’ greatest concerns.

Event details:

• Jan. 21-May 15, 2016 at the Museum of Vancouver
• More information can also be seen at urbanarium.org

This exhibition will be a provocative and timely exploration of the future of the changing region of Vancouver. Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver will be on display at MOV from January 21 through May 15, 2016, will immerse visitors in an experience that spotlights 20 visions for tomorrow’s city, while focusing on four topical issues: housing affordability, residential density, ease of transportation, and quality of public space.

 Vancouver is a city in flux, undergoing massive growth and redevelopment. With as many as three homes demolished each day, often to make room for denser living, we are experiencing a watershed moment in the history of the region. With everyone already talking about Vancouver’s sky-high housing prices, we want to shift the conversation from real estate to the state of the city.  Your Future Home launches from a ‘presentation centre’ into an ‘urban grid,’ in which some of Vancouver’s most creative minds grapple with the city’s thorniest issues. We want to bring more people into debates about what their city might become.

Gregory Dreicer,  MOV Director of Curatorial and Engagement.

More than 20 of Vancouver’s leading architects, urban planners, and visionaries will create multimedia scenarios that ask visitors to stop and rethink what they want in their hometown. These scenarios will include a model for a 2,500-foot vertical city that will have visitors challenging customary notions of scale; a strategy for a post-disaster transportation network that caters to bicycles; and a proposal for a network of floating barge parks. Your Future Home will also contain a fascinating series of case studies that will highlight the role that individuals and communities play in building Vancouver. Stories will speak to the Arbutus Lands redevelopment, upcoming decisions that may transform places like Granville Island, and changes to how we heat buildings downtown.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Vancouverites will be invited to participate in a number of complementary activities, including walking tours, discussions, social events with drinks, and workshops developed to spark conversation about the environments in which we live.

Here are a couple of perspectives on cities, like Vancouver, and how maybe we need to go beyond design alone and consider other factors like social connections and responsible design.

Alexandros Washburn, Urban Design for Successful Cities

As Chief Urban Designer for the City of New York, Alexandros Washburn understands one key thing about designing successful cities: it doesn’t work until it works for the pedestrian.

Charles Montgomery, Happy Cities

Charles Montgomery explores what happens when you take an abandon city space in NYC and populate it with urban social experiments. The outcomes are unexpected as city dwellers explore this public space, interact with each other, and change their attitudes towards social connections, values, and each other.

Ryan Betts, Dark Cities

Local Vancouverite, Ryan Betts covered some serious challenges in cities and discusses cities in this talk from the Dark Futures conference in 2014. Here he shows some great archival footage from Vancouver from the mid-50s when the downtown core was being changed drastically. I’d personally love to see him as part of this debate.

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.