In honour of Nathan Edelson, RePlan’s longtime Project Manager who passed away in September 2023, RePlan and CoLab have launched Nathan’s Book Club, a city planning book club and lending library for False Creek South residents.
Nathan’s Book Club is an opportunity for False Creek South residents and allies to come together, discuss what good city planning and urban design means to them, and how these ideas can shape and inform dialogue about the future of False Creek South.
Parents obsess over their children’s playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but their toys, classrooms, and playgrounds are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades-even centuries-of ideas about good child-rearing versus bad. What is the Good Toy? Is it wooden, plastic, or even digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can our built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle.
Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic Alexandra Lange reveals the surprising histories behind the human-made elements of our children’s pint-size landscape. Her fascinating investigation shows how the seemingly innocuous universe of stuff affects kids’ behavior, values, and health. Along the way, she reveals how years of decisions by toymakers, architects, and urban planners have helped-and hindered-American kids’ journeys toward independence. Seen through Lange’s eyes, everything from the sandbox to the street becomes vibrant with meaning. The Design of Childhood will change the way you view your children’s world-and your own.
Meeting date: Sunday, January 25, 2:00-4:00pm (Location TBA). Interested in joining or would like to borrow a copy of The Design of Childhood? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
A story of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation): past, present, and future. One hundred years after Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) leadership signed an amalgamation agreement that declared several communities in Squamish territory as one nation, this accessible history of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people traces our stories from ancient times to the present. Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw: We Come from This Land offers the culmination of generations of knowledge about the Squamish People and Sḵwx̱wú7meshulh Temíx̱w (Squamish People’s Territory).
The book is intended to be a snapshot – a collection of some of the multi-faceted stories and histories that are held by the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh People and a starting point for future conversations. It was written by Kwetásel’wet (Stephanie Wood), a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh journalist, in conjunction with a large research team including Nation staff.
Meeting date: Sunday, November 30, 2:00-4:00pm at Circles in the Square (Location TBA). Interested in joining or would like to borrow a copy of Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw: We Come from This Land? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamour, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?
Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything argues that spontaneity and urban workarounds are not liabilities but essential elements in all thriving cities.
Forty-three essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.
With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.
Meeting date: Sunday, September 28, 2:00-4:00pm at Circles in the Square (665A Market Hill, Leg-In-Boot Square). Interested in joining or would like to borrow a copy of Messy Cities? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
Vancouver is one of the most intensely studied medium-sized cities in the world and heralded everywhere as a model for sustainable development. In Planning on the Edge, nationally and internationally renowned planning scholars, activists, and Indigenous leaders assess whether the city’s reputation is warranted.
Chapters:
1. Planning since Time Immemorial: Musqueam Perspectives, by Howard Grant, Leona Sparrow, Larissa Grant, and Jemma Scoble
2. City on the Edge: Vancouver and Circuits of Capital, Control, and Culture, by Tom Hutton
3. Beyond the Downtown Eastside: A Regional Perspective on Affordability, Displacement, and Social Justice, by Nathan J. Edelson, Penny Gurstein, Karla Kloepper, and Jeremy T. Stone
4. Beyond the Dreams of Avarice? The Past, Present, and Future of Housing in Vancouver’s Planning Legacy, by Penny Gurstein and Andy Yan
5. Beyond Cosmopolis: Dreaming Coexistence as Indigenous Justice, by Leonie Sandercock
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, by Leslie Kern, exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future.
Meeting date: Sunday, March 30, 2:00-4:00pm. Location TBD. Interested in joining? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, has, since its first publication in 1961, become a standard for those interested in urban planning at the human scale. Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs’s monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.
Meeting date: Sunday, January 26, 2:00-4:00pm. Location TBD. Interested in joining? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.
In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today’s varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.
Meeting date: Saturday, November 16, 2:00-4:00pm. Interested in joining? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
Jesse Donaldson’s book explores the role of real estate in the post-colonial development of Vancouver. It explores the backroom dealings, the skulduggery and nepotism, the racism and the obscene profits, while at the same time revealing that the same forces which made Vancouver what it is, speculation and global capital, are the same ones that shape it today, showing that more than anything else, the history of real estate and the history of Vancouver are one and the same.
Meeting date: Saturday, September 28, 2:00-4:00pm. Interested in joining? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
In Capital City, Samuel Stein details how city planners have shaped the way the state uses and is used by organized capital, and how they hold the solutions.
Meeting date: Saturday, June 1, 2:00-4:00pm. Interested in joining? Email Sarah at *email is hidden, JavaScript is required*.
Originally published in 2013, Happy City by Charles Montgomery remains a modern planning classic. Montgomery asks how, as more and more people move into our cities, we can make those cities happy. Through interviews and urban experiments, Montgomery found that happy, green, low-carbon cities are possible, and they are within our reach.
