"You should write a book."
Over the years, I have often been told this, usually after exaggerating the truth to make an interesting story even more interesting. In fact, I have written lots of books, but none have been published. That's because I started keeping a personal journal in 1968 shortly after arriving in England, the place where I was born, following three years of studies at the University of Toronto School of Architecture. While London may have been the best city for a 20-year-old architectural student on a 'gap year' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_year, I ended up in Manchester, working for Building Design Partnership, at the time the largest architectural firm in England that no one had ever heard of.
Many of my Manchester recollections relate to cars - a ten-year-old Ford Popular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Popular that had rubber bands securing the front wheel ball joints; and subsequently a 1957 British racing green Jaguar Mark 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_Mark_1 that was so rusty you could hear the rust falling off every time the car hit a bump.
Some mornings, I drove my flatmate Eli Harari to the University of Manchester but refused his request to wear a hat so that others might think I was his chauffeur. Decades later, Eli could afford a real chauffeur after the company he co-founded SanDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SanDisk commercialized flash storage and became the second largest maker of digital audio players in the US behind Apple.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Today I am finally starting to write a memoir, inspired in part by my friend Michael Audain's recent book One Man in His Time. In the preface, Michael writes that on a tour of Iceland, his guide told him that one in ten Icelanders writes a book, usually about themselves. While they often say it's something for their grandchildren, she believed it also helps people to understand themselves better. Michael adds that writing his book had been instructive for him. Time will tell if the same holds true for me.
Michael told me that he had difficulty picking a title. While he preferred something personal, his publisher picked 'One Man in His Time', a somewhat generic title that has been used for many other memoirs. My working title will be 'Michael Geller's Planet' which my friend Gordon Price picked for a March 2008 talk I gave following an around-the-world Sabbatical.
This talk highlighted lessons for Vancouver from around the world, many of which had been documented in a bi-weekly Vancouver Sun column called "Homes Away from Home" and on this blog. Fellow blogger Stephen Rees kindly wrote an account of my talk, and although it's been almost 15 years since I gave it, many of the ideas still seem relevant so I am reprinting it below:https://stephenrees.blog/2008/03/20/michael-geller%E2%80%99s-planet/
Thoughts about the relationships between transport and the
urban area it serves
Michael Geller’s Planet
Lessons for Vancouver from around the World
Michael Geller travelled to 31 countries on four continents
in search of interesting places and good planning ideas. This talk featured
some of the highlights, including master planned communities in India and
Dubai, alternative forms of transportation, and ways in which we might beautify
Vancouver.
Gordon Price introduced Michael as an architect who has
worked in both the public and private sectors: he thought that this might be one of
the reasons that Vancouver is not as polarised as other places, because
practitioners can and do work on both sides of the street. Michael came to
Vancouver with CMHC to work on Granville Island, public housing and housing co-ops. He went back to Toronto and Ottawa but
returned to work for a developer, then in his own practice, and in 1999 started work on UniverCity
for SFU.
I should point out that Michael’s talk was more of a slide
show – he had lots of his own very good photographs which he spoke to.
I have found that Michael has his own
blog with many of the images he used
Getting around
He started with walking. In New Zealand at
crossroads, all the lights turn red, and pedestrians can cross in any direction
including on the diagonal. Apparently, this used to be common here too but was stopped in order to improve car traffic flow. That in itself suggest we
should reconsider. Similarly, nearly every city except Vancouver has pedestrian
zones. He showed one in Curitiba, Brazil which had been created over a long
weekend: people just moved in with barriers and planters. The advice of the
Mayor Jaime Lerner is – start fast! Hanoi is not pedestrian friendly but Split in Croatia has a splendid wa;kway, all polished
concrete and no spots of discarded gum anywhere! Dubrovnik, which at night is
car free and once again splendid in its restored medieval walled magnificence.
Cycling He showed examples of Amsterdam, Rio, and even Ljubljana – the lesson there is to be flexible and use
colour – red tarmac in that case [also used in London for bus lanes]. Hanoi is dominated by scooters and that causes concern
about noise and air quality, but maybe electric scooters would work better here
[they are already popular in Richmond,and can be used in BC as slow evs without licenses].
Bus: In
Aukland NZ there is a free hybrid bus which circles the downtown and bus stops
have electronic directories: ne thought that Translink’s new cell phone text
service was a pretty good substitute. In Turkey mini buses are ubiquitous: he thought
small buses should be more widely used here to penetrate neighbourhoods and
connect to major routes, and was saddened when a fatal van accident in New
Brunswick lead to a call for banning 18 seat vans. [To be fair, the call
related to one Ford product that has shown itself to be unstable. Most
countries that use small sized buses have purpose designed vehicles not poorly
adapted vans]. Singapore has attractive bus shelters, as the bus is not just
for poor people and in Curitiba they are a fare paid zone. The shelter has a turnstile, so
loading the bus is quick and easy. The buses are high floor with no steps and
the shelters are on raised platforms so the bus is as effective as a train.
These solutions were adopted because the system “wasn’t designed by experts.”
He showed double decker trams in Hong Kong. As an English
expat (like me) he likes double deckers – but seemed to be unaware that BC
Transit uses them in Victoria (and the high capacity design used there was
developed initially for Hong Kong). Istanbul also has trams, though they do not
seem to have an exclusive right of way unlike Melbourne which has an excellent
tram system. Hong Kong has a spectacular rapid transit system
paid for by property development [which is probably unique due to the peculiar
circumstances of that city]
Water is more commonly used in cities like Sydney which has both
hydrofoils and a solar ferry. Brisbane has a ferry service to its University – might that work for UBC too? Michael was
told that ferries are not good in terms of ghg per passenger km – I am far from
sure that is supported by hard evidence but I could go look that up, later. He
also liked water taxis.
Which segued nicely into a discussion on Taxis especially
communal taxis: he thought we need for shared ride taxis here and he showed
images of tuk tuks.
In New Zealand they now have a deregulated taxi system: drivers' hours are controlled but prices are set by market and there can be different levels for different types of service. He sees a need for change here, especially when a Vancouver taxi is obliged to take a passenger to Surrey but is forbidden to pick up a fare for the return trip. [This is an even bigger problem at the airport for suburban cabs that do not have the special YVR licence to allow them to pick up there after dropping off a fare]
Planned communities
le Corbusier designed Chandigar for “the poorest of the poor to lead a
dignified life” something we could adopt on the downtown east side. There is an
edict that buildings will have a human scale and there are seven categories of
roads. This, he said contrasts with only two here: a highway and semi-rural.
There are five “areas of architectural interest” and a city centre designed as
a “pedestrian paradise”. Industry is only permitted to use electric power and
there is a lake where no motorised boats are allowed. There are also no
statues.
He was very taken with Dubai where nothing gets stolen and the whole
place is spotless. It did look a lot like Vancouver on steroids. Under
construction now is “Dubailand” which is a sort of Arabian Disneyland.
Brasilia – the city of the future is not pedestrian friendly. There
are separate networks of roads, buses and pedestrian routes often at different
levels and all very unfriendly. It has grown far beyond its original design and
the builders don’t respect the design guidelines.
Dubrovnic is an historic city where the colours and especially traditional
tiled roofs give a harmonious feeling
Jaipur the town was painted pink to welcome George V, and has remained pink ever since
Jaisalmer is all built out of sandstone
Warsaw has a great variety of building materials but all buildings are on
a “mid rise” scale. Similarly, Hanoi and Ljubljana stick to 4, 5 or 6 storeys
but with all kinds of colours and finishes. A similar approach in Prague now
includes an ultra modern building by Frank Gehry
Housing
In Sydney there is no limit on the size of balconies, which may help people cope with the
loss of gardens when they move to higher densities. There is also more variety
in the towers but only 50% of the units can be purchased by non residents.
Melbourne managed to afford an exclusive pedestrian and cycling bridge, which is
probably a better solution for crossing False Creek than widening Burrard
Bridge.
In New Zealand apartments are sold with a separate parking
space at cost – around $65,000 each. We should reduce the parking space
requirements here to make places more affordable: to simplify the process we
should, retain the same figures but make them maximums rather than minimums. He
showed floor plans and pictures of 2-bedroom 500 sf apartments designed for
students.
He recommended we consider the use of modular housing, rather like the way we use portables to
expand schools. He also thought that we need affordable walkup homes and showed examples from Australia that could not be built here due to “out of
date” fire codes. He said it was time for us to rethink these codes to take
account of smoke alarms and sprinkler systems He also likes street rowhouses – where people can have freeholds of
a terraced house with shared partition walls. Such houses are far more flexible
in adapting to different uses than more recent designs.
Public Art, Places, Squares
In east Europe it is common to see bronze models of cities
mounted in the squares, so people can see what the city used to be like and how
it is changing. He showed examples of remarkable places like Angkor Wat and St Petersburg. He has a special
fondness for fountains which in St Petersburg are all done without pumps,
though this is impractical here because of the space requirements for
reservoirs. [He did not mention that this city is built in a drained swamp.]
In Warsaw the buildings are art. And in many cities public spaces host opera and jazz concerts even if they need marquees. He also said that Vancouver needs more flowers and said that Richmond is way ahead of Vancouver with its municipal plantings of flowers on road medians. Vancouver should celebrate its birthdays – one city plants flowers with the number of years since its founding as the centrepiece.
Six Final Lessons
Albania is the poorest country in Europe but
the Mayor of its capital decided to brighten the place up by giving the
residents paint for their the buildings . We need this kind of
visionary leadership for a community spring clean-up, especially in our public
housing.
Singapore has a competition for the cleanest
building sense of pride in public housing –
Vietnam has a property tax based on frontage which produces interestingly thin buildings
Singapore has an urbanarium where developers
must donate a model of each of their buildings but also is a place to talk
about urban issues
Curitiba – Jaime Lerner established recycling with colour
coded public bins, but he also collected gum, which means there is now
no gum on the streets. [A more human solution to the disgusting habit of merely
spitting it onto the sidewalk than the outright ban used in Singapore which I
would favour.]
There they also turned an old quarry into an opera house using a very cheap,
rapid construction technique that looked like a conservatory.
New Zealand is his favourite country, for a
wide variety of reasons but he illustrated with street furniture.
By this time my laptop’s battery was low, and we moved to a
more general discussion. This included why bike lanes could not be on the
inside of the line of parked cars, why there were no designated motorcycle
parking spaces and other issues
I recommend, if you have not already done so that you visit Michael’s blog of his world tour that he kept up to date while he was on tour – I wish I had known about it at the time.
So, what will my book be about? In addition to writing about lessons for Vancouver and other North American cities offered by cities around the world, I intend to write about the many affordable housing ideas I often included in annual SFU talks and other presentations. Many of these ideas date back to experiences gained while working at CMHC in the 1970s and early 80s. I am often told I should include ideas proposed in five years' of weekly and bi-weekly Vancouver Courier columns, especially on how to address the deteriorating conditions in the Downtown Eastside. As noted above, we can learn from Albania.
There's no doubt writing a memoir is a self-indulgent activity. Fortunately, I will have my wife looking over my shoulder reminding me that no one will be interested in what I am writing. So, I will assure her it's just for my granddaughters Harriet and Sylvie. Because the fact is, I wish my grandparents had written about their lives, especially experiences being chased out of Odessa and ending up in England, where my story will begin.
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