Last night Mayor Gregor Robertson launched the Campus City Collaborative at the CityStudio — the hub of sustainability education that is burgeoning under the Cambie Street Bridge (in a great studio space). Energetic students from our six post secondary institutions in the City have been working on real projects to demonstrate what can be done to advance us to be the greenest city in the world.
It seems along time ago now that Mike Harcourt and I were musing on how we were going to keep the energy and ideas from the Greenest City Action Team “alive” for ourselves. We both really liked the idea on p. 45 of the Bright Green Future report http://vancouver.ca/greenestcity/PDF/Vancouver2020-ABrightGreenFuture.pdf which talked about connecting the post secondary sector in any urban centre with its municipal government.
So we brought together our colleagues (at the faculty level mainly) from the six institutions who nominally have “homes” in the City of Vancouver: BCIT, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Langara College, SFU, UBC and Vancouver Community College. We met and talked about what it might be possible to do with our knowledge resources (faculty and students) to help the City realize its greenest city targets. See the Greenest City Action Plan Council Report http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110712/documents/rr1.pdf
As with any complex collaboration, it has taken some time to turn talk into action. We started with establishing some goals:
C-3 has four broad goals:
- To maximize synergies between the efforts of the City to advance sustainability, and those of the post-secondary sector, thereby enhancing community-wide collaboration and engagement and providing new approaches to urban sustainability and sustainability-related education;
- To make the research and other expertise of the post-secondary sector more readily available to the City and the VEDC, helping them to address a wide variety of challenges, notably those associated with increasing the number of green jobs in the city, increasing the engagement of local businesses in sustainability, and making Vancouver the greenest city in the world by 2020;
- To provide opportunities for post-secondary researchers and teachers, and their students, to become engaged in working on practical and real urban sustainability and other challenges, thereby making courses more interesting to students, and increasing the job-readiness of graduates; and,
- To encourage post-secondary institutions, faculties, departments and academics to develop innovative approaches to green education and applied research in sustainability, based on inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration.
We need affordable hosuing for students and staff more than we need a shiny Skytrain or another cluster of apartments that are being snatched up on the market faster than you can blink. I hate to break it to you, but this UBC Line issue is way beyond the scope of our little UBCtown. Fact is, Broadway is Vancouver city’s busiest west-east arterial, and the number of buses serving it (9, 17, 99) just don’t cut it anymore. It’s not just UBC students using the 99 in rush hour, but business people, residents of Kits, and basically anyone who needs to get from the western part of Vancouver onto the Canada Line/Skytrain.In fact (if I may dare to say this), it may be because of the amount of space city planners have given to BOV lanes that cause this congestion. Take away the busiest route (99), and replace it with a system that is grade-separated from other forms of traffic (UBC Line). The result: faster travel time from end-to-end as opposed to the current bus system, more lanes for automobiles, local students being able to live at home as opposed to having to shell out money to live on rez, and an improved transit system mirroring Vancouver’s busiest west-east arterial.