The City of Vancouver adopted a Heritage Action Plan in December 2013 with one of the key areas of action and implementation is the Character Home Zoning Review.
CitySpaces collaborated with the City of Vancouver to engage with the public through extensive consultation on the proposed options for the Character Home Zoning Review in four study areas across the city. This work included developing a communications and engagement strategy, engaging with residents and stakeholders through a series of public open houses and online survey, facilitating a practitioner workshop, and preparing a consultation report to summarize the feedback received during the engagement period of the Character Home Zoning Review.
CitySpaces focused its efforts on providing support to the City on the planning and executing the engagement activities, including interactive tools to spark dialogue with residents and stakeholders on the topic of tradeoffs for incentivizing character home retention. The Character Home Zoning Review activities included a visual explorer to explore residents’ perspective on character and Lego models of the proposed zoning options to allow participants to provide feedback on the proposed zoning options using a hands-on approach. Over 1,000 participants attended the four open houses and over 3,300 surveys were completed.
CitySpaces also facilitated a workshop with design practitioners to provide an in-depth review and comment on the technical aspects of the Character Home Zoning Review options. The workshop focused on three main topics: the character merit assessment, character retention projects, and new home construction.
Feedback from staff conversations and the activities at the open houses, the survey, and the practitioner workshop were collected and summarized in a consultation report which was presented to Council along with staff recommendations for next steps in the Character Home Zoning Review.
PROJECT TEAM:
Jada Basi Spencer Andres Andy Hiscox Talia Kerr