The aim of the urban design charrette is to explore ways to meet population targets identified in Metro Vancouver’s regional growth strategy by applying the principles of human-scaled urbanism at the scale of the neighbourhood centre, or “quartier”.

Coordinating community design with implementation of public transit and the provision of social housing, educators and urban design experts worked with 42 SFU students from the Summer Institute in Environmental Education to demonstrate socially, economically and environmentally sustainable urbanism implemented in our Historic Area.

The charrette is part of the BC UN-RCE’s Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood Network (SUNN) project, an initiative to research and develop a more open, inclusive, and cost-effective neighbourhood planning protocol. Focused on long-term sustainability through growth, the charrette will demonstrate and test a streamlined sustainable Community Planning process in Vancouver’s Historic Area.

The project is important because a charrette space acts to set up a learning experience for Educating about Sustainable Development (ESD) or 'good urbanism'. The Vancouver Historical Quartiers Charrette is a process that can be repeated with different groups in the community as part of the planning process, or taught in the classroom (post-secondary or K-12) in a scaled-down format. The process of applying the elements of good urbanism to a site by designing for livability, social mixing, and sustainability is best understood through the hands-on experience provided by the environmental learning space of the charrette. Fostering a collaborative exchange the charrette gives participants an understanding of how sustainable development emerges from local values of community, and values of place. Participants have the opportunity to experience the people, and the place first hand before working, and testing for themselves, how the long-established principles of good urbanism fit the locality under study.