Working Green

Space2place project manager Mike Teed is featured in an upcoming educational video that will introduce High School Students to Landscape Architecture. Mike presents Garden City park and explains some of the underlying ideas behind the park. Once we have more information on the release of the video we will provide an update on where to find it.

For now here is a rough cut of the production. Mike is feature at the 1 minute mark and again 5:40 minutes into the video. Perhaps Mike has discovered an alternate career path for himself....

Opening Day Garden City

Below is a short video illustrating some of the play experiences at Garden City. The video focuses on the activities or "stories" taking place in the park. This is our first video and apart from a few sound issues I think it is successful in displaying another side to the project online. This also shows the park mostly complete with the recent planting in the park. I anticipate the park will change as the planting grows throughout the summer.

Look for more videos about our work to be posted here.

Garden City Play Environment - Opening Day - June 2008 from space2place on Vimeo.

Garden City Media Coverage

Our Garden city park is opening this Saturday with an official opening from 11:30am - 1pm. The seems be quite a bit of excitement surrounding the park and the park is receiving a lot of media coverage. We are hopeful that this will help to encourage support for more innovative public spaces throughout the lower mainland.

Below are 3 videos that have aired on recent local televison:

This segment aired on Shaw Access early in May. They did a nice job of framing some of the conceptual ideas and research that went into the creation of the park.

Garden City - shaw segment - May 2008 from space2place on Vimeo.

This segment aired on CTV and features an interview with Alexa. I like how the contrast a "traditional" playground with the new park.

Garden City - CTV news segment May 2008 from space2place on Vimeo.

The last video aired on CBC. This video features Clarence Sihoe the project manager from the city of Richmond. This video has a slightly different perspective and focuses on some of the natural elements of the park.

garden city - CBC news segment - may 2008 from space2place on Vimeo.

Space is the Place - Sun Ra

Some people may be familiar with the tune "space is the place" from the cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra. While this wasn't the original source of our company name I thought it would be fun to share. There is also a "out of sight" movie from 1974 where Sun Ra lands his spaceship in Oakland and attempts to rescue black people from earth before it explodes. As far a science fiction goes it doesn't measure up to Star Wars from the seventies, but it does feature some great concert footage of the Arkestra.

Majora Carter - Greening the Ghetto

We are currently working for the Vancouver Parks Board on Oppenheimer Park. This project is in the heart of the downtown eastside. This is a challenging project for us and one that we are honoured to be involved with. The goal of this project is to develop a park that inclusive of the diverse community without driving people from the park. The space is already one of the most used park spaces in the city and we hope we can make it better for the community.

The video below is of Majora Carter from the Sustainable South Bronx it is encouraging to hear the passion in her voice. She is spearheading efforts that utilize sustainable open space to help improve the lives of the community. Check out what they are doing at www.ssbx.org - and help support them by buying a T shirt. I already have mine - green the ghetto. I was particularly excited about this because it sort of marries two things close to my heart public realm and hip hop.