Industrial Placemaking : Case Studies and Lessons for the Neighbourhood of Marpole

The goal of this report is to identify key lessons for placemaking in an industrial context based on case studies of industrial districts or developments in other North American port cities comparable to Vancouver. In other words, this research aims to understand the contexts in which industrial placemaking could occur. This involves identifying several facets of placemaking, including: (a) The physical qualities of industrial settings; (b) The processes – public, private, financial, or institutional – that enable industrial placemaking initiatives and/or industrial land use protection to occur; (c) The implications of placemaking application; and (d) The contexts in which industrial placemaking are appropriate. Based on the findings from the case studies, it is the aim of this study to develop principles and guidelines of industrial placemaking that contribute to the City of Vancouver’s on‐going thinking and planning of the South Vancouver Industrial Lands in Marpole. Three industrial districts have been chosen from west coast American port cities. They are: (a) San Francisco, California; (b) Portland, Oregon; and (c) Seattle, Washington. Each case study will describe: (i) the Placemaking Elements; and (ii) the Placemaking Processes that have enabled placemaking within each setting. Research and analysis of these case studies involved the following: • Primary and secondary literature reviews; • Site visits; • Personal correspondence with city planners; and • Spatial analyses of each study area’s physical elements. The aim of the spatial analysis is to provide the reader a better understanding of the physical elements that make each place unique. As previously demonstrated in Section 1.0 for the main study area, Marpole, this includes the following series of maps and figures that have been created for each of the three case study areas: • Context maps o To show the location of the study areas and any significant adjacent land uses or landmarks; • Land use map o To demonstrate the mix of land uses within each place and their block patterns; • Figure ground map o To illustrate the building footprints of a smaller area (but at a larger scale or in greater detail) within each case study; and • Street sections o To depict the typical public right‐of‐ways (ROWs) found with each study area, and the scale and relationship of the land uses relative to the streets.Applied Science, Faculty ofCommunity and Regional Planning (SCARP), School ofUnreviewedGraduat