Monday, January 24, 2011

Raze It!

Joe posted an article about the Downtown East Side on his Facebook profile yesterday. A lively conversation ensued which eventually lead to place making.
Joe Zaccaria Interesting arguments that could be very valid! I've never heard the repurposing comment before. We are sure learning that with manufacturing space that has moved off-shore in the past few years. Glouchester Industrial Estates in Langley current had millions of square feet of space that must somehow be repurposed.
Corey Newcomb If Glouchester was built in 1900 it would be converted into loft apartments!
For those of you that don’t know, Glouchester is located by the 264th Street interchange on Highway 1. It is an industrial park in the middle of the Agricultural Land Reserve with no transit or housing nearby. When you look at many pre-World War II neighbourhoods, they have a great ability to be renewed and transformed. They can be called sustainable because the buildings and infrastructure don’t need to be razed; the ultimate in reuse! There is also a movement to retrofit 1950’s suburbia and turn dead malls into mixed-used regional centres, we can call this recycling. But, what will come of 1980’s to percent business parks? What will come of places like Glouchester? We will simply abandon them or can they be transformed?

I think that places like Glouchester might be turned back to nature, but other areas might be different if they are close to regional transit corridors. What do you think? Could places like Glouchester have a second life?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gloucester is the correct spelling.

I used to travel between Vancouver and Abbotsford regularly and for years the site was nothing more than a sign at the side of the freeway. It always struck me as a really strange place for an industrial park. Eventually something was built that could be seen from the road, but feeling of it being out of place never disappeared.

It's not even well served by the SRY so there isn't much hope for it as a housing estate.