Ringing cowbells and cheering on strangers who were out for their morning exercise sounded like good fun so that’s what Robyn Chan and a handful of her friends did Saturday morning along the Stanley Park seawall.
It was one of Chan’s big ideas for her contribution to the Vancouver portion of the 100in1Day festival, which was held for the second time in this city as part of a national community-building movement based around random merriment.
Chan, who is also the project lead for 100in1Day in Canada and works for the local branch of Evergreen, a not-for-profit environmental group specializing in livable cities, is pleased with the way Vancouver has taken to holding individual projects (or, as the group likes to call them, “interventions”) as a way of taking one small action to improve the city.
“It’s really great. The ideas are anything and everything — it’s anything that brings about positive change,” she said. “It’s really a social experiment.”
Residents in Vancouver and in other areas of the Lower Mainland participated by leading their own events that, Chan said, help transform the way people interact with the city. Some had stronger messages than others. Stacey Forrester and
Sarah Foot set up the Admiration Station at the Mount Pleasant Library where the idea was to compliment a stranger in a respectful manner. Others, such as the Silent Disco at Grandview Park where anybody could show up, sync playlists on their phones or MP3 players, throw on some headphones and dance, was about community connection. Others, still, were historically and environmentally motivated such as the informative walk on St. George Street where a historic stream, one of many paved over as Vancouver grew, still flows underneath. The walk was lead by women who are part of Lost Rivers Vancouver, St. George Rainway Project and the False Creek Watershed Society.
“We want to use rainwater to bring life back to cities,” said landscape architect Sarah Primeau before walking down the street with the group that held long stretches of blue fabric between them to represent a stream.
100in1Day started three years ago in Bogotá, Columbia, when some students were asked to come up with six ways to promote civic engagement. While brainstorming ideas over beer, the students decided to tackle 100 instead, which, miraculously, ended up being 250. The idea spread to other cities around the globe and Metro Vancouver jumped on board with 83 events in different neighbourhoods last year. That figure grew to 105 this year.
It wasn’t just individual participants, either. One of the stations that worked up an all-day buzz was the Kensington branch of the Vancouver Public Library where the mechanical clacking of typewriter keys springing onto paper was enough to stop passersby. Much fuss has been made of the innovation lab and other technological advances at the central library of late, but there’s a tactile appeal to old-fashioned typing which falls somewhere between pen and parchment and letters electronically imprinted on dot-matrix paper.
“We’re promoting high-tech stuff but that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for this,” said Sarah Green, the VPL employee responsible for rounding up the three typewriters outside the library in a temporary living room featuring her own furniture from home.
“People have been expressing all day that they love how the typewriter sounds. It’s using a lot of senses and it sounds comforting.”
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