Vancouver is what some people call the perfect city, from the tall, glimmering buildings of downtown, all the way to the forested mountains of North Vancouver and everything in between. But no city is perfect. Vancouver has it’s own fair share of ‘sins’. In this project we are focusing on all of those, we were out in groups for the different kinds of problems. My group of Aiden and Kate were part of the city growth group.

The way we decided this was a vote we took after going to the Museum of Vancouver (MOV). After visiting the museum we took a poll that asked about what our preferred topic was and what in the museum inspired us. I chose the growth of the city, I was inspired by an exhibit about the different views of objects, and the main object that appealed to me was a Lamborghini Aventador engine.

This by itself is relatively impressive, but I was impressed by how there was two sides: what the engine can do, the 6.5 litre, V12 engine, only weighing 235 kg. The other side was how the number of cars like this had doubled in the past few years.

So we had our topic, but it was still very broad, Vancouver had grown in so many ways since the interwar years all the way until now. That is the timeline we were working with, from in-between the two world wars and now. We noticed after all three of us living here our whole lives and through research that no matter what Vancouver is doing, what’s happening inside, and whose here, people are always coming here. In the interwar years tis was based around the forestry industry, now it is more around the general economy, the port, and perhaps the largest is tourism. With more than 9 million people visiting the city each year, it’s doing just fine in the area.

We wanted our podcast o follow the economic booms that Vancouver has experienced, why these booms happen, and why people always love the city. We did a lot of research on these things and then we formed a script around this, and we had some good evidence, but we needed an outside opinion. So we interviewed Tobin Postma, Director of Strategic Issues in Vancouver. His answers were very strong and he elevated our podcast to a professional level, and also his voice sounded really good on the podcast.

Below is the podcast that we made.

This is not the only thing that we did. We also read a book in our groups that related to our topic, so our group, a group about city growth and economy. We were given The International Bank of Bob, a book about finance and world economy. I didn’t really enjoy the story of the book, it was a bit of a compilation of short stories that could’ve had their own book. But, I did understand how it related to our topic of economic growth.

The International Bank of Bob

Throughout this book we wrote a series’s of reading responses. We do these quite often in PLP, but in this one we didn’t have a strong many guidelines as we have in the past, this one was more of just a paragraph about our opinions of the book. These were written every week for 4 weeks; so we had 4 reading responses.

The next part of this project was the behind the scenes video, this was to show what we did to make the video, where we went and showed where and how it was interviewing our featured person. The fist video that is below is our first draft that we revised before this post was out.

The most common critique that all groups got on all videos was that we included a little bit too much about the museum, and not enough about the project, so we revised later for the second video draft. This draft is currently being finished up and it should be in this blog post before Christmas.

The final part of this project was an essay that was directly about Vancouver’s ‘Sins of the City’ we each individually wrote an essay that was formatted like a letter to our local MP, Terry Beech. We wrote these about a problem that we think he can fix. My group wrote our essays about the problem with vehicle congestion in heavy areas of tourism, especially Deep Cove, and how we could fix it. Below is my essay first draft.

As you can see, Ms Maxwell had a lot to say about my essay, so after a couple of revisions, here is the final draft of my argumentative essay/letter.

Then as a group we took all of our ideas and combined them into one letter to M

This unit really was a large experience of learning, I definitely learned a lot about the “Sins of the City,’ in a city that in my opinion was perfect. Not just learning about the economic problems now and in the past, but also hearing other groups projects. I learned a lot about indigenous rights, environmentalism, passive housing, and a lot more problems with our beautiful city.