Putting People First: a dialogue on Vancouver’s public spaces (VIDEO)

Derek is the Principal of Urban Design at PWL Partnership and a LEED® Accredited Landscape Architect. He brings over twenty years of experience in community master planning, regenerative urban waterfronts, and public realm design across North America, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the Middle East. Serving as the creative lead on design teams at PWL, Derek focuses on innovative placemaking with a view to improve people’s overall health and quality of life. Derek’s infectious passion for innovation is grounded by extensive experience in design, public engagement and providing oversight in project implementation. His experience and ingenuity is evident in all scales of work, from large-scale master plans to custom details that celebrate a site’s unique character. Derek’s ability to quickly translate conceptual ideas into graphic form effectively bring ideas to life.

Jay Pitter, MES, is an award-nominated author and placemaker whose practice mitigates growing divides in urban centres. She spearheads institutional city-building projects, rooted in neighbourhood knowledge, focused on: cultural heritage interpretive planning, gender-based mapping, inclusive public engagement, safe streets and mobility, social planning, and healing fraught sites. She also shapes urgent city-building conversations through media platforms such as the Agenda and Canadian Architect—as a keynote speaker for organizations like UN Women and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—and as a knowledge producer in urban planning faculties across North America. Recently, Jay consulted on Edmonton’s new heritage plan; hosted a professional development luncheon for women city-builders in Detroit; initiated a safe and connected streets engagement following the mass shooting in Toronto, and led (RE)IMAGINING CHEAPSIDE, a Confederate monument placemaking process in Lexington. She is currently collaborating with cities across the world, working on the first phase of HER City (a public space initiative that explores how urban design and social attitudes impact women’s safety, leisure, and play), and writing Where We Live, which will be published by McClelland & Stewart at Penguin Random House.

John Bela is an Urban Designer focused on making cities for people. As a Partner and Director at Gehl, he works to synthesize public life and user experience data to enable citizens, governments, developers, corporations and institutions to make good choices regarding the design and creation of healthy, holistic and enduring places. John’s work ranges from long term public realm strategies, to masterplan frameworks and public space design. John comes to Gehl from leading the Rebar Art and DesignStudio, the creators of Park(ing)Day. He is a distinguished lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, and holds degrees in landscape architecture and environmental design, biochemistry, and sculpture.

Kelty McKinnon is a Landscape Architect and a Partner at PFS Studio. With over 20 years of professional experience, Kelty brings a diverse background in landscape architecture, art and ecology to all of the projects that she leads at PFS. Specializing in projects dealing with the public realm, she is committed to the creation of unique, innovative and meaningful public spaces that merge cultural, social, and environmental ecologies. Kelty has played a key role in several high profile public realm, waterfront and park projects including the international Toronto Harbourfront Competition for which PFS placed second, Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, Redmond Downtown Park in Washington, and the West Don Lands Public Realm Plan in Toronto. She writes extensively and broadly about landscape related phenomena- from sugar production and cultural landscapes, to hefted sheep, genetic mutation and urban bestiaries.