The following is a guest post written by Dr. Darren Peets, former student Board of Governors representative and campus planning aficionado. We invited Darren to offer a critical retrospective on campus planning procedures, and to offer a solution. Dr. Peets is currently working as a post-doc in Japan.
I was invited to write a short piece for UBC Insiders on the amenability of university campuses (campi, perhaps?) to physical planning exercises such as the current UBC Vancouver Campus Plan. While I’ve been on plenty of planning-related committees and have argued with plenty of planners, I don’t have a degree in planning, so there may be things I’ve overlooked, misunderstood, or oversimplified. I am, however, probably qualified by now to offer a curmudgeonly admonishment about how you people are getting it all wrong, how you should really do it, and how, back in my day, we had to carry the horse through five metres of snow to school and back, uphill both ways. I should also mention that I’m not known for being brief, but I’m occasionally sarcastic.
The first and most important thing to understand about university physical planning is where new buildings and public open space come from on a university campus (existing buildings require much less planning).