Stanley Park

Stanley Park is the first and largest urban park located in the borders of downtown in Vancouver. Before the British colonized the British Columbia, indigenous people were the users of this land. Later in 1886 was when the city incorporated it into a park. Stanley Park is a unique urban park because it promotes the use of urban space and evolution of a forest. The park is an environmental-friendly place for many people to go to as entertainment. It is also a place that is easy to access since it is close to downtown and has many different forms of transportation that will take you to the park. Going on a trip to see the formation of this park can help us to better understand how the city of Vancouver plans the urban areas of this place when doing its construction. Stanley Park also provides sustainability to the city since it promotes evolution and ecology. The park today serves as one of the famous tourist attractions that promotes a healthy environment to the city.

I am most excited to go and see this park. Besides from the beautiful scenery and the fresh air that the park provides, I also want to see how it successfully attracts so many tourists. I want to see the structure and formation of the park and how it is designed to preserve its sustainability. My goal for this trip is to explore as many of these urban spaces in the city. From this trip to Vancouver and Seattle, we can observe and collect many ideas and concepts on how cities are planned and how urban spaces work in other cities, and perhaps bring back and implement some of them into our own city of San Francisco. I think that it is very important to improve the overall environment and space usage in our city, thus meanwhile improving our community as a whole. Besides from my own personal interest into urban studies and planning, Campaign Academy has somehow taken a role on developing this interest for me. Because in Campaign, we discuss about issues that are relevant to striving for a better community and community advocacy. These issues are ones that exist citywide and also are a factor of how the city was developed. Urban planning is one main factor in city development, and I’m looking forward to learn more about this topic through this trip to Seattle and Vancouver.



-Shirley Tsang

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