Artists, laypeople and kids helped build a green, densely populated, eastside neighborhood out of building blocks and plastic trees, in a project called Emergent Urgent, at FUSE, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s first all-night event, June 22-23.

Urban-planning sustainable design specialists Duane Elverum and Jérôme Bertrand used “community expertise” in their model of a future, green Vancouver.

“The population of Vancouver will double in the next 40 years,” said Elverum. “We have to somehow fit all of these people in and make it livable and sustainable, thinking about sunlight paths, green energy, and urban agriculture.”

On their model of the twenty blocks surrounding Main St. and 10th Ave in year 2050, Elverum and Bertrand daylighted Brewery Creek – meaning they would unearth an existing underground waterway that was filled in when the area was developed. They kept existing commercial space, but moved Main St. to accommodate for the creek.

They used wooden blocks to represent two 800-sq ft. apartments that could each accommodate a family, and invited designers, design students, artists, poets and gallery-goers to find a way to build them into attractive housing developments that could accommodate twice the area’s current population.

“It was encouraging to see there was so much interest in something to do with ideas of sustainability, the future of our world, the future of our cities. People really are interested, that’s amazing for me,” said Elverum, an assistant professor for sustainability and sustainable design at Emily Carr.

The structures built by people with training were incredible, he said. “You can really imagine living there, it’s very real and rich.”

“Whereas if you weren’t a designer, if you were just a lay person or if your profession was outside of the design or art world, you piece tended to be a little more fantastical, or free somehow.”

A great example of a fantastical design was a tall tower built by a ten-year old, which was “totally unpragmatic, but amazing and magical,” Elverum said.

Karling MacAskill is one of Elverum’s industrial design students at Emily Carr. “I thought it was funny that all the industrial design kids, their buildings didn’t look as whimsical as some of the guest’s buildings did,” she said. “We’re trained to be creative and experimental, but I really thought we were critical of our pieces, thinking about how practical each little block we placed might be, trying to apply the principles we learned at school.”

MacAskill thinks Vancouver’s city planners are too conservative. If in the future they’re more creative, she said, Vancouver might look like the Emergent Urgent model in forty years.

She tried to keep in mind sun exposure, green spaces, Vancouver’s beautiful views, and the idea of breaking down the barrier between exterior and interior when she designed her building.

The underling hypothesis for Emergent Urgent, the doubling of Vancouver’s population, is based on current demographic trends. While Canada’s birthrate is decreasing, rates in Africa, South America and China are “booming,” and the world population could spike to 9 or 10 billion by 2050, Elverum said. The project assumes Canada will continue an increasing trend of immigration.

“I can imagine that we will be encouraged to accommodate more and more people, by the world’s governments, and we can. We want to,” he said.

“The largest migration in human history is happening right now as people out of the rural areas and the farmlands move into cities, it’s astounding.”

Vancouver will have to deal with the slums that surround most of the world’s cities, Elverum said, but hopefully in a more controlled way.

Solving sustainability problems should involve a cross-cutting between disciplines, and that’s what Emergent Urgent represented, he said.

“The city engineers can’t solve the sustainability problems by themselves, or the politicians can’t, or people who are involved in sustainable technologies can’t–you sort of have to work together,” he said.

Emergent Urgent was about going into an art context, and giving “non-experts access to technical information and expertise,” Elverum said.

“You ask them to solve a problem, they’re brilliant.”