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Although it stands in the shadow of the controversial Woodward’s development, the W2 Community Media Arts centre hopes its outreach work will help temper the problems of a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. Inset: Executive Director Irwin Oostindie.

Photo Credit: Doug Shanks

The controversial Woodward’s site, located near Hastings Street between Cambie and Abbott, has existed in a state of flux for years. Standing between the Downtown Eastside and Gastown — both rapidly changing neighbourhoods — the future of the block that once housed the historic Woodward’s department store has, for many, been symbolic of the future of the city itself. Like most major changes to Vancouver’s landscape, it has seen its share of growing pains, from the housing squats in 2002 to the day in September 2006 when the original building was demolished.

Now, with the 2010 Winter Games serving as the unofficial (and fast-approaching) deadline for construction in the city, and with big-box grocery and drug stores set to open at the Woodward’s site in a matter of weeks, years of planning are finally reaching tangible results.

Meanwhile, across the street, Irwin Oostindie’s work for the past five years is also coming to a head in the form of W2 Community Media Arts, an ambitious and multi-faceted art, media, and community centre that’s already played host to a wide range of events such as the Heart of the City Festival, the Fresh Media conference, and a Downtown Eastside photography exhibit. A sleep-deprived Oostindie met with WE last week, in the midst of hectic negotiations and final planning, to talk about W2’s progress to date.

“Woodward’s will only work if W2 works,” says Oostindie, who is the centre’s executive director. “And while there’s cynicism in some quarters of the Downtown Eastside towards Woodward’s — that it’s a retail giant and market housing — in reality, W2 is taking on the responsibility of making sure that Woodward’s isn’t alienating to Downtown Eastside residents. It’s a responsibility we carry very heavily.

“It’s also the policy framework W2 is working on to advance and to ensure that, 20 years from now, we have existing populations that are still intermingled in the Woodward’s complex, and that we don’t suffer the fate of Plaza of Nations or the Roundhouse Plaza, which became controlled by either market forces or strata councils.”

Prior to his role with W2, Oostindie worked as the communications director for the Roundhouse Community Centre, with the City of Vancouver as a senior community planner for the Downtown Eastside, and, most recently, as the executive director of Gallery Gachet. His experience with the Roundhouse in its formative years, he says, helped shape his thinking about how to develop W2, particularly within the context of the Roundhouse’s successes and failures.

“It’s about bringing many voices together, and the Roundhouse is a community piece of civic infrastructure, so W2 is very much the same way,” he says. “It’s a piece of communication infrastructure that empowers residents to access creative technology, and those residents may be Downtown Eastside residents, those residents may be citywide. It’s very much like a wired community centre.”

W2 will also take to the streets in the form of the two-year-old Fearless City mobile project, which aims to provide video and online technology with which Downtown Eastside residents can communicate to audiences in their neighbourhood, across the city, and around the world. During the Olympics, W2 will serve as a digital media space, giving Downtown Eastside residents the opportunity to share their experiences of the Games — good or bad — with a global audience. “Fearless City is the mechanism where residents can be engaged in telling their own stories around their own personal experiences. And for some, that will be critical, and for some, that will be celebratory,” Oostindie says.

For now, W2’s online membership and presence in the city’s independent arts scene is continuing to grow, with 628 members on the official website (CreativeTechnology.org) and 550 members on the W2 Facebook group.

For Oostindie, it’s a project he hopes will contribute positively to the city’s cultural and intellectual fabric. “I’m born and raised in Vancouver, so, for me, a place where we can re-imagine the future and deal with redress and cross-cultural dialogue issues — if W2 can contribute toward healing Vancouver’s past and imagining a socially inclusive future, then our work’s been done,” he says. “We can only walk the talk. If people are critical of W2 by lumping us into their opinion that Woodward’s is gentrifying, then we’re either not doing a good enough job or they’re not hearing our story.”

http://www.westender.com/articles/entry/new-media-centre-hopes-to-empower-troubled-community/news-and-views/