Carole Jolly is a 20 year veteran of campus planning who immigrated to BC from Ontario in 1999 to study planning.
Jolly, originally from Ontario, graduated with an honours degree in geography from the University of Guelph.
"I always had an affinity and affection for urban spatial issues and land use planning but quite didn't know how to define it," said Jolly.
She moved out to B.C. in 1999 after a road trip across Canada and eventually found herself in Vancouver. Shortly thereafter, she completed her master's degree in urban planning here which led to working at UBC focussing on transportation and land management initiatives. That role evolved into transportation planning and she has been in her current position since this unit was established” (The Ubyssey, March 19, 2015).
I first met Carole when she was working in the UBC transportation office in the early 2000s. Later she and I both served as Directors on the UNA Board (she appointed, I an elected resident Director). Carole remains a University appointed observer on the UNA Board.
Carole and I met late January 2023 on the patio outside the Sauder School of Business to talk campus projects. Carole had selected three projects that highlighted some of her work during her years at UBC. They were UPass, activating the public realm, and how to re-emerge public programming and work coming out of COVID.
UPass
Carole began with UPass, a project that started her UBC career.
The UPAss was a very big deal. It was at the early part of my career, and it was such a big project that involved multiple stakeholders, varied interests, and with such an important outcome. … being part of that project was really something that I reflect on and was a big part of the early part of my career.
“That was a big shift in campus practices,” I commented. Transforming transportation practices allowed UBC to downsize surface parking lots, essentially free them for housing, and get more people into transit. This seems to mostly have affected students though, I suggested.
Carole agreed that students were the biggest cohort that was impacted by the UPass. She went on to explain the process and the benefit of the transit transformation.
It took several years of conversations and negotiations. I first became attuned to the notion of a UPass program when I was doing my Master's program here at SCARP. We had done a trip down to University of Washington as a mini exchange program. The topic that we were studying was transportation. We met with faculty at UW and we learned about their UPass program. Through that conversation I learned that there was interest from UBC in modelling a similar program here after the UW program on the principles of equitable access and subsidized transit pass for students. So I came back to campus with an interests in learning more about this. And then through those conversations, met Gord Lovegrove (then UBC Director of Transportation), learned about the Strategic Transportation Plan, got engaged in that and started contributing to the development of the UPass program.
UPass created this culture of transit ridership loyalty. Even when students graduate. The bus maybe the only thing that they know, their primary mode of transportation, because it's easy, it's affordable, it's accessible, and then when they graduate, it's just a seamless transition to continue to use transit if they're in the city.
Another big part of the program was seeing it implemented in the Okanagan. I had a big part of that initiative, and I took all the experience from here. It's a different context [at UBC-O]. You're dealing with BC transit. You're dealing with a different student body. It's a different sort of climate in terms of people’s appetite for transit. So it was an entirely different process [than at UBC-V], but many parallels in terms of the principles and interests we were trying to advance. Again, another success story. So you see, once it's in, UPass serves its purpose and continues to provide a good experience for the students.
Harvest Feast and Activating the Public realm
Next big project was activating the public realm. As we shifted off the UPAss Carole said “the other of area that I appreciate getting to be a part of is the activation of our public realm spaces.” In about 2013 the University had completed major infrastructure and landscape investments along University Boulevard and Main Mall.
I laughed and said the busses used to come right by here, in fact the bookstore was a bit down the street from where we were sitting. There was a cafe there, called the Bus Stop Cafe, right into the late 1980s.
Carole picked up the thread:
“one of the biggest transformations has been Main Mall where it was once a sad looking roadway. Now it's this great pedestrian spine across the campus. After those investments were made in the public realm, we saw the transformation of the public realm space. There was a real strategic focus on leveraging the public realm spaces and breathing life into them somehow through programming and partnerships and looking at opportunities for encouraging people to see this space as their own and use it for opportunities for social connections, interactions. Getting to be a part of the team that looks at those opportunities and working across the campus with different groups to breathe life into these spaces and animate and activate the spaces has been really great to be a part of my work. I'll give you some examples of some of the stuff that we've done over the past several years. Harvest Feast - that's one of our favourite events.”
“We've had to sort of damper down [these events] with COVID. We'll explore opportunities for reimagining what that might look like in the future. But it is remarkable to have 1000 people sit down and enjoy a meal together; that in part uses ingredients from our farm. In all these circumstances, to me, the measure of success is not necessarily the number of people, but it's the number of interactions between students, staff, faculty, youth. It's like this real opportunity for our communities to come together and share an experience that might not otherwise happen. I love being part of that. I love what the outcomes of those interactions could be or might be.”
“Some other example that I love has been our Chef Challenge. That's another event that we've done in Thunderbird Commons [at Thunder Blvd & Main Mall]. Again, that's been dampered down because of COVID.”
“There's something so special about community celebrations.”
“I think that's sort of what I'm what I'm talking about too. I think it's just this community is so diverse. There's so many opportunities for bringing people together and we have this beautiful setting.”
“Beyond the events, it's things like this C-shore Pavilion right here that was another sort of tactical place making initiative that we did in partnership with the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, through the SEEDS program. The wood was taken from a construction site in south campus. It has been designed so that when it is decommissioned the wood can be repurposed into something like, for example, planter boxes.”
“It's these creative opportunities that we get to see come to life on campus. Seeing the lights strung across Main Mall like that has an impact on people's dreary walk down Main Mall.”
“I think all these little sort of interventions can help give people connection to the place and the space they are in. It might change it in some way and make people feel more connected, more safe, more a part of the community.”
Coming out from COVID
Our conversation ended with a reflection on the impact the pandemic has had on social connectivity - both in our work places and in the wiser social realm.
“The team and I,” said Carole, “have been thinking a lot about how we re-emerge. And I don't want to say post COVID, it's not the right word because we're not out of COVID, but in a post peak COVID world.”
“One of the things that I noticed when we first entered the Zoom era, early days of COVID, was how the nature of our meetings and conversations changed. Everyone has the same size of box, everyone has the same amount of space around them, and there's a sort of equality to that. Many of us were working from our living rooms with life happening in the background-a cat jumping up, a dog barking. There's a sort of personal connection that can come from that-- doing away with the formal nature of meetings. For me, this lasted for a short period of time, then I soon realized, for me, there is so much more value in connecting with people face to face. We need to balance that against the reality of what we're in right now and find ways to bring people along in terms of how we organize ourselves moving forward.”
“What does it mean for the work we do around space activation, around events, around bringing people together, and how we move forward. What does Harvest Feast look like in the future? What does Chef Challenge look like in the future? How do we create? Because I think there are so many more opportunities when people can connect in person. If you and I were doing this over Zoom, it wouldn't be as impactful or meaningful. We'd get it done. But it's just there's something about our human nature that it's less transactional when we're meeting face to face. How do we carry that into the work that we're doing and re-emerge out of this new reality that we're in and how does that impact the work that we're doing?”
Carole and the team are working that one out. I look forward to seeing what re-emerges with the animating and reactivating campus public realm for the diversity of our campus communities.