As an architect-advocate, I try to defend and implement community aspirations, which can often be at odds with the status quo.ĭS: The work that Sean and I do takes place within the Downtown Eastside. It’s a role that also incorporates the input of institutional stakeholders, and negotiates a path with the requirements of the regulatory system. I see my role as an advocacy planner-a community-based designer who takes the time to hear the stories. SM: As an architect, my work assists in explaining these stories and visualizing how they might manifest in real-world buildings and tenant improvements. It focuses on people’s experiences, their stories, the sense of meaning they derive from their community and their lives. This is a key part of the anthro-architectural approach that Sean and I have been working together on. To borrow a phrase from another medical anthropologist, Byron Good, while a physician might look at a patient as a site for disease, an anthropologist sees them as a site for story.ĭS: Stories give us a sense of profound experiences in people’s lives. My particular interest is the lived experience of healthcare and illness. Over the years, they asked me to be the architect on such wonderful projects as the supervised injection site, the Interurban arts centre on the Downtown Eastside, a bank for low-income folks, social enterprises like East Van Roasters, and an urban farm.ĭan Small: Medical anthropologists, like other anthropologists, study culture, but they focus on culture in healthcare. I was really struck by the social-serving activists who worked with the Portland, and began to collaborate with them on a number of projects.
Sean McEwen: I first met the principals of the Portland Hotel Society about 25 years ago, when I was working as an affordable housing activist in Vancouver. Here’s the story of their endeavours, in their own words.
A Downtown Eastside church expresses support for the local supervised injection site, whose operation was challenged by the federal government.įor over two decades, architect Sean McEwen and medical anthropologist Dan Small have been involved in designing and advocating for vulnerable populations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside-including North America’s first supervised injection site.
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