From 2022 to 2025, the City of Vancouver hosted public consultation sessions for the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan, a long-term framework guiding how this area of East Vancouver, with Still Creek at its centre, will grow in the next 25 years.
In February 2025, during the final open houses for the Plan, community members were invited to help create Waterways Cultureways: Vision Felt – a collaborative needle-felt artwork imagining the future of culture and ecology along Still Creek.
This project, led by Carmen Rosen, built on the story of Still Moon’s 2023 Community Vision Felt, this time focussing in on how water, culture, nature, and city life might come together at the heart of the Rupert-Renfrew Station Area.
Around Still Creek, dense urban neighbourhoods are growing and changing. Well-designed greenspaces beside the creek can offer many benefits at once: they create wildlife habitat, places for recreation and exercise, spaces for gathering, culture, and events, cool refuges from summer heat, protection from flooding, and support for mental wellbeing.
Through Waterways Cultureways: Vision Felt, residents were invited to imagine how these kinds of creekside greenspaces could feel and function in the future – as welcoming spaces for both people and more-than-human life.
At each open house, a large prepared felt mural was set up on tables in the centre of the room. Community members of all ages were invited to sit down, pick up wool and needles, and needle-felt their own images and symbols of creekside habitats, cultural spaces, and neighbourhood life.
Facilitating artists and environmental educator Connelly Stirling supported participants, offering guidance, conversation, and inspiring reference images. The original Community Vision Felt piece was displayed nearby to show how many individual contributions can come together as one shared artwork.
Community felting took place alongside the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan open houses at Thunderbird Community Centre, Sunrise Community Hall, and the Italian Cultural Centre.
The Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan was approved by the Vancouver City Council on July 8, 2025,
You can visit the 2023 Community Vision Felt page to learn about the first project that inspired this new chapter, including the story of how we sourced and prepared the felt’s base layer from sheep farmed on Barnston Island in the Fraser River estuary.
