William Boei
Sun
CREDIT: Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun Johnny Carline, chief administrative officer of the GVRD.
Greater Vancouver has to embrace sustainable development standards quickly before its remaining land that can be developed is lost to urban sprawl, according to a University of B.C. landscape design expert.
The situation is urgent because metropolitan Vancouver’s population is forecast to double from two million to four million by mid-century, said Patrick Condon, who heads UBC’s James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Livable Environments.
Regional government officials are already sold on shifting to green development principles, but they anticipate the process may take 30 years or more. By then, Condon said, it might be too late.
“The stakes are so high,” he said. “The Vancouver area is a very fragile landscape with not a lot of extra land to waste. We’re clearly on the verge of running out of land.”
Urban sprawl North American-style usually takes the form of subdivisions strung along arterial roads.
The subdivisions tend to be so spread out they are difficult to serve with public transit. Nothing is within walking distance, so suburbanites drive everywhere, creating traffic congestion, air pollution and health problems.
And so much land is paved that the soil can no longer absorb all the rainfall, resulting in lowland flooding.
Condon lobbies for a development model that includes denser subdivisions with smaller lots, narrower roads, various amenities — such as shopping, recreation and public transit — within walking distance, and enhanced drainage engineering to prevent flooding.
Many of those principles are being incorporated in the experimental East Clayton subdivision being built in Surrey. Condon helped to design it.
But Johnny Carline, chief administrator of the Greater Vancouver Regional District, said it may take decades before such principles become the region’s development standards.
Carline said he expects green principles to take hold more quickly in individual buildings, especially commercial and multi-family residential buildings “starting to implement new sustainable technology that maximizes and optimizes the use of energy, recycles energy and recycles water.”
The GVRD also favours using more natural drainage instead of massive storm sewer systems, and other principles being used in the East Clayton subdivision, Carline said.
Condon said he’s happy the GVRD embraces sustainable development principles, but argued that the way subdivisions are developed should be a higher priority.
“We have only a short amount of time to get the site development side right, if we go from two million to four million people within the next 40 or 50 years,” he said.
“If we don’t get the pattern right at first, it’s almost impossible to come in and retro-fit the pattern of the suburbs later. It’s much easier to retro-fit buildings than to retro-fit street designs.
“So I feel some degree of urgency for the priority of getting basic community design elements in order as soon as possible, such that the next two million people come into communities … which don’t require over-dependence on the automobile forever, and that can be served with transit, and that have modest impact on the surrounding ecology.”
There could be a public debate on such issues starting this fall.
The GVRD has been reviewing its long-term development plans, including its two-year-old Sustainable Region Initiative. This fall, it plans to introduce proposals that may include a model bylaw for municipal governments to adopt.
Green development principles are being explored, Carline said, while cautioning that it’s early in the process.
Condon countered that Greater Vancouver is already North America’s leader in sustainable development projects. Of the four most advanced projects in Canada and the U.S., three are located here:
– East Clayton.
– UniverCity, a community of 1,800 homes, mainly condominiums, apartments and townhouses, being built on Burnaby Mountain next to the Simon Fraser University campus.
– False Creek, a planned development on former industrial lands south of downtown Vancouver that will include the 2010 Winter Games Olympic Village.
The fourth project is located at Coffee Creek Ind.
“There is absolutely no question that British Columbia is leading North America in exploring these options to standard models,” Condon said.
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