Has our focus on creating a modern metropolis distorted our vision of a “complete community”? It seems as though our objective of creating a better living environment in the Lower Mainland is largely focused on developing a more diverse range of housing opportunities, while at the same time creating higher quality, more welcoming public spaces.

The focus on these twin goals is beginning to threaten another essential component of a complete community — places where people work.

Vancouver city Coun. Sam Sullivan sounded the alarm bell on this subject a few weeks ago when he pointed to the amount of industrial land in Vancouver that has been converted to residential uses in recent years.

According to Vancouver‘s Planning Department, about 1,600 acres of industrially zoned land remains within the city today, down from 2,570 acres that were zoned and largely used for industrial purposes in 1960.

You only need to look at a few of the largest urban re-development projects in the city to quickly grasp the essence of Sullivan’s warning.

Start in the stunning Coal Harbour neighbourhood, where waterfront residential towers occupy the rail yards and docklands once dominated by the CPR and every kind of industry related to international shipping and rail transport.

Move to False Creek– the historic home to a full range of heavy industries that lined the shores on both sides of what is now one of the most beautiful urban waterways in the world surrounded by dense inner-city housing and a public continuous waterfront walkway.

Then there is the old Carling O’Keefe Brewery site in Kitsilano, a large industrial site now home to a mixed-use neighbourhood that is slowly expanding south along Arbutus Street.

The Canadian White Pine mill site in the southeast corner of the city on the shores of the Fraser River is currently in the active planning stage for re-development.

There’s the Finning tractor site on Great Northern Way, now home to an emerging multi-institute post-secondary education campus.

The list goes on and on and it isn’t just restricted to the City of Vancouver.

Richmond has seen a huge transformation of its once industrial waterfront in Steveston to accommodate popular new high density housing. Maple Ridge, Fort Langley, North Vancouver –they’ve all recently converted large industrial sites to new residential neighbourhoods.

It is unpopular to argue with the kind of urban renewal that takes what most view as bleak and often polluted waterfront areas and transforms them into naturally beautiful, active public places. I’ve advocated many times in the recent past for development that activates our waterfronts and invites people to enjoy gathering and interacting with each other and with the environment.

But we often forget that job-creating industries originally located on places like waterfronts because that is where they needed to be.

We also often forget that Greater Vancouver is the hub that supports a resource-based economy that still dominates most of rural British Columbia. That resource-based economy relies upon the transportation sector and many heavy industries for its survival. The Greater Vancouver area provides that lifeline.

It is trendy to talk about transforming our city so that it can adapt to the “new economy” and the “information age”, which really means relegating the ugly, noisy, heavy industries and resource-based processing to cheaper land further away from the city.

It means creating squeaky-clean, quiet passive places devoid of things like noisy float planes and smelly exhausts from diesel engines on trucks and tugs.

But, it also means creating places where the only jobs are service-oriented jobs and likely in much lesser numbers than those created by durable-goods-producing industries.

Complete communities are places where people can live, shop, play and yes, in most cases, work.

We need to ensure that our focus on creating a better living environment keeps in sight the need to develop a complete community.

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with Counterpoint Communications Inc. He specializes in urban development issues. He is a former real estate developer and serves as a director of the Urban Development Institute — Pacific region.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005