Design will need to trump residents’ fears and perceptions of change

Bob Ransford
Sun

Recreating Vancouver’s downtown is one part of the puzzle in creating a new urban reality in the region.

Two back-to-back residential building booms over the last 15 years have certainly gone a long way to completing that important part of the puzzle.

But now the real heavy lifting starts for planners, developers, politicians and ordinary citizens.

The new challenges are many in securing our superb quality of life and ensuring that urban growth does not strangle our natural environment.

But they are different challenges than those that were tackled over the last few decades. Growth is changing and so is the canvas on which the picture of the metropolitan region is painted.

Vancouver’s two departing senior planners, Ann McAfee and Larry Beasley, listed up a few of them recently at a public forum where they recounted their thirty years plus helping shape Vancouver from their lofty positions at city hall.

Both agreed that the challenge of transforming the city’s first-ring suburbs will be a priority challenge for their successor heading Vancouver’s planning department.

Rather than focusing on the glamorous challenge associated with high-rise signature projects on empty parking lots and old commercial properties in the downtown core, the future focus will be to the south in Vancouver’s first-ring suburbs.

Much time will be spent on smaller infill projects, painstakingly consulting neighbourhood residents who fear change in any form–whether a conversion of a single-family lot to a duplex site or the entire re-development of a once sleepy local shopping plaza into a mixed-use centre.

Neighbourhoods like Oakridge, Kerrisdale, Hastings Sunrise, Main Street, Marpole and many others have the capacity to absorb more growth while becoming complete communities.

But how complete will those communities become?

The real challenge will be one of design. Design will need to trump residents’ fears and perceptions of change.

McAfee sagely pointed out that change in these neighbourhoods will need to bring not just new forms of housing, but a whole range of community amenities so that residents will be able to calculate the net community gain brought by change.

Contrast these challenges with the work of transforming Vancouver’s downtown. Remaking the downtown seems easy in comparison.

The transformation of Vancouver’s downtown peninsula over the last two decades likely represents one of the most significant achievements in re-making a North American inner-city.

We doubled our downtown population from about 40,000 to more than 80,000 people while most other North American cities are still struggling to stop the flight to the suburbs.

It was made easier in Vancouver because of the scale of a few big projects, their location and their past uses.

The north shore of False Creek would never have become the Yaletown inner-city residential neighbourhood that it is today if the provincial government hadn’t acquired a huge chunk of the land from the CPR and assembled other smaller parcels from a patch-work of industrial land owners prior to Expo 86 and then sold it as one huge site to Li Ka Shing.

Coal Harbour was also a brownfield re-development site with CPR’s Marathon Realty completing the master plan for the transformation of the old port-side rail yard into a spectacular high density waterfront neighbourhood.

Vancouver also had a beautiful shoreline with untapped potential, a huge wilderness oasis at the edge of the downtown–Stanley Park–and the Downtown Eastside as, unfortunately, a dumping ground for what’s left of the gritty industries and those forms of housing many other neighbourhoods won’t accept.

Larry Beasley rightly pointed to the Downtown Eastside as one of a few failures during his watch, albeit a huge failure.

We don’t often think of the contributing role this district played, to the detriment of the people who live in it, as the rest of Vancouver’s downtown became shiny and polished.

Tackling the tough challenges of this special district–challenges mainly man-made as most are–also must remain a top priority as Vancouver looks ahead to the next two decades of the new urbanism.

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. Contact him at [email protected]

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

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