Wikipedia Wednesday: Vancouverism

When I first moved here, I noticed that certain things were very different from what I was used to.  Buildings, in particular, were not like buildings in other cities.  There were also no freeways, or even anything resembling a freeway (Calgary only has one freeway technically speaking, but plenty of other roads that are somewhere between a freeway and a major road).

Until recently I didn't know this was a specific style of city planning.  It's called Vancouverism.

Vancouverism is an urban planning and architectural technique pioneered in Vancouver, Canada. It is characterized by mixed-use developments, typically with a medium-height, commercial base and narrow, high-rise residential towers to accommodate high populations and to preserve view corridors.  With a large residential population living in the city centre, no expressways connecting the core to the suburbs, and significant reliance on mass public transit, Vancouver is somewhat unique among large North American cities. In part, these reasons contribute to the fact that it is consistently ranked among the most livable cities in the world.  Other cities have begun to take note of the principles of Vancouverism and have begun to incorporate this approach in their own planning directions.

Basically, there are three core components of Vancouverism:

1. High-density, mixed-use developments near the city centre.
2. Mass transit instead of freeways.
3. Preservation of view corridors.

There are tons of examples of the first one.  One Wall Centre is a Sheraton hotel for the first 27 floors, a Club Intrawest Resort on the middle three floors, and condos on the top 18 floors.  A building a block from my office has a Save On Foods, a Home Depot, and several smaller shops on the bottom, a Winners/Homesense above that, and about five or six floors of condos on top.  Next door to that is a similar building featuring a Canadian Tire and a Best Buy on the lower floors.  These developments have managed to squeeze a ton of living space and retail space into two city blocks.  Back in Calgary, all of the above would occupy half a neighbourhood.

The second one is pretty evident to anyone who looks at a map of the city.  As you can see, there are definitely freeways in the Metro Vancouver area, but notice how they all either bypass Vancouver proper (Highway 1), or abruptly terminate at its border (Highway 99).  If you want to drive into downtown, you have to take the surface streets, usually Oak or Granville coming off the 99, or Hastings or 1st Avenue coming off the 1.

In the 1960's, the big trend in urban planning was to build massive freeway systems that enabled automobile traffic to drive rapidly from downtown to the suburbs.  The reasoning was that with fast roads, traffic would move quickly and efficiently.  Anyone who's driven on a freeway in rush hour traffic knows this theory turned out to be complete bull honkey.  Urban planners assumed that traffic was like a liquid; when unimpeded, it would flow freely and quickly around the city.  In reality, traffic is more like a gas; it expands to fill the space it is given.  When driving from the suburbs to downtown becomes the easiest commuting option, two things happen: more people move to the suburbs, and more people drive from the suburbs to downtown.  Humans are, above all else, greedy and lazy, and will always take the easiest and cheapest option available to them.  Thus, big freeways in the 60's quickly translated to big traffic in the 70's and beyond.

So, to whom do we owe Vancouver's lack of freeways?  In large part, the Chinese community.  In the middle of the 20th Century, a proposal to build an elevated expressway between downtown and the Second Narrows Bridge would have resulted in the demolition of large sections of Chinatown.  The local Chinese, joined by white people concerned about the issue, protested the freeway en masse.  The result: Chinatown was declared a historical district in 1971, and the freeway plan was quashed forever.  All that remain of it are the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, which run the short distance from downtown to Clark Drive.  The city never again raised the issue of freeway construction.

As for the third part of Vancouverism, the prevalence of excellent sight lines should be evident to anyone who has ever visited here.  What most people are not aware of, however, is that the visibility of the North Shore Mountains is legislated.

One principle of Vancouverism involves protecting "view corridors". Vancouver's "View Protection Guidelines" were approved in 1989 and amended in 1990, establishing height limits to protect views of the North Shore Mountains. This approach, while credited with preserving the city's scenic backdrop, has been criticized for lessening visual interest and failing to represent the city's contemporary image. In response, Council commissioned a "Skyline Study" in 1997 which concluded that Vancouver's skyline would benefit from the addition of a handful of buildings exceeding current height limits, to add visual interest to Vancouver's skyline.

Basically, the criticism was that by restricting the height of downtown buildings, Council created a situation where every downtown building was roughly the same height (about 30 floors).  This made for some nice views of the mountains, but made downtown look like a huge glass and concrete monolith.

The most notable of the aforementioned handful of buildings is the moronically named Living Shangri-La.  And guess what ... it's a mixed use building!

This month, a lot of people from around the world are going to experience Vancouverism first hand.  I wonder if any of them will take the ideas created here back to their home cities.  More than likely, they will just sit stewing in traffic on Granville and wonder why the hell the freeway suddenly ended.