The suburbs are the most interesting places to watch these days. They’re where people are trying to create new forms of urban life — not the bedroom suburbs of yore, not the traditional cities of the past either. Something new, which no one quite knows what it will be.
My story in the Globe this week looks at how they’re trying to create new downtowns, often with not even so much as a historic old town centre to build from but just out of whole cloth. That prompts the question of, what is a downtown? What makes it work? What are all the pieces you need?
At the moment, too many of them consist of a few large towers or civic buildings next to a transit station and a mall. But they’re all at work trying to figure out how to fill in from there with smaller streets, more mid-rise buildings, more of the kind of variety that older towns naturally produce, where you can have an office building next to some dilapidated one-story building with a tattoo shop next to a historic old bank next to a cool new bar at the bottom of a condo tower.
Surrey and Mississauga in particular are pushing hard to transform themselves, in a time frame as short as two decades they’re hoping.
37 responses so far ↓
1 Joseph Jones // May 11, 2011 at 10:57 am
To kick start the process, the city is contemplating acquiring a whole block where it can direct the redevelopment and ensure there is room for quirky places.
That is exactly what the City of Vancouver has refused to do in Norquay planning. The 2400 Motel site was identified by the Norquay Working Group as the desired new “neighbourhood centre.” Planners said No and then proceeded to designate a one-mile strip along Kingsway instead.
(Neighbourhood Strip program, there is the real project in Norquay so far.)
The three-acre city-owned parcel that could provide a base for a real neighbourhood centre seems fated to satisfy little more than the financial return demands of the black-box Property Endowment Fund.
In Norquay, and in East Vancouver, it is all about facilitating a land rush — not at all about livability or sustainability.
2 MB // May 11, 2011 at 11:11 am
The Number One way to structure a city is through its transportation network. This has been dominated by roads in newer cities which cover a third to half its entire land base.
I commend Surrey for trying. They are only at the beginning of what could be a long process. Generally, though, cities across the world are increasingly aided by three trends: the fact that many are now so filled up with cars that alternatives are being funded more; the price of fuel which has been trending upwards for over a decade; and a younger generation that is less enamoured with the ubiquitous suburban model.
Peter Newman from Australia’s Curtin University cites new research in this area, and claims that the worldwide supply of car use peaked in 2004. We expect car use to increase especially in China and India, but the trend in their largest cities is instead toward mass transit. Shanghai, for example, built an extensive metro system that covers 80% of the city in only 10 years. That’s commitment for you.
What follows is an excerpt from a radio interview he gave this month in Perth.
“… we talk about hitting the Marchetti wall. Marchetti was the first to define that every city has a one-hour travel time budget, and if you can’t get to most destinations in one hour over an average for your travel time for the day, then you either move or you get very angry and the road rage settles into a political movement that defines elections. And that has been the limit, because we built cities around the car, which could go quicker and be more flexible, and for a while there we were keeping well within the Marchetti travel time budget, but we have gone over now. And most cities have hit the wall on freeways. They don’t work anymore. They’re absolutely jampacked at peak time, so it really needs a different sort of economic approach.
“And the reality is … it costs about $50 million [per kilometre] to build a lane of freeway today and pretty much the same to build a rail line, except the rail line will carry 8 to 20 times more people than that road will. So it doesn’t take long to recognise that the cities are going to fill very quickly with cars, and the only way around it is to get public transport going. So at the same time as this peak car use is happening, we are seeing dramatic increases in public transport. In Melbourne and Perth in the decade ’99 to 2009, 70% increase. In Brisbane, 50%. Sydney had just a few percent because it didn’t build anything new, every other city has been building it. And as soon as you build it, they come, because it’s a better way to get around, it’s quicker, and you are not stuck all day in the traffic.
“… there is a cultural change going on. Young people in particular are wanting more urban and less suburban. Densities are going up for the first time in hundreds of years. Dramatic change that the car and before that trains and trams did was to spread cities out and lower densities, it is now coming back in right across the world. So the cities have hit the wall on sprawl. Younger people, baby boomers like myself, are not particularly wanting to have the bigger block and long commutes in a car that is hardly moving. The change to living in areas that are more urban where they can have greater opportunities, where they can meet friends more easily and do the things that cities have always been about, that is a universal phenomenon, it’s called the ‘friends’ phenomenon as compared to the ‘father knows best’ phenomenon. And that change is documented and I think we are now seeing it reflected in the data.”
I hope Diane Watts is listening. Here’s the link:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3206293.htm
3 T Ian McLeod // May 11, 2011 at 11:14 am
Thanks for taking the time to look beyond Main Street, Frances. The question of how to create a suburban downtown is a puzzle indeed. Mayor Watts deserves credit for tackling the challenge in Surrey. Richmond is further ahead in building up its central business area around Westminster Highway and Number Three Road, although readers of this site are likely to point out a pile of flaws in the execution.
In modest and invisible Maple Ridge, my own home city, we are lucky to have the remnants of a central commercial area dating from the 1930s. Local government has made ongoing rhetorical and financial commitments to building a vibrant, diversified, pedestrian-friendly downtown on this foundation. The balance between decay and renovation has been improving ever so slowly in the past decade. However, the developers tell us that greenfields development is cheaper than infill, and the present Council is moving toward throwing the central business area overboard in favour of an Arizona-style highway-oriented supermall. (That’s not just a parking lot — it has potted plants!) C’est dommage.
4 MB // May 11, 2011 at 11:22 am
Transit-oriented development is also a key issue.
I suggest Surrey look to graduated surface rail (commuter + rapid transit in key corridors, and slower trams with dense stop frequency) and electric trolley buses where appropriate. But to also look seriously at humane urban design where transit streets and open spaces are given as much detailed design attention at the pedestrian scale as architectural facades on the better quality new buildings.
Low rise and mid rise on these streets with small urban houses and fee simple row houses at the edges could change the Surrey image forever, and for the good.
There also has to be an investment in public institutions and culture to fulfil the role of a stronger and well-defined public realm.
All this is a tall order, but it’s the key to success.
5 Joe Just Joe // May 11, 2011 at 11:41 am
My opinion is that any attempt to bypass organic growth is destined to fail. The city should create a vision and set the guidelines to realize that vision and then sit back and let it unfold on it’s own.
The problem is organic growth takes generations and not years and we have councils addicted to revenues.
6 Michelle // May 11, 2011 at 12:52 pm
To me this article sounds as another cheap follow up to Robertson &Vision laughable remarks that Vancouver is becoming or has become a ‘downtown’ rival to that of London, New York or Paris. LMAO. Maybe Frances you are in the wrong profession, and urban planning and design is not your forte, same as with the present council, mayor. Vision? LOL
7 IanS // May 11, 2011 at 1:12 pm
I’m not an expert or anything, but this quote really jumped out at me:
“To kick start the process, the city is contemplating acquiring a whole block where it can direct the redevelopment and ensure there is room for quirky places.”
Does anyone really believe that a municipal authority (or any gov’t entity, for that matter) can direct development so as to ensure there are “quirky” places? Isn’t gov’t direction / oversight pretty much the exact opposite of such a development?
IMO, the best any such entity can do is to create zoning or other guidelines which foster, or allow for, the growth of such a development. Quirky, or interesting, designs or developments evolve, IMO, they don’t come into being through gov’t intervention.
8 just a thought // May 11, 2011 at 1:22 pm
@IanS #7
well, if the City is serious, they could keep rents low to help those small funky local start-up businesses get established on the property they own…
as opposed to private land owners who will jack rents and hold out for the highest bidders because there is a whiff of potential gentrification and profit in the air.
just saying, Main Street got too cool and now the small independent local businesses who were the early catalysts for making Main Street a great place are starting to move on out as a result of rent increases. hopefully Main Street won’t become a victim of its own success… although the Tim Hortons at Broadway and Main might have been the first nail in that coffin.
9 Ternes // May 11, 2011 at 1:25 pm
In regard to the last few comments, I think Granville Island is a pretty instructive counterexample of a government planned space that managed to be a very successful pedestrian-focused area with lots of quirky shops, community amenities and mix of other things. Obviously it’s not a downtown, but it’s also not miles away from what Surrey is trying to do.
Growing up in the city with Granville Island always having been there, I had always assumed that it *had* developed organically until I read more about it a few years ago. So it can be done, it’s just hard to do, especially for governments overly dependant on developers and big commercial interests.
10 IanS // May 11, 2011 at 1:52 pm
@Ternes #8,
I stand corrected. Great example.
Like you, I grew up with GI pretty much in place, at least since I started living downtown. After reading your post, I checked out wikipedia and a couple of articles and I’ve had to revise my views.
In my experience, from traveling and from observing how gov’ts work, I remain of the view that gov’t success in this area is a relatively rare occurrence, and that organic development is far more likely to be successful. However, judging from GI, it’s clearly not impossible.
11 Frances Bula // May 11, 2011 at 2:13 pm
@Ian. Yes, I’ve heard all about the Albion Flats controversy, even here in distant Vancouver. It’s too bad, as Maple Ridge has, as you say, an original downtown to build on, one that will become valuable one day. Look at how Steveston and Fort Langley have parlayed their real original villages into becoming the locus for very attractive developments all around.
12 IanS // May 11, 2011 at 2:22 pm
@Just a Thought #8,
You write: “well, if the City is serious, they could keep rents low to help those small funky local start-up businesses get established on the property they own…”
That’s a possibility, but low rents benefit whatever entity’s renting the spot, be it the “quirky local business” or McDonald’s or whatever. So we end up in the same place, ie. the gov’t entity deciding who is sufficiently quirky to be included. That’s the process I’m skeptical of.
Perhaps a “Quirk Committee” could be struck, to determine which business is sufficiently “quirky” to be deserving of a rental break, or subsidy?
13 Roger Kemble // May 11, 2011 at 2:22 pm
“But they’re all at work trying to figure out how to fill in from there with smaller streets, more mid-rise buildings, more of the kind of variety that older towns naturally produce, where you can have an office building next to some dilapidated one-story building with a tattoo shop next to a historic old bank next to a cool new bar at the bottom of a condo tower.” They! Good luck . . .
MB 2 #4
“Transit-oriented development is also a key issue.” Also maybe . . . perhaps . . . but it is down the line after the “little place” has sprung to life! The key issue is incremental, small scale, ownership . . . and light hand regulation!
JJJ @ #5
“My opinion is that any attempt to bypass organic growth is destined to fail . . . organic growth.” Agree – implicitly – absolutely . . .
Ian S @ #7
“Quirky, or interesting, designs or developments evolve, IMO, they don’t come into being through gov’t intervention.” Agree Ian – implicitly – absolutely . . .
Ternes @ #8
“ Granville Island is a pretty instructive counterexample of a government planned space that managed to be a very successful pedestrian-focused area with lots of quirky shops, community amenities and mix of other things.”
Errrrr . . . ummmm . . . Granville Island was a slam-dunk, early 1970’s all-of-a-sudden, idea by Ron Basford, Liberal federal urban affairs minister, encouraged by deputy minister UA Peter Oberlander, managed by King Gagnon and somewhere egging ’em on our own Michael Geller.
There is no way quirky will come out of that melangé of heavy handed bureaucracy. We enjoy it because it’s all we’ve got.
Look carefully GI: to the east the huge sheds of ECU and parking: to the west, huge sheds of the market, Bridges and parking. Some small scale but nothing quirky! Nothing in that fandango to emulate!
I used to shop there but “Thu Drive” was more authentic: better selection and prices. The traffic was still madness!
The town centre we all have in our minds eye . . .
http://members.shaw.ca/urbanismo/two.little.places.pdf
. . . started with the Lady of the manor and as in time she lost control we love what we see today.
May I suggest They stop trying, keep out of the way, and just leave us to it.
14 Shane // May 11, 2011 at 4:01 pm
I always feel like the missing piece to making a place feel “urban” is to do away with street level parking and create a street-wall with your buildings.
Until they do away with that sea of parking that fronts King George Highway (and rename the “street” altogether) its always going to be Whalley to me.
15 ThinkOutsideABox // May 11, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Interesting to see Mississauga take on this initiative around a “downtown”. As far as they want to design the area to be pedestrian friendly, I don’t think they can go far enough.
The “walk” on Burnhamthorpe Road around the city centre makes the Vegas strip look like a Commercial Drive stroll.
But I do wish they would get on with it already. They have been talking about putting in rapid transit lines across the city extending to the TTC for at least a quarter century now.
They could do better than to keep the focus around an artificially anchored city center construct, Square One shopping plaza, when the lake shore is already somewhat off to a start as a pedestrian oriented area with natural features of park and lake.
For all Mississauga hopes to do, it will require monumental impetus. I wish them luck!
16 Bobbie Bees // May 11, 2011 at 7:20 pm
As long as north america is carcentric, you can forget about any type of ‘organic’ touchy-feely neighbourhoods.
Cars make it far too easy to drive everywhere.
I really wish to see $10.00/litre gas in my lifetime. That way we can finally see the unravelling of the car culture that killed our neighbourhoods.
17 Corey // May 11, 2011 at 8:59 pm
@ Joe Just Joe:
Right on man.
The part that I find hilarious about everyone casting about to recreate downtown-like areas in the suburbs is that accomplishing it seems like a big secret that somehow eludes us, or takes years to unfold. Two myths, in my opinion. For one, we only need to look to the past to see how it was accomplished; small scale builders for the most part put up the majority of the commercial buildings in Vancouver’s downtown – what today we consider to be “fine grained” pedestrian oriented areas. The buildings were human scaled and the growth organic.
The second myth is that it takes decades to do. But that too is untrue – Vancouver was a boomtown that grew blocks of downtown -organically and fine grained – in a matter of a few years.
My thought is that the conditions in which that growth took place are now missing. Government regulations, and the assumption that all development will be done by large scale firms have killed the conditions that made organic growth possible. Between the extra costs of parking requirements, development applications, DCCs and the myriad of other expenses, small scale organic growth of the kind we need to build true human spaces in places like Surrey no longer is possible.
Instead we get developments like “Uptown” in Victoria – ghastly imitations of what we once built so well, only now with monstrous structured parking and all private space owned by a corporation – no public realm needed. In the end I think it all comes down to greed… we don’t build like we used to because profit trumps human needs.
18 Richard // May 11, 2011 at 9:56 pm
@Ternes
Granville Island is fine but it certainly is not a great pedestrian space. It is a parking lot and is no better or worse for peds than any other parking lot. It is only all the old industrial buildings hiding the parking that make it seem different from other lots.
19 voony // May 11, 2011 at 10:22 pm
NewWest had this eclectic mix of old and new, but really have some hard time to lift up the thing,
Richmond has, eventually per accident one of the most accomplished secondary DownTown, and the heavy presence of good standing hotel has something to do with it…it gives patrons to local food scenes..and urban design with “streewall” on avenue of human scale like Westminster Hwy where lot of hotels congregate is an invite for hotel patron to walk out of their room and explore the city.
20 Bill Lee // May 12, 2011 at 2:03 am
#1 and then there is the yuppie cleansing of Norquay Park. Nothing to offend the easily offended or hurt their spoiled spawn. And it is still behind a fence as is the similar newly ascetic Grandview Park. I see that the chief cheerleaders for Grandview bourgeois white-washing have left the district.
Meanwhile yet another ironic iconic tower as at Knight street is arising on Kingsway at Nanaimo soon to be marketed by the Rennie Market Systems as on-a-clear-day ….
#8 Yes, “just-a-thot” Not only Main south of 16th, but I counted 8 vacancies in the few block s of Pender Street Chinatown.
Blim shop and its eclectic stuff moved to Pender St. from Main.
But the Rennie black monolith is killing the unit block north side.
We can kill organic downtowns as well.
See the old centre for the western valley, the Queen City, the royal city of New Westminster since the power centre cross the Fraser and the Coquitlam rivers.
Fabula’s piece was about the general development attempts across the country. It was in the real estate pages, of which we might get a small portion of the Toronto-centric stories in our West Coast Edition.
Every town strives to have a centre.
There are continual complaints of Bellingham trying to reverse Bellis Fair.
And the lament of the death of Central department stores in the late 2oth century, though regional stores were always dying and being bought and sold and renamed over time.
Who remembers the precursor in Vancouver of the Safeway stores in the days when they were 3000 sq. feet? what ever became of the several David Spenser stores…..?
Purposely creating a centre can be done, but will it hold under our corrupted land speculator and boom town promoters?
21 rf // May 12, 2011 at 7:02 am
I thought this was a pretty great article.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dd9bba18-769c-11e0-bd5d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1LcOl8w6e
22 Max // May 12, 2011 at 9:39 am
Vidoematic on West 4th is closing its doors soon. The owner made the following statement about the texture West 4th is taking on: (FYI, the ‘hairy hippie that is referenced, still lives in the neighborhood, he is our local homeless guy)
Videomatica’s closure is part of an ongoing shift in retailers on Fourth Avenue. When Videomatica opened, Fourth was brimming with funky independent shops, like the one run by the hairy hippie who used to sell used clothing outside his store because the inside was packed to the rafters.
The hippie clothier left in the mid-’90s, and Fourth Avenue is now a street of trendy clothing outlets, yoga stores and high-end bike shops. Many independents have been displaced by chains.
“I feel the vision for Fourth Avenue should have been modelled on a place like San Francisco: Keep all the old funky houses and put new bunker stores behind them, and at least keep some character and some interest on the street, even if you are a chain store,” said Peat.
“Instead, we have the concrete boxes, like Granville and Robson. [The street] loses all its charm. Look what we’ve got now: There’s almost no character left. Soon it will all be wireless stores and baby booties.”
23 MB // May 12, 2011 at 11:51 am
@ JJJ + Corey.
“Organic” urban growth is, in itself, a myth. The only thing organic here on the coast is climax old growth forests.
Even the 19th Century urbanism you mistakenly allude to as “organic” is as contrived as 50’s freeways. Someone had a say in platting the streets, designing the buildings, zoning the uses and financing the construction. This is not an organic process. Would you attribute the massive historic corporate CPR land grant that influenced Vancouver so much over the last 130 years “organic”?
What the more accurate measuring tool should be is the specific value of planning and development to human well being and society. In that regard we can say, for example, that 19th Century urbanism has a greater value than freeways from several aspects, from health to economy.
24 Everyman // May 12, 2011 at 12:28 pm
@ Shane 14
All the signage I’ve seen lately refers to King George Boulevard. Is that a new creation?
25 Mira // May 12, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Bobbie Bees # 16
You said ‘I really wish to see $10.00/litre gas in my lifetime.’
You sir are one of the following: a stupid teen, an old fart, or a bike afficionado. probably live in the vicinity of the downtown, Stanley park, kits…inherited your own place with preferably a garden with space for a chicken coop, dropped out of school because you are not the academic type and anyways you can always join Vision and do an induction seminar up North, shall I go on? You are the reason why nothing works in this world buddy, people like you, with that sense of entitlement, sure let’s go the Mad Max way…unbelievable!
26 Corey // May 12, 2011 at 6:02 pm
I guess by organic I really mean “not built by machines”, which basically limits us to human-sized development.
27 False Creep // May 12, 2011 at 8:06 pm
This article makes me think about Squamish. It’s 2011 and they are actively doing all the things that other cities have been regretting for the last 10 years. Trying to be the next Nanaimo. Small cities, but it still looks like suburban sprawl, and nearly impossible to fix.
28 Roger Kemble // May 13, 2011 at 4:54 am
MB @ #2
The Number One way to structure a city is through its transportation network. This has been dominated by roads in newer cities which cover a third to half its entire land base.
Early Vancouver Metro was dominated by roads, water roads: New Westminster is there because of a major water road the Might Fraser.
But it took the Royal Engineers, hence Sapperton, to make it work. Arrival of the gold rush miners was sort of organic and that caused the engineers to push the Dewdney Trunk Road into the interior . . . and out of that came Maple Ridge etc . . . I dunno, is all that organic?
What comes first “organic” or the army?
I would interpret greed, i.e. gold rush easy money (or so the miners thought), as organic in which case pretty well all British Columbia could be organic!
I do know the little Yorkshire villages of my youth came out of necessity and that I interpret as organically: farm workers’ hovels crowding around the village pump. Admittedly, they were first conceived by the Lord of the manor out of necessity, i.e. organically! That, IMO, is preferable to land speculation, which has been Metro’s MO since the beginning.
Indeed, I would suggest “ The Number One way to structure . . . has been land speculation.
To continue MB‘s train of thought . . .
I commend Surrey for trying. They are only at the beginning of what could be a long process.
Surrey was farming country until Grosvenor Laing, in the ’60’s, decided to plunk Guilford in the middle of no-where: following the mindless nostrums of the LMRPB: an organic gamble if ever there was one.
I remember doing some work with Block realtors on Fleetwood town centre when it was a gas station on The Fraser Highway. That would be in the early ’80’s and if an educated guess can be described as organic then Fleetwood has it!
Is unbridled growth organic? Is the free market organic? We have on the one hand the eugenicists wanting to drastically cull us and, on the other hand, Freidman-ites wanting to exploit us.
The Number One way to structure a city is through its transportation network . . . I hope to God it isn’t. The latest plan for the Cambie Corridor . . .
http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/cambiecorridor/pdf/studyarea.pdf
. . . is anything but organic having been started by inappropriate speculation: Marine Gateway.
29 Roger Kemble // May 13, 2011 at 6:40 am
PS . . .
Marpole is about to be desecrated by that behemoth Gateway that ignores the organic center of Marpole at Granville @ 63rd, just because there happens to be a bit of under utilized industrial space on that billion dollar CL boondoggle.
If the city relies on that for development incentive, and if MARA continues to passively roll over, someone along way away will make a pile of money while the city goes slowly broke . . .
30 Ron // May 13, 2011 at 11:37 am
Bellevue, Washington has a good suburban downtown that’s developing well. But of course, they have office towers with jobs that can in turn support local (and national) businesses in that suburban downtown. You won;t be able to build a downtown (or what people consider a downtown (i.e. lots of stores, restauarnts) without a ready suppy of all-day office workers followed by nightime shoppers and restaurant patrons.
That’s why retail stores fail in Yaletown and have been replaced by restaurants. Not enough traffic during the day (even topugh there are small scale offices there).
The key to a suburban downtown is building office towers full of discretionary spenders, and the necessary retail services will follow.
Surrey is on its way with a couple of office towers (one at Gateway) one at Cnetral City) and a “lower” level of discretionary spender with a University.
31 MB // May 13, 2011 at 12:45 pm
@ Roger & Me.
Agreed. “Yorkshire hovels gathered around the town pump” and liquid freeways with villages carved from the organicy old growth forest dotted along the edges are organic.
But the Griddo, Kiddo, is not.
32 Sandy Garossino // May 13, 2011 at 12:46 pm
In a semi-related aside, we have been working hard in our local micro-district to encourage small merchants to help create a walkable & affordable neighbourhood commercial district. A far cry from a major downtown district typical of the last century, but along the lines of the Surrey approach in theory at least.
This sprang out of the recession when our commercial properties suffered a huge rash of vacancies. My husband decided to fill those vacancies by curating a small scale design district in keeping with his own retail operation. This entailed incentivizing some merchants whose profile added to the overall appeal of the area, notwithstanding that they could not afford market rates.
No sooner had we started to get things off the ground than a property in the district sold for a crazy price, effectively vaporizing the economic conditions that make “curated” neighbourhoods attractive for other land-owners.
We will continue to support these small enterprises because they benefit our family retail operation, which has been located in the area for over 60 years, because our long property ownership enables this formula, because we care about what happens in the neighbourhood, and because my husband (whose brainchild this was) gets enormous personal satisfaction and pride out of the creative process of helping bring a new local neighbourhood into existence.
All these circumstances are highly anomalous, and the disrupting entry of the external investor signals the limitations of the model in scaling up in a wholly private sector initiative.
Yet as I look at the Surrey plan, it seems that this general concept–just like Granville Island–CAN work if there is a strong and coherent vision and community support behind it.
Undoubtedly there are many ways that Granville Island could yet be improved, but for a 70’s concept it still works astonishingly well. Here is that wonderful mix of higher residential density, walkable communities, quirky local merchants, and a bustling market that draws over 10 million visitors annually.
For those cities like Surrey, which have an opportunity to build a new model, this is not a terrible jumping off point. Whatever the 21st century ideal downtown is going to look like, it will likely incorporate a broader range of uses than the downtowns built in the 20th century. Committed place-based work environments will likely give way to more flexible live-work spaces.
Who knows? Maybe the 21st century downtown will look more like a taller village after all. Interesting to consider the possibilities.
33 Max // May 13, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Granville Island is a tourist destination so I am unsure of how people look at this as a workable/liveable community that needs improvement. It is what it is.
Surrey is tackling its sins of the past – the urban sprawl and patchwork neighborhoods by having a plan. It will be tough work connecting all the pockets of Surrey, but Mayor Watts, the council members and city planners seem to be on the right track. And the ‘downtown’ of Surrey has the ability to spread out. Vancouver is locked in by water. Personally, I think tall glass buildings are ugly. The older neighborhoods, the old hotels, storefronts and structures hold so much character and in many instances, history. Why would you want to remove that for another souless ‘tower’? When visitors come to Vancouver they don’ marvel at yet another tall buidling – they are a dime a dozen. They marvel at all that is the heritage of Vancouver.
34 Bobbie Bees // May 13, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Earth to Mira, come in Mira……….
I don’t know what rarefied gases you’ve been inhaling, but you should stop. If you keep doing it for too long you will suffer brain damage.
I’m a 4th class power engineer. I work 40 hours per week. I split an apartment with a room mate.
I don’t own a car. I walk just about everywhere I need to go. I ride a bicycle when I need to go beyond a ten block radius of where I live and work.
Yes, I could find a cheaper place to live, but being able to walk to work in under 15 minutes and not have to pay for gas, parking, insurance or deal with the idiots and morons on the road more than make up for the price of rent.
As I said, I hope to see a more realistic price for gas in my lifetime. Not this artificially subsidized price currently at the pumps.
Subsidized?!?!?
Yes, subsidized.
look at all of the tax breaks and tax incentives that petroleum companies are given every year and it becomes quite clear that motorists again are being subsidized.
Oh and by the way, now that the Chinese are buying cars and now that the Indians are buying car, where all of the oil going to come from to fill their tanks? Oh yeah, that’s right, we’ll just start more wars to fight for the remaining oil. YAY!!!!
So again, live local and work local. It’s worked for humanity for the last 2 or so million years that we’re been wandering around on this planet, and it’s the only thing that’s really gonna save our bacon in the future.
35 Tessa // May 13, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Every example of “organic” downtowns full of “quirky” shops and small-scale buildings that was built by the private sector was built pre-WWII, pre-automobile domination. The magical hand of capitalism isn’t going to sweep in and solve all our problems by us sitting around doing nothing. That’s how we got malls and suburbs in the first place. No, community organization and directly, whatever that form takes, is essential to create anything “quirky” in this day and age.
Maybe allowing people in houses on some streets to build onto the front of their homes and add shops would be a good idea, just like they did in the old days. That’s a little more organic and small scale.
But I have a feeling any new “downtown” is going to be more than that, and is going to require some major developments, and thus likely some major 21st century developers, and they have no interest in a successful downtown. A city does. The only way I’d give those developers any trust is if they’re doing the work under the direction of a plan visioned by fairly ordinary folks and steered by a government with the ability to enforce those rules. Good on Surrey for leading the process, because business isn’t going to get it right on its own. Let’s just hope they aren’t too prescriptive in their solutions.
36 Tessa // May 13, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Also, I find both comments from Bobbie Rees quite refreshing. He’s right. It seems ironic to me that Mira, clinging to cheap yet increasingly scarce oil that is hoarded and used almost entirely by rich nations, is claiming others have a sense of entitlement.
37 Gentle Bossa Nova // May 14, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Give up the ghost… organic or otherwise. We are at the tail end of the long anti-urban wave. We have become so beholden to getting inside and turning over the key, that we forget just how close close can be.
Ten minute’s walk? Nah… Fire up the minivan and get there in four.
The challenge of “suburban downtowns” is that they were platted in the automobile era. Somewhere between 1908 and 1948 in our region, the lessons of good urbanism were more or less lost.
Thus, our project is one of recovery. However, there is nothing to “recover” in the suburban lands. They came too late.
My sense is that the “walkable neighbourhoods” will crop up first in the places that once were laid out with the expressed intention of making “walkable neighbourhoods”.
In the meantime the amount of re-learning that must go on within the professions, the political class, the banks and the investors, and just the plain neighbourhood folks themselves is gargantuan.