Encore for Vancouver

VANCOUVER -- In the U.S., the model of sustainability, urbanism, density, and transit is Portland, Ore., the subject of our documentary film on the struggles of citybuilding. But the real mecca is a few hundred miles to the north, across the Canadian border -- the cluster of gleaming towers on the Pacific, Vancouver. What started as a sawmill and railroad town now attracts urban planners from all over the world, to witness how the city has been able to encourage density, provide urban amenities including extensive parks and running and biking trails, set aside highways and build a first class transit system for a metropolitan area of some 2.3 million people.
    Yet as in Portland, Vancouver continues some soul-searching -- and wonders what should come next, based on comments in a three-day field trip organized by the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Granville Island, the Olympic Village, the towers and urban grocery stores of Coal Harbour all suggest a playground for the rich -- a "pied-a-terre on the way to Whistler," as one local developer put it, amid "Spandex urbanism," in the words of another planner. (This is a reference to the way to seawall paths to Stanley Park favor the impossibly fit and trim). The Canadians put a lot more into affordable, or what they call social housing than most communities in the U.S., but still the contrast is stark, with the heroin-shooting denizens of Downtown Eastside. Will the jobs all be in services? There are reportedly more people working at VYR, the airport, then in all of the timber industry. The city could also become a commercial center for tar sands extraction, tarnishing its green credentials.
    What the future holds may be exemplified in the 1,000-person-per-month population growth and how it's being managed -- virtually all of it south of False Creek. The real action is in the wealthy Asian immigrant community of Richmond -- where the Asian malls include Lamborghini showrooms -- and south of the Fraser River in the booming suburb of Surrey. These areas have lots of Vancouver-calibre density, showcased by the Bing Thom-designed Simon Fraser University at the Surrey Centre station -- classic transit-oriented development. The driverless TransLink subway trains ply 43 miles of track and stop at 47 stations, and both maintenance and expansion are financed by a gas tax (as well as a version of a value capture mechanism via the property tax). For the livable city, it seems, transportation is destiny.