Re: New Toronto Brand: "City of Unlimited Possibilities
To add fuel to the fire, here is an article from the current issue of Canadian Architect:
Downtown's Last Resort
A Critique of the Last 20 Years of Vancouver's Approach to Downtown Living Asks Some Difficult Questions About Where the Future Lies for Canada's Ocean Playground.
Text Trevor Boddy
That downtown Vancouver is home to one of the grandest experiments in Canadian urbanism is now beyond question. No city in this country--not Toronto when it lined Bay Street with banking towers, not Montreal in its pre-EXPO optimism, not even Calgary during its last oil boom--has remade its core so radically, in so short a time. Whether this experiment will prove a long-term success is very much in question.
While the planners, developers and politicians most closely associated with the city-transforming 1991 Downtown Plan have been quick to sing their own praises, and a compliant Vancouver and national press have generally sung along to the same tune, there are now growing worries about the fate of the glittering glass and concrete downtown it has produced. In over two decades, the downtown's population has doubled to nearly 100,000 residents. But over the same period, only nominal residential growth has been seen in the adjacent West End and nearly all other Vancouver neighbourhoods. Our politicians are loathe to extend the densification they trumpet so loudly in the downtown to the areas that need it most.
Ninety percent of the nine million square feet of new towers approved in downtown during this decade have been condos. Downtown is heading towards a fate as a dormitory suburb (transit ridership projections have more people leaving the core than coming in each morning, and downtown traffic levels and commute times have been reduced) while new employment continues to locate in suburban fringes ill-served by transit. Rising suburb-to- suburb traffic levels prompted the provincial government under Gordon Campbell to undertake its current binge of bridge-building and perimeter highway construction, foolishly replicating the energy-wasting urban form of nearby Seattle, and other American cities, and contradicting the radial nature of our mass transit system serving downtown jobs and retail.
The stark reality is that one-third of Vancouver's head-office jobs left the city during the past six years, whereas Calgary has seen an increase of 64 percent. Never much of a head-office town, the bias of Vancouver planners towards condos means that it may soon not be a town for offices at all. First, eight million square feet of potential office space in the former downtown service area of Downtown South was re-zoned "housing optional." This area is now nearly completely developed--as condos and condos alone. Next to go "condo" were the heritage buildings in Yaletown and Gastown that once hosted design, media and software companies. Developers then turned towards office tower sites in the commercial core of the "Golden Triangle" bounded by Georgia and Granville Streets and Coal Harbour. Given the promotion of housing over all other uses by Vancouver planners, you can hardly blame developers: Westbank Corporation's Ian Gillespie estimates economic return for condos in Vancouver is now five times that of new office buildings, the highest such skew in any North American city. Land brokers confirm that downtown land has not been priced for office use for at least five years, but Vancouver is only now having a public debate about downtown's future.
A revealing example is the fate of Rhone and Iredale's 1969 West Coast Transmission Tower on Georgia Street, recipient of many engineering awards for its Bogue Babicki and Associates-designed cable-hung forms, converted recently into condos and renamed "The Qube." Many more of downtown's dwindling stock of towers would have met the same fate, had City Council not slapped a moratorium on such conversions last year. Although hard to grasp for many planners--especially Americans or Canadians in slow-growth cities--too much housing may be killing peninsular downtown Vancouver, especially the mono-form, mono-class, crank-the-handle towers of recent years.
West Coast architects have long groused about the top-down imposition of housing typologies, the arbitrariness of discretionary approvals, and the continuing postmodernist stylistic bias of Vancouver's senior planners. Bing Thom was one of the first to publicly decry the shift to a downtown future as a "resort," not a true metropolis. At the recent World Planners Congress here, he went on to call too many of our condo towers "vertical gated communities," noting that street life is not what one would expect at North America's highest residential densities, especially in the toniest of these new zones, Bayshore and Coal Harbour. After touring Vancouver for three days for "A Dialogue of Cities,"--an international symposium discussing urban trends here and globally--eight architecture critics from five continents came to much the same conclusion. However, Vancouver's recently departed co-director of planning Larry Beasley defends the suburban values of predictability, cleanliness and lack of architectural variety in the high-rise zones shaped by his "Living First" strategy, arguing that a key motor of Vancouver's downtown success is making itself attractive to those who grew up in urban fringes.
Then there are questions about the nature of these new downtown residents. Planners portray them as mountain-biking software and computer game developers, walk-to-work denizens of the postmodern economy--but there is just as much contrary evidence that many of the new residents are a golden global class temporarily parking their investment dollars, linked with a huge cohort of Canadian baby boomers planning to spend their final years in Vancouver, shaping a Penticton with point towers. Estimates are that one-quarter of downtown purchasers are international speculative investors and another quarter are Canadian non-residents who rent out their apartments, Vancouver's only new source of rental housing in a decade. These mainly young renters give downtown its current air of diversity. But soon after the arthritis kicks in for their greying landlords, these cultural creatives will get booted out. Even worse, the social diversity that was a hallmark of False Creek South is proving difficult to duplicate downtown, and not just because of the loss of federal social-housing subsidies. Perhaps the most damning indictment of Vancouver's planners is their policy-driven intensification of the Downtown Eastside's shameful slum. Like Rio de Janeiro--Vancouver's only rival for the world's most beautiful setting--they have condoned a high- density favela for drug dealers and the indigent beside a glamourous beach-ringed high-rise zone that is home to the middle class and the wealthy.
Nearby, the first phase of the Southeast False Creek development--home to the 2010 Olympics Athletes' Village--was bought last spring at double the highest previous price ever paid for downtown land. Its developers were eyeing the international and not the local market for the new global commodities: condos in resort towns. I predict it will not be long until condos in what I call the "Portal Cities"--Vancouver, Dubai, Hong Kong, Panama City and Miami--are traded on stock exchanges like commodities. Leading this trend is the extremely influential and political condo super-marketer Bob Rennie-topping Vancouver magazine's 2005 list of most influential Vancouverites. As a society we may come to regret a scene in which 15 percent of the cost of new housing goes to marketing, but only five percent goes to all design fees. With the exception of a token condo tower by Arthur Erickson for Concord Pacific, Vancouver's finest architects are largely conspicuous by their absence in the downtown boom.
What is happening in downtown Vancouver is unprecedented in North America--a diverse downtown, in times of wealth and growth, changing itself into a residential area. Detroit emptied itself out, but planners have had to come up with the awkward language of "de-downtownification" to describe Vancouver's manic turn to condos over downtown jobs. Toronto and other Canadian cities have relocated downtown functions as they have evolved, but as a peninsula surrounded by water and Stanley Park, Vancouver has no such geographic option. The nearly three million people of the Lower Mainland may be losing their opportunity to join the ranks of the great world cities--I have little confidence that Richmond, Burnaby or Vancouver's off-peninsula inner ring will ever achieve metropolitan density.
To an astonishing degree, the changes in downtown Vancouver are tied to the fads and fancies of architectural, economic and cultural theory over the past few decades. Postmodernism--in its stylistic, socio-economic and cultural modalities--is the idea-set which has produced downtown Vancouver as resort. The easiest visual clue to this is the plannerly bias towards ersatz historic references for new buildings and streetscapes. The1991 plan and its updates promoted Art Deco roofs and "Chateau Chapeaux" as caps on condo towers, while city urban designers mandated a pale imitation of Bath's Royal Crescent for the foot of Richards Street.
More worrisome than this is the glib promotion of postmodern urbanism and economics by our city builders, validating lifestyle before the creation of wealth, pumping the visual markers of the "Creative City" over the more difficult and important investments in affordable housing and cultural institutions that would actually make a creative city happen. At a recent RAIC panel on urbanism, Calgary architect Marc Boutin described the new downtown Vancouverites as totally immersed in this promotional oversell, lost souls trying to find themselves through the self-congratulatory latte-and-rollerblade lifestyle they have bought into. This all started with Stanley Kwok's urban design for the first phase of Concord Pacific in the late 1980s. Kwok says its small-plate tall towers were dually inspired by Hong Kong's residential towers and tropical resorts like Waikiki--a cruelly apt choice!
Led by Las Vegas-born and -educated Larry Beasley, downtown planners were surprised by the relatively easy reception higher-density housing was receiving in Vancouver, as long as it was accompanied by significant public benefits. The resulting 1991 Downtown Plan is the Magna Carta of Vancouverism, the document proposing an urban design philosophy, an accompanying architectural typology, plus a massive re-zoning to transform much of the downtown peninsula into a residential zone. Discretionary approvals tightly controlled by senior planners--usually through social-bonus zoning--traded density for sometimes questionable public benefits, including mini-parks, historic building preservation, public art, construction of community facilities, contribution to a social housing fund, day-care provision, and so on.
The Vancouver high-density housing typology of small-plate high-rise on continuous townhouse base was codified at this time. A truly postmodern hybrid, the Vancouverist typology is deeply revealing of the planners and developers who concocted it, its form being a conflation of Hong Kong towers with New York brownstones. The argument was that the townhouses would serve families, but high prices mean that few with small children can afford them, and they are just as likely to be filled with empty-nesters. Beasley has long associated himself with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and engaged founder Andrés Duany for some key urban design work in South Vanvouver's East Fraserlands. Conversely, the New Urbanists have taken to claiming Vancouverism's Hong Kong-New York hybrid as the highest-density option for their own visual lexicon of urban forms. Despite this mutual admiration, even the schematic genealogy offered here indicates that Vancouverism has nothing to do with New Urbanism.
In its inception and initial implementation, Vancouver's 1991 Downtown Plan is one of North America's most visionary and inspired plans, on par with New York City's Zoning Resolution first passed in 1916 (substantially revised in 1961), and San Francisco's downtown initiatives under Alan Jacobs. What is currently Vancouver's problem, and may soon become the Lower Mainland's urban calamity is that these plans were not adjusted to changing conditions and realities. With the wholesale transformation of the city, what was necessary and inspired in 1991 had become ill-advised and outdated by 2001. As often is the pattern for large-scale shifts of planning policy, Vancouver's development industry resisted the principles of the plan for the first years, then came around to become its strongest supporters with the condo boom this decade.
Much of this accommodation to the development industry was accomplished through a lowering of Vancouver's already-low architectural standards. For example, the corner of Richards and Nelson Streets in Downtown South represents a particularly bleak concentration of the Beasley-era architecture of Vancouverism. First came Bosa Development's two-tower, voluted and otherwise postmodernized half-block complex, which received the unlikely name of the Mondrian because its height was bonused through inclusion of new art exhibition spaces for the Contemporary Art Gallery. With the ghosts of Dutch Constructivists quaking in their graves, the crudely banal Miro was built across the street, followed by the Gallery kitty corner. Linked by their almost complete absence of architectural art, the "Three Gracelesses" of the Mondrian, the Miro and the Gallery give permanent witness to the lack of striving for architectural excellence by typology-obsessed planners--while developers ironically accrued social status through Vancouver's art world, and not through the art of city-making.
Similarly, Vancouver's policy regarding the "View Cone"--an emphasis on views to the mountaintops from a dozen public spaces pales in comparison with what was really needed--the protection of views to the harbour along streets and stewardship of Vancouver's most important public space, False Creek. The ocean inlet has become a parking lot for 1,280 seldom-used yachts, and this transformation of False Creek into one big marina is an obvious cue about the new Vancouver few dare mention: our locking into a future as a resort for the wealthy and the aged. The cultural creatives our planners and developers love to boast about are crawling away from Terminal City, priced out and themed out by a converging city planning and urban development ethos that has traded away long-term urbanity to get short-term rewards.
Vancouver will survive indignities and lost opportunities even as enormous as those inventoried here.
If we improve its architecture and shape its downtown into a place to work as well as live, Vancouver will resume its natural position as Canada's only chance at a world city. Montreal's mayor may call in UNESCO contacts to name itself, somewhat pompously, one of three "World Design Cities," and Toronto will be a long time admitting that its turn to "starchitects" over the past decade has resulted in a string of buildings that will only cement its decline from national metropole into a provincial striver. Whatever its failings, especially recently, Vancouverism has entered the argot of planners and architects worldwide--a status no other Canadian city developing planning ideas has ever known.
Vancouver will succeed--despite its resolutely lame mass media, the rewarding of its architectural bottom-feeders, its unsettling convergence of developers' and planners' pretensions--because of the depth of passion many of us invest in it. We have let the rhetoric of real estate supplant the craft and consciousness of city building, and a sharp recession is what will soon set things right. The bones of a great city are coming into place, and now we need time and public wisdom to put some flesh on it. Love-hate relationships are always signs of a love frustrated, and Vancouver is now ours to make or break.
Architecture critic Trevor Boddy (trevboddy@hotmail.com) is winner of the Alberta Book of the Year and Jack Webster Journalism prize for his writing on cities and buildings, and has taught architecture and urban design across Canada and around the world.
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If we improve its architecture and shape its downtown into a place to work as well as live, Vancouver will resume its natural position as Canada's only chance at a world city. Montreal's mayor may call in UNESCO contacts to name itself, somewhat pompously, one of three "World Design Cities," and Toronto will be a long time admitting that its turn to "starchitects" over the past decade has resulted in a string of buildings that will only cement its decline from national metropole into a provincial striver. Whatever its failings, especially recently, Vancouverism has entered the argot of planners and architects worldwide--a status no other Canadian city developing planning ideas has ever known.
Only "world city"?! I wonder what measure he is using...and we don't need Vancouverism for a downtown that has always been vibrant.
AoD
