City planners have a creative responsibility

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City planners have a creative responsibility

Michael Geller
Special to Westcoast Homes


Saturday, August 16, 2008


As you enter Winnipeg, you cannot miss the signs proclaiming it is "One Great City". However, Mayor Sam Katz and a local newspaper recently invited city residents to come up with a new slogan for the city. Some popular suggestions include: "City of Opportunity," "Heart of the Continent" and "Muddy Waters, Clear Skies."

Vancouver planner Jay Wallenberg supports none of the above. He thinks it is a mistake for a city to have a competition for a new tagline. "If a city has to create a slogan for itself, something is very wrong," says Wallenberg. "After all, does Paris need a slogan? Does Vancouver need a slogan? Of course not."

Wallenberg and I were recently in Winnipeg, along with Vancouver's director of planning, Brent Toderian, and 700 delegates attending the Canadian Institute of Planners' annual conference. The theme was Planning by Design in Community: Making Great Places, and the gathering included Canada's best known planners, as well as two thought-provoking keynote speakers from the U.S. and Great Britain, Jeff Speck and Charles Landry. Speck is one of the leaders in the New Urbanist movement and author of Suburban Nation. He told the audience that planners once had much greater status in the community than they do today. The original purpose of zoning was to improve health and increase longevity by separating noxious and residential uses. As a result of their zoning bylaws, planners were hailed as heroes; sadly, however, the resulting bylaws and separation of uses have had negative impacts in subsequent years. In some cases, for instance, residential neighbourhoods have been left without shops and commercial services.

His thesis is that planners now have a new opportunity to become heroes once again by helping to avert two pending disasters: global warming and declining health standards. He warned that for the first time in history, North American health professionals fear that the life expectancy of children may be less than that of their parents.

Just as we have come to recognize that "we are what we eat", there is a growing belief that "we are where we live." People living in car-oriented, low-density suburban environments are more likely to be obese, with lower life expectancies than those in higher-density, more compact, walkable communities, Speck said. Furthermore, less car-dependent neighbourhoods can help reduce greenhouse gases and related climate changes.

Speck is particularly critical of school boards that replace smaller neighbourhood schools with larger schools in outlying areas that can only be reached by car or bus. He is also critical of politicians who allow traffic engineers to dictate the design of roads that too often are poorly suited for pedestrians and cyclists.

Praising the work of Vancouver planners Patrick Condon and Larry Frank, Speck urged his audience to design communities with a focus on VKTs -- or vehicle kilometres travelled. While acknowledging it is helpful to replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, the benefits are minimal compared to replacing private automobiles.

Speck was followed by British urbanist and writer Charles Landry, who asked the audience why buildings and cities are not planned the way they are supposed to be. He pointed out that we all know how to design good places, yet we rarely do. The author of The Creative City and The Art of City Making, Landry is generally acknowledged as the founder of the worldwide Creative Cities movement, which has been popularized by Richard Florida.

Landry believes that good planning is an art, not a science, and that great cities result from imagination and creativity, not engineering and planning formulas.

Today, he travels the world armed with thousands of photographs, urging civic leaders and planners to be less rational and more creative.

Michael Geller is a Vancouver-based architect, planner and real estate consultant who is running for city council.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...d-62a29c8961c6