Not sure if anyone here is familiar with Brent Toderian? He is the former chief planner of Vancouver. If you’re interested in smart development, urban planning and dense livable communities, he has some great lectures on youtube. Here’s a shorter one that sums up a lot of the great work he has done in Vancouver.
I’ve been to Vancouver a few times and I find it amazing how livable the downtown is (in fact, all of Vancouver proper). It’s dense, but it’s very livable and it doesn’t’ feel like most big cities.
Anyways, I figured I’d share this here in case it sparks discussion on any of the topics in his talk. Particularly, he discusses public space and how Vancouver used regulations to make developers pay for most of the developed, public space in the city. I might be overly optimistic, but I think in a booming city like ours there are going to be more and more people wanting to live downtown and in the city center. If this is true, there will be huge pressure on developers to meet that demand. That demand will work in our favour as it could give the city leverage to ask more of developers. If developer A is not willing to incorporate great public space than the development will not be approved and hopefully Developer B or C will come in with a proposal that meets the standards we set. Again, perhaps I’m too optimistic. What do you guys think? If we set our standards too high, I guess the risk is that lots could sit undeveloped for decades?
Another area in this talk I find interesting is the discussion around density and the fact that a lot of people assume it means skyscrapers. There are many ways to increase density and towers are only one of them. I think Vancouver has done a great job of using towers, but building them into great neighborhoods that don’t’ suffer at street level (with the exception of Coal Harbour). I think this is important for us as we don’t really have residential towers yet. So as we begin to build our first residential highrises at Tiffany we should be asking what kind of street level interaction and interaction with their surroundings they are going to have. For future residential highrises, what is it that we will expect from developers?
A final thought, is that Vancouver has a terrible problem with affordability. Are the high standards imposed by the city partly to blame? Maybe, but they are also consistently ranked among the most livable cities on earth so how important is it that most citizens in a city be able to afford their own a home?
Anyways, here’s the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRk93Wgdv1g