Spacing Vancouver recently published an interesting look at Vancouver’s West End neighborhood. And it led me into a deep dive of the neighborhood’s recently adopted Community Plan (November 2013). So today I’d like to talk a bit about the neighborhood and also their plans for managing growth over the next 30 years.

Officially established in 1969, the West End spent the next 3 decades as the most densely populated area of Vancouver. But starting in the 2000s with the development of high-rise condo towers in neighbouring areas such as Downtown South to the southeast and Triangle West and Coal Harbour to the northeast, the West End lost this position. Today it’s the 4th most densely populated neighborhood in the city.

The bulk of the housing (77%) is in the form of apartments with 5 or more storeys. And 81% of residents are renters. This is well above the city average of 52% and is likely a reflection of the neighborhood’s younger demographic (25-29 years old is the largest segment) and its position as a landing ground for new Vancouverites.

But as a large central area with exceptional access to natural amenities, I would imagine that development pressures are and will continue to be significant. To plan for this growth, the city wants to intensify the central areas of the neighborhood with low-rise and mid-rise form and the periphery with high-rise towers. And already this is happening with developments such as the 62-storey Shangri-La Hotel.

Here’s an image depicting their 30 year vision:

But what stands out for me in the Plan is Vancouver’s continued commitment to laneway intensification. The Plan refers to it as “Laneway 2.0” and they specifically mention the opportunity to redevelop the West End’s wide laneways with “ground oriented infill housing.” Below is an example of how this could be done on a small residential lot, but the Plan also includes images for how the same might be accomplished on underutilized apartment building sites.

Laneway housing is a topic I’ve written about extensively on ATC. Toronto is absolutely behind on this. And as I’ve argued before, we need to be looking at urban intensification across all scales, from low-rise to high-rise, if we want to create inclusive and vibrant cities. With the West End Community Plan, Vancouver seems to be doing just that.

The journey of Architect This City has been an organic one. When I first started blogging regularly in September 2013, I had no plan in mind other than that I wanted to write about cities. I had just come off working full-time on my startup, Dirt, where I had gotten into the habit of writing and I enjoyed it immensely. So I wanted to continue.

Cities seemed like the perfect umbrella to capture all of my passions: architecture, design, planning, real estate, and even technology. And so I rebranded brandondonnelly.com—which I had already been using as a microblog—and slapped the title “Cities” on it. (That personal microblog has since become brandondonnelly.me.)

Then, after a few months of blogging, I was having drinks with a good friend of mine and telling her about my new daily discipline. She immediately asked me what it was called and, when I replied by saying that I didn’t really have a name for it, she insisted that I create one immediately. Since she’s one of the brightest people I know, I gave it some serious thought. A few days later, Architect This City was born.

I liked the idea of having a distinct brand, because then it meant it could grow beyond just a personal blog. It could become a real community of people passionate and committed to building better cities. And that ultimately became the goal as I got deeper and deeper into writing.

Since that time last year, I’ve had friends guest blog on ATC. It has gone on to become syndicated on Mobility Lab and Urban Times. And it has been featured by the Guardian in the UK has one of the big city blogs in the world. But even more exciting are the moments when somebody tells me, either face-to-face or through a quick message, that they’re really enjoying ATC and that they read it daily. That’s what keeps me going.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. What’s the purpose of ATC? What’s the why? I thought about writing a manifesto of sorts, but that just seemed unnecessarily onerous. So I sat down, primarily on the subway, with Evernote, and I wrote a purpose statement for ATC:

To promote the building of beautiful and environmentally sustainable cities that offer strong economic opportunities and a high quality of life.

That’s really what I believe cities should do. They should be enjoyable and beautiful places to live life and they should empower people to get richer. At the same time, we need to be aware that as more and more of the world’s 7 billion people move into cities, the need for environmentally sustainable solutions is only going to increase.

So those are the kinds of discussions I hope we can have on ATC. Regular scheduled programming will continue as usual, but hopefully now the why is clearer. If you have any feedback on the above statement, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

This blog post is a submission to a group blogging event being put on by Meeting of the Minds and Living Cities. The focus is on urban opportunity. Click here for more information about the event.

Since the beginning of time, the purpose of cities has been to bring people together to socialize with one another and to generate wealth. And, today, more than ever, the potential returns of being smart and being in a global city are huge. Cities are our economic unit. They are what’s driving the global economy.

But as the world continues to urbanize at an unprecedented rate and as the global economy becomes increasingly concentrated in select urban centers, how do we ensure that all city dwellers are connected to the economic opportunities being made available by this new information age?

Here are 3 suggestions.

First, we need broad and equitable access to education. I was deliberate in talking about the “returns of being smart.” Education and the right skills are even more critical today, because the labour market is not what it used to be. In Edward Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City, he talks a lot about Detroit and how the greatest thing the city–and the car industry–did in its history was create lots of high paying jobs for people with little or no education. However it was also possibly the worst thing Detroit did because, today, the city is now stuck with that legacy. And those same high paying jobs for people with little or no education aren’t coming back. The labour market has changed. 

Second, we need to ensure that people living in cities have the opportunity to be physically connected. That our cities offer strong transportation and mobility options and that our cities are designed to be inclusive. When I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles a few years ago and lamenting about the traffic, he responded by telling me that LA traffic is merely a socioeconomic problem. If you have the means, you get to live in desirable central neighborhoods where your commute is entirely reasonable. And if you don’t have the means, well, then you get stuck with a horrible 2-hour commute. We know that the rich will always outbid the poor for housing in any city, but as much as possible, we need to give people physical mobility so that they can then achieve economic mobility.

At the same time, the design of individual neighborhoods and buildings matters a great deal. If you’ve ever watched The Human Scale, you’ll likely remember the line:

“First we shape our cities and then our cities shape us.”

As one example, the documentary talks about how masterfully modernist architecture from the 60s and 70s achieved extreme forms of social isolation. It cleansed the urban environment of any sort of public life and brought it all up into disconnected towers. The problem was that it was far too rational. The power of cities lies in their organic and evolving nature. And when you constrain them with mechanisms such as single use zoning and other restrictions, you stifle their potential to generate economic opportunities for their residents–which, as we’ve said, is one of the main reasons people choose to live in cities in the first place. 

Finally–and this is a bit of a tie in for everything we’ve been talking about–we need to be proactive about inequality. Research shows that there’s a direct correlation between income inequality and social mobility. The more income inequality a city or country has, the less intergenerational social mobility it has–not to mention that it also leads to more crime and other negative externalities. This is a complex issue though, and I won’t pretend that it can be easily solved with a better public transit and more bike lines. It’s something much deeper and more broad. This one is about a belief that cities should be designed to enhance everybody’s quality of life and to make everybody richer, not just a few.

Photo: Wikimedia