Vancouver - healthy, happy and high density

Making space for families to live downtown is central to Vancouver's innovative approach to urban renewal, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

Most North American cities have been turned into doughnuts by decades of flight to the suburbs. Not so in Vancouver, the third largest metropolis in Canada. At least 45,000 people have moved downtown in the last 15 years - more than doubling its population, which is now expected to reach 120,000 by 2020.

Much of the downtown area is now peppered with apartment blocks, rising to 30 storeys or more. But that's not what they're called. In Vancouver, as leading architect Peter Busby explains, "apartment block" is a pejorative term because it conjures up images of long corridors; "condo tower" is the thing.

Tall and slender, with a maximum floorplate of 650 metres, these towers are all about access to light and views. At most, they have six to eight apartments per floor, with a central lift and staircase core. In some cases, two lifts are back-to-back so that residents of the larger units can walk straight into their apartments.

Condo (condominium) towers have become so standard that "you can't sell a building with corridors", according to Busby. "People want to see their own doors when they come out of a lift".

His firm, Busby Perkins + Will, has designed an elegant tower for a tight triangular site that will have just two apartments per floor.

The towers are usually set on podiums with shops and restaurants at ground-floor level and flanked by three-storey "row houses" - terraced houses, we would call them - to cater for people who prefer their own door onto the street. Over 600 of these row houses have been built in the city centre so far.

None of this has happened by accident. As director of planning Larry Beasley explains, Vancouver has a strong planning and regulatory regime, one of the most interventionist in North America.

"What we've tried to do is to take pressure off delicate areas by opening up development opportunities elsewhere".

The city has an incentive programme to save heritage buildings, under which owners are allowed to sell their "air rights" to developers in other parts of town - thus raising much-needed cash to fund renovation and restoration schemes; the quid pro quo is that the buildings are listed for protection in perpetuity.

Vancouver was also lucky. Unlike Boston, Seattle and San Francisco - to name but a few - it didn't sacrifice its waterfront to highways, or drive them through historic districts such as Gastown and Chinatown. Earlier plans to do just that were abandoned in the 1980s, so there was an opportunity to do something different.

"Living First" became the city's strategy. In other words, downtown was no longer seen as merely as a location for office blocks, hotels and shopping malls.

Housing was given top priority and, with extraordinary foresight, the planners made it a policy that 25 per cent of what was built had to be suitable for family living.

From the beginning, provision was also made for social and affordable housing - "non-market", as it's called in Canada - amounting to 17 per cent of the total.

And unlike Ireland, this was integrated into all of the major projects in Vancouver, even in the areas of highest demand such as Coal Harbour and False Creek.

More than 50 acres of new parks have been provided on the peninsula where the downtown area is located. These provide both active and passive recreation areas, catering for ball games as well as strollers and people just sitting out. Some 20km of the waterfront has been laid out for walking and cycling.

No wonder Vancouver has won an award from the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation for being statistically healthier than other cities, with only a 10 per cent rate of obesity compared to the national average of 30 per cent.

It was also voted "Best City in the Americas" in 2004 by readers of Condé Nast Traveller.

"Our view is that the municipality should set out the vision and collaborate with everyone to achieve it, but we're not afraid to say 'no' if projects are not in line with the vision," Larry Beasley says. So architects and their clients need to observe complex urban design guidelines on massing, form, character and landscape.

The skyline of Vancouver is also being composed, like a piece of music.

In the 1970s, there was a basic rule that the tallest buildings should be in the centre.

This was refined in the 1980s to protect 20 key "view corridors" with the aim of retaining the city's relationship with the water that surrounds it and the mountains to the north.

"Then in the mid-1990s, we decided that we could could sculpt the city skyline", Beasley explained. "We looked at a whole array of skylines from around the world such as Sydney, Dallas and New York, did computer simulations of what Vancouver would look like if these were imposed on it and took that to the citizens.

"We wanted to find out what kind of skyline they wanted Vancouver to have, and this generated a wonderful discussion about about how the skyline could be a work of art.

"And incidentally, we discovered that men favoured strong landmark buildings while women preferred something more sensual - peaks and valleys.

"After that whole exercise, we went back on the zoning and set down policies outlining where we would consider buildings taller than the ambient heights. These were buildings that could emphasise and provide focal points, but they also had to offer a strong quid pro quo in terms of amenities, facilities and excellent architecture."

All major development proposals are reviewed by an urban design panel, with the final decisions being made by the planners themselves.

And almost all projects are designed by Vancouver-based architects; the city had enough native talent that it didn't feel the need to sign up the likes of Santiago Calatrava or Daniel Libeskind.

Sustainable development will be taken to a new level by the Olympic Village being planned for the south side of False Creek for the Winter Games in 2010.

IT INCLUDES plans to manage energy use, water and waste, transportation, amenities and facilities, and even urban agriculture in a high-density, mixed-use neighbourhood.

"We wanted to raise the bar, environmentally and socially," says Ian Smith, the area's development manager. "When we started planning it in the late 1990s [ long before Vancouver bagged the 2010 Olympics] we were beginning to understand what 'being sustainable' is about. So it will be much more about how the area works."

The city council owns 50 acres of the 80-acre site, and half of its holding will be developed as parks to cater for a community of 15,000 people after the Olympics have come and gone.

The area will have its own district heating scheme, with heat extracted from the city's sewers to fuel it. And there will even be apple trees on the streets.