News and Features
Larry Beasley's Simple Plan - continued
By Frances Bula published Dec 1, 2008
Cities all over the world, in love with the image of Vancouver as an urban utopia, are eager to clone it. But as former planner Larry Beasley will tell anyone who’ll listen, it’s not quite that easy.
White, a senior planner in Abu Dhabi, talks about community-input meetings and transit-oriented neighbourhoods and a central business district surrounded by dense residential districts. The map on the screen behind the podium is colour-coded to show parks and schools and mixed-use main streets. The language, the graphics, the choice of colours, and even the title-Abu Dhabi 2030-make me feel like I've been transported back to Committee Room 1 at Vancouver City Hall. Substitute Southeast False Creek or East Fraserlands for Abu Dhabi and I could be listening to yet another meticulous presentation in front of Vancouver's urban-design panel, albeit one on a vastly more ambitious scale. The déjà vu is not surprising. Until 18 months ago, White was Vancouver's second in command for EcoDensity; now, he finds himself one of the displaced "Vancouver planning mafia."
The capo, Larry Beasley, watches approvingly from the audience. Vancouver's former co-director of planning, Beasley has become emblematic of Vancouver's new image as the 21st century's utopian city, an image that is now one of our prime exports. In Dallas, for example, a prominent activist has gone all out to bring a Vancouver touch to its massive riverfront redevelopment. Gail Thomas, president of the Trinity Trust, brought Beasley down to Texas to give a public talk last October. She helped raise money to send a group of city managers and developers here in June. Over the summer, she raised more money to send the heads of all relevant city departments. "If we try to implement this Vancouver model," says Thomas, whose work restoring historic areas has earned her the sobriquet of public entrepreneur, "everyone will need to understand how it works-the engineers, not just the planners." And, she adds, even that may not be enough.
"We're not naïve enough to think we can do all this. We don't have the waterfront. We don't have the cruise ships. We don't have the Asian population." And, the city may not even get the needed public support.
