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.
Thomas's observations underline the real complexity of re-creating Vancouver. Smart people get that it's more than just buildings that has made this city. It's even more than just good urban design. Vancouver got dealt the perfect hand: a group of bright, idealistic planners led by an innovative import from Toronto, Beasley's predecessor, Ray Spaxman; a council in the 1970s that encouraged a new kind of city planning; an influx of cash from Asian investors, which created a hothouse for development; acceptance from developers that they had to chip in for schools, day cares, and parks; and approving consensus from the public.
Few cities have all those cards. Beasley says that for every question he gets about how to design cities, he gets another about how to convince parties to buy in.
We in Vancouver often have a hard time comprehending that others see our city as an urban paradise. What about the vertiginous real-estate prices? Or the Downtown Eastside, our outdoor mental asylum that it seems no one can do anything about? The kaleidoscope of constant history-erasing change? The property crime? The parochial obsession with being world-class?
