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.
Told that it's our city fabric and urban design that people especially love, we roll our eyes. It's not so great. All those bland new buildings downtown. It looks like Blade Runner. It feels like a vertical suburb. And the rest of the city, well, it's no Paris (or Barcelona, or Berlin, or London). But like it or not, we are Paris to a far-flung collection of fans. More precisely, Paris 2.0, a template for developing or redeveloping cities that are looking for a way to build a contemporary version of the City of Light. Our transformation in only 20 years into a mini-Manhattan of almost 100,000 people downtown, our capacity to attract families and suburbanites, the sense of liveliness in our parks and on our streets and seawall paths, even our success in convincing grocers to move into the central city-all of that in a young western city at the edge of sprawl-loving North America produces awestruck and frequently wistful admiration.
The love affair with our city is most visible in places that have tried to paint-by-numbers a replica Vancouver. There's the Beijing suburb called Vancouver Forest that's filled with Dunbar-style houses made of wood and stone. Dubai has faithfully copied the seawall and towers of north False Creek on its waterfront, down to the last handrail. To San Diego and Orange County, Vancouver builder Nat Bosa has exported what's seen as the city's signature building: the skinny tower on a podium of townhouses. In Portland, the city and developers have copied wholesale the concept of a downtown condo district (without hiring Vancouver builders).
Those are only the most obvious manifestations of the world's crush on Vancouver. They are also frequently the kinds of development that most exasperate the Vancouverists-that elite group of architects, planners, and urbanists who make a living in whole or in part from their association with the Vancouver model. Of Dubai, Beasley sniffs: "That is just a copy of the buildings. That has nothing to do with what Vancouver is about. When we saw it, we started to laugh and cry at the same time." Bing Thom sighs over one of the new condo neighbourhoods in Portland, where the local developer asked him why they aren't as successful as Vancouver's. "He didn't really do the Vancouver model," says Thom. "He just put in the condos, but not everything else."
