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.
But for every Vancouver fan who's content to simply copy the exterior, there are many more who admire the "everything else"-that intangible quality that is less about buildings and more about how buildings, streets, places, parks, and people are brought together.
In Washington, at the marble-pillared National Building Museum, Larry Beasley gives the closing address for the Capitals Alliance conference. The event attracts a small but dedicated group of professional city lovers who gaze attentively at his slide show of downtown Vancouver. In high motivational-planning-sermon mode he urges them to be brave in their own cities.
"Knowing is not doing. Those of us who are planners and managers of cities now have to shift our emphasis from polemics to implementation," says Beasley, wearing his usual impeccable suit, with an emerald-green tie to complement the conference's theme of sustainability.
After the speech, people line up to have a word with him. Stacie Turner, a young realtor who is the mayor's appointee to Washington's National Capital Planning Commission, wants to talk about an immediate application of Vancouver ideas to a sector of Washington that's being redeveloped. Jeff Soule, the international director of the American Planning Association, points out that it's not just downtown Vancouver that people admire, though it gets the lion's share of attention. "We consider the Greater Vancouver region a laboratory for interesting stuff," says Soule. "It seems to us Vancouver's always trying things. Certainly Vancouver is very much on any planner's radar screen."
