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.
"What they like is our urbanism and mixed use," says Cheng. "We take it for granted, but the more I travel around, the more I understand what has made Vancouver unique. It's not so much a style we have here. It's an attitude. Other cities go for grand settings. In Vancouver, it's people-centric."
But the leader of the Vancouverist pack is Beasley, now that he has liberated himself from city employment to spread the Vancouver gospel. Beasley is the first to acknowledge that he did not invent the Vancouver of today. The groundwork was laid by people before him (especially his predecessor, Spaxman, to whom he refers frequently), made possible by councils that demanded developers give something back to the city, and carried out by dozens of other planners around him.
Beasley became the crown prince of the new Vancouver because he was the one who oversaw the transformation of what had largely been a suggestion-let's create more downtown neighbourhoods like the West End-into reality during the years when the city's megaprojects were developed and its other downtown areas saw a flood of condo-building. He orchestrated it all with a meticulous attention to what he calls "experiential planning": designing streets, buildings, public spaces, and neighbourhoods with an almost obsessive focus on what they would feel like to a typical citizen experiencing them block by block.
