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.
At the end of the night in Washington, the head of Abu Dhabi's urban-planning council, Falah Al Ahbabi, sits down at a cleared-off banquet table to give me the history of his country's romance with Vancouver. It started shortly after the sheikdom opened up its land in 2006 to private development and found itself instantly overwhelmed.
"Before we had this plan, we had so many developments happening around the city without any vision. It was a free-for-all market," says the articulate, 32-year-old Al Ahbabi, who went to university in Arizona for management studies. "We decided we wanted to have a plan and that we would learn from others. So we contacted the best players."
In June 2006, Al Ahbabi came to Vancouver. He went to cafés, strolled the streets, and found he could walk to meetings with Beasley and others. It was a revelation. "Everything was in close proximity, which made it easy to live. I never walked like that in other cities."
Shortly afterward, Beasley was appointed special adviser to Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the British-educated prince who has emphasized that he wants to create an environmentally sustainable city. Since Beasley started, Abu Dhabi has been infiltrated by his disciples. At least eight Vancouverists are working for either the planning council or developers, and Beasley has imported planner Joe Hruda of CIVITAS Urban Design, architect Peter Busby, and sustainability consultant Mark Holland to help design master concepts. Ironically, everyone working there prefaces every conversation with a reminder that they are not in Abu Dhabi to replicate Vancouver. That sort of cloning, they say, is not what Vancouverism is about.
