From The Tyee – May 13, 2011

by Erick Villagomez

Vancouver is well-known for its approach to urbanism,
and using densification towards creating a more liveable city. In
reality, however, this popularity is focused on the relatively small
area of Vancouver’s downtown core and the neighbourhoods immediately
surrounding it. Moreover, emphasis is often placed on the city’s
podium-towers as the future of sustainable urbanism.

The vote Tuesday by city council to approve
the Cambie Corridor Plan, allowing mid-rise towers of up to 12 stories
along that key artery — and taller towers at Marine Drive and Oakridge
intersections — shows a different version of what the future may hold.
More recent developments in Vancouver outside the downtown core, such as
Olympic Village, have successfully deployed a mid-rise urbanism, and
the Cambie Corridor Plan builds off many of the lessons learned from
such projects, instead of the renowned downtown peninsula.

Recently, I conversed with Vancouver’s
director of planning, Brent Toderian, about the Cambie Corridor Plan,
and what it means for the future of Vancouver and the City’s approach to
urban planning. Here is a condensed version of that discussion (with a
longer version found here.)

Erik Villagomez: This is the first
time since 1928 that a large area of the city, spanning multiple
neighbourhoods, is attempting to be planned comprehensively. Can you
talk about how it differs from past approaches that focus more on
developing small pockets of the city individually?

Brent Toderian: “It’s
true, the Cambie Corridor work represents the largest and most complex
area planning exercise — crossing several neighbourhoods and involving a
significant intended transformation over time — that we’ve ever
undertaken outside of the central area. I’ve also suggested that the
corridor will eventually become the third most significant area of
complex urbanism in the city, after the downtown and the Broadway
Corridor.

“Originally, the planning department had
conceived the work program along Cambie Street as a series of station
area plans, and that would have taken a long time — six to eight years
in total — to do one at a time. Not only was that approach lengthy and
time consuming, it also, to my mind, thought about the street and
transit line in the wrong way. It didn’t think about the corridor as a
corridor, but saw the corridor as a series of individual areas. And it
didn’t necessarily think about change along the corridor in the areas in
between the stations. From my perspective, you don’t have to choose one
or the other, you can do a corridor approach that recognizes the
transit-related commonalities and consistent principles along its
length, but also recognizes the unique identity of the station areas.

“And that’s what we’ve done — a corridor
approach that also breaks the corridor into distinct neighbourhood
areas, each with their unique identity.”

Read full article