The Vancouver Model of Density_Point Tower Typology

Broughton & West Hastings: While Coal Harbour represents a model for Vancouver’s high density living, the amount of surface parking surrounding these towers reveals further opportunities for interventions of architectural intensity.

In a bit of a synthesis of what this blog has covered over the past few months, I offer a view of what Vancouver model of density currently means for the Downtown peninsula. The replication of residential towers with similar floor-space ratios, design details, and colour palette in a planning-led initiative has led to the proliferation of a point tower podium typology which has furthered densification but has also produced a monotonous consistency in the built architectural form which now characterizes downtown Vancouver. So successfully so, that the Dubai Marina has now successfully created a new False Creek which has arguably superseded its originator in innovation, design, and usage: (Replicating Vancouver in Dubai) In Vancouver, the design of large scale mixed-use developments is being administered under the guidelines of City Hall in close partnership with the private sector of residential developers. The result is a homogenous typology that is being repeated throughout the city with little consideration given to site or cultural context. In essence, these projects are being plugged into the city rather than being connected to it. New master planned developments such as Concord Pacific Place, Coal Harbour, and smaller block developments such as Woodwards are developing entire city blocks, in a manner which consumes space rather than generates it.

The point tower typology’s massing, materials, choice of program and location of program are dictated by the urban planning zoning and development by-laws. The design of these new developments is also influenced by marketing and real estate specialists. These two forces have created a standardized and replicable building product that has become ubiquitous in new downtown Vancouver neighbourhoods.

Influences of Hong Kong and New Urbanism

01_The Tall and thin tower was imported from Hong Kong.

02_The four-storey eyes-on-the-street podium in the downtown core has been reinterpreted in response to New Urbanist tendencies to define street walls with front porches.

03_The nicely scaled podium, at street level, should make the tall, thin tower almost disappear from one’s perception.

View obsession

01_Downtown Vancouver is on a peninsula surrounded by ocean and mountains.

02_Slim towers are more expensive to build than bulky towers. However, purchasers bear for the extra costs in construction.

How did Vancouver get here?_The Breakdown or Top 5 Lists

In an attempt to make some sense of the qualitative/quantitative issues surrounding Vancouver's current urban form/makeup, a look at some previous observations made by Trevor Boddy in his September 2005 “Vancouverism vs. Lower Manhattanism: Shaping the High Density City” along with some of my own remarks outlines where I'm at thus far in questioning the current diversity/density situation of Downtown Vancouver:

Vancouver breaks iron rules of North American urbanism:
01_The continent’s youngest major city with its highest residential density;
02_Vancouver is the only major city in North America without a single freeway within its boundaries;
03_Current planning decisions are almost entirely insulated from interference by city councillors and mayor;
04_While having immigrant and non-white population ratios comparable to New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles, Vancouver has escaped many of the striations and frictions that come with neighbourhoods sorted by ethnicity. The ghetto of Vancouver is chemically derived instead;
05_For nearly 20 years, Vancouver has used a form of social bonus zoning, in which extra density in housing developments is granted in return for such public amenities as cultural facilities, parks, schools, and social housing.

Vancouverism’s current residential building typology has been generated by the following:
01_1960s: There has been a long-standing tradition of high density living: Since 1960s, the West End has had Canada’s densest residential neighbourhood; second in North America only to Manhattan;
02_1970s: False Creek South [Granville Island]: mix of income groups and modes of housing tenure in dense neighbourhoods with significant investment into parks, arts, rec. facilities, social housing;
03_late 1980s: North shore of False Creek: Hong Kong inspired small plate high-rise towers rather than the mid-rises constructed previously allowed for significantly higher densities. This was also due to Li Ka Shing’s acquisition of Expo lands and significant public investments in the area were extracted from his Concord Pacific Developments;
04_1991: ‘Living First’: codified social bonus zoning system and was partnered with a Vancouver market willing to live in smaller units in denser neighbourhoods;
[Taiwanese and Hong Kongers fleeing in the prospect of returning to China’s control in 1997]
05_Townhouses Typology: The same plan established the small plate high rise tower on townhouse base typology that is the architectural face of Vancouverism, along with the notion that developers, not taxpayers, would help pay for public amenities in new districts, raising the value of their constructions through a vibrant public realm. The same plan also re-zoned a huge portion of the downtown peninsula as “housing optional,” but which has since developed almost only as housing.

The current monotony in building typology can largely be attributed to:
01_Planners have too much control to intervene on visual and design issues and have a detrimental effect on the aesthetic and the social atmosphere of Downtown Vancouver; which has led to …
02_Vancouver’s urban successes come at the price of architectural quality, innovation, even standards of building finishes, which has led to…
03_Very few of Vancouver’s best architects winning commissions Downtown. Instead, low fee production houses [see tract house suburbia] with close linkages to developers [Bob Rennie, Ian Gillespie and others] which has led to…
04_A burgeoning market which buys nearly half the condo market as speculative investment and has little concern with issues of ownership, identity, and liveability and rather with resale value
05_As the final 10% of Downtown sites are developed, only now has architecture and the quality of housing layout started to become a real factor in the real estate market place.

A Brief History of Density_In Vancouver

April 1973_The Agriculural Land Reserve is created to limit urban sprawl. Prior to the 1970s, some 6,000 hectares of farmland were lost annually to urbanization.

May 1988_Shaugnessy residents fight a proposal to convert 3.2 hectares of neighbourhood parkland into multi-family housing.

December 1991_City Council approves the rezoning of eight million square feet of downtown commercial space to residential; the buildout of fomer Expo lands, now known as Yaletown, soon follows.

January 1992 _Arbutus residents protest the development of the Molson Brewery site. The condominiums and apartment towers go ahead, but with fewer units than planned.

June 1995_City Council adopts CityPlan to help define future growth, create or expand neighbourhood centres, and add density and variety in “neighbouhoods that have little variety right now”

September 1996_SFU formally approces UniverCity, a new residential community that’s to add 10,000 residents to Burnaby Mountain; 10 months later, UBC approves University Town, which will double UBC’s population to 20,900 by 2021.

May2002 Over 500 residents from Dundarave amd Ambleside pack a public meeting to protest a proposed density increase. Many wear funeral black.

July 2004_Mackenzie Heights goes to war with former MLA Art Cowie over his application to build a three-unit rowhouse. City planners receive over 100 messages protesting the project; council rejects the application.

January 2006 A Vancouver city staff report reveals the growing scarcity of affordable housing in Downtown Eastside, with rooms for rent declining from 900 in 1992 to under 600 in 2005.

July 2006_ALR commissioners reject a proposal to turn Barnston Island into an industrial park.

August2006_Concord Pacific purchases CBC’s staff parking lot for $34 million and begins construction on two highrises; studio suites start at a compact 566 sq. ft.

October 2006_NPA Councillor Kim Capri suggests shrinking the size of new SRO units to 100 sq.ft. “cruise ship cabins”

January 2007_CMHC figures for Greater Vancouver indicate multi-family units made up 70% of total housing starts in 2005-06, up from 40% in the 1980s.

February 2007_“The Aerie” becomes the British Properties’ first townhouse development, with units starting at $2 million.

February 2007_The GVRD tables a report calling for residential “intensification” in the region; only 11% of Vancouver land has multi-family units.

February 2007_Suspicious fires damage newly built Dunbar townhouses. The two units had been opposed by neighbours because they were built on two 25-foot-wide subdivided parcels.

February 2007_Vancouver begins a series of public workshops on Mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity initiative. The plan, approved by council in July 2006, adds a green dimension to the decades-old density debate; Brent Toderian, the city’s new director of planning, tells the media, “We are not a sustainable city and we can no longer pretend we are one.”

This synopsis was compiled by Rosemary Poole in the April 2007 edition of “Vancouver.”

The Overspecified Generic

“When you break west coast life down...to its fundamental elements...what you are left with is...PURE...the essence of west coast living.” www.livingpure.ca

In her critique of urban renewal policies in the US of the 1960s, Jane Jacobs praised the use of these generic outdoor spaces (balconies, steps, patio gardens) as spatial tools in support of vibrant, dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods. In response to her claims, it should be noted that in the context of contemporary Vancouver, Jacobs’ claims are impractical and do not reflect the reality of urban politics. Another criticism is that Jacobs’ approach leads to gentrification: an observed urban social process whereby urban economic development leads to old neighbourhoods becoming too expensive for the original population once “renewed.” The previous inhabitants are replaced by yuppies who enjoy the semi-bohemian life that results. In many cases, the reality of this pseudo-bohemian lifestyle reveals itself in the need to sacrifice other aspects of life in order to cover the mortgage/rent: decent food, adequate furnishings, enjoying pastimes, travel, etc. The new social realities are inconsistent with the market imagined not only by Jacobs, but by developers and the City of Vancouver itself.

An argument can be made that these generic spaces are not doing enough to bring vibrancy to the urban realm. Although residents who buy into new condos are occasionally given the power to choose: granite vs. butcher block countertops, the cappuccino machine nook, stainless steel appliances, the faux fireplace, these options do very little in bringing identity to the lives of the residents and absolutely nothing to the character of the building they actually dwell within. These cues prevent people from appropriating spaces in a meaningful way. Real-estate developers have become increasingly adept at marketing these pseudo-spatial implications that are convincing buyers that they actually have an identity in the cityscape of Vancouver. When in reality, there are no spatial implications being addressed in the consumer being given the choice of an electric fireplace or nook for the coffee maker they might not even have. This phenomenon has also fuelled the high degree of speculative investment in Vancouver. Resale to the unknown buyer is of the utmost importance and prevents any real appropriation of spaces or buildings to take place. It has come to the point where ultimately, if a prospective buyer can’t see the fireplace, they won’t know where to put the couch.

A certain image is maintained on the exterior of these new condos and townhouses that tells very little about the activities of the interior. This discrete image is only one layer in a series of layers that buyers in the urban Vancouver real estate market and speculative investors have become extremely receptive to. Notions of privacy are now being developed through the increasing ubiquity found in the realm of downtown. The degree to which City Hall and the Planning department have honed their craft at dictating a ‘desirable’ character for downtown Vancouver has generated an overly specific framework that leaves precious little to be interpreted or subverted. Successful developers in the Vancouver context have become exceedingly efficient at presenting proposals that fit exactly into the overly-prescriptive “guidelines” set up by City Hall which has resulted in an exceedingly replicable building typology found throughout downtown Vancouver.

Missing in Action_The Individual Part II

LWPAC’s Roar_one development of stacked homes in Vancouver is a vision of dense urban living. Situated above a shopping district on West 10th Street and resembling a converted warehouse, the complex is designed with an open living concept. Fitted with ten residential units, the model utilizes maximum space efficiency and features natural light and airflow. Roar_one architect Oliver Lang is optimistic about future projects: “We need more flexibility in bylaws to create more height. This [Roar_one] is a worthwhile model, but would be more successful with another set of units built on top.”

www.vancouver.ca/ecodensity

In Vancouver, the attempt to make large numbers of single-family houses cohere by stacking them on top of each other has resulted in the vertical embodiment of the suburban phenomenon – an endless sea of towers upon townhouses in which the desire for individual expression has been perverted into a need to be indistinguishable. For the most part, the complexities that converge in the North American dwelling have been reiterated and exacerbated rather than resolved by strategies that have indeed produced architectural and social order. Once established, this order is visibly and inherently problematic.

A profound issue confronting contemporary architecture is the fact that the cultural importance of the discipline that enabled architecture to take meaningful action was historically derived from a faith in a building’s capacity to produce order – in itself and society. Today, however, the very concept of order has become suspect. The denaturalization of language, context, time, and the human associated with the postmodern condition is increasingly revealing the ideological basis of order in efforts not to equalize but to eradicate difference. Order is rapidly retreating as a means of insuring personal liberty and emerging as a source of social repression and control. This graduation project attempts to demonstrate in different ways the impact on architecture being made by this new understanding of “order” as a social construct with only contingent value.

The traditional solution to growth – densification – is increasingly resisted by community groups because dense buildings are perceived to generate choking traffic and curbside parking problems, packed apartment houses and overburdened sewer lines and street infrastructure are considered physically inappropriate when juxtaposed against existing smaller scale neighbourhoods, and, though rarely articulated, because denser housing types symbolically stand for the rapid intrusion of people of different colours and languages who are perceived to represent a challenge to the hegemony of homeowner values (Unfortunately, the slower growth ascribed by those in opposition to density, ultimately means too few houses and apartments, which lead to the inevitable jump in housing prices. Paradoxically, proponents of density see High-rise living actually reversing the negative effects of automobile traffic such as road congestion, air pollution and gasoline consumption) This latter paranoia is only fed when the newcomers are people of low income and the spectre of dropping land values is raised in anguish-filled community halls and public forums. In order to convince voters that density is vital to sustainability and future prosperity, mayor Sam Sullivan and Director of Planning Brent Toderian have repackaged densification in the form of “EcoDensity”…more on this later.

Missing in Action_The Individual, Part I

Le Corbusier’s housing project in Le Pressac, France attempted to erase class segregation through a fundamental and ordered hegemony of form.

The fusion of social order with the order of individual lodging assigned to architecture the task of negotiating the complex relation between the public and the private. From the moment families began to identify themselves with their houses, the single-family house was burdened with the need to reinforce individual integrity while simultaneously demonstrating the individual’s relation to a larger social continuum. This conflict is reenacted with the design of every dwelling. No house can escape the fact that its sanctity as a private interior in which the most intimate aspects of life are defined will be compromised by the intrusion of public notions of order and reason. Even if physically and psychologically removed from other human beings and their shelters, the interiority of a private retreat inevitably reaches a point where it confronts the public realm. In multi-unit dwellings, townhouses, and other dwelling alternatives to the single-family house, the relation to the street embodies a certain confrontation or alternatively, a consensus on how the connected dwelling behaves in the context of the street, and/or the public realm. Generic spaces such as balconies, steps, patio gardens represent the contribution individual units make in the absence of front or back yards, garages, or the seeming individuality of the single family house.

The nature of this confrontation in the modern world would begin to crystallize when the design of a house was multiplied, conceptually, to produce the design of housing. The modern city is the spatial counterpart to this moment of crystallization, for the urban terrain is where the private order of the individual is most intensely juxtaposed with the social order of the public sphere. As urban populations escalated during the nineteenth century, this intensity burgeoned with two seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, the “masses” were housed in residences that, with some variations in their urban configuration, were characterized above all by their large number of utterly undifferentiated units. Individuals were housed and thus valued on some level, but differences between individuals and the inequities they revealed were decisively repressed. At the same time, the more mobile classes moved out from urban centers in an effort to preserve the sanctity of their homes. The stylistic expression of this effort, significantly contemporaneous to the uniform dwelling, was historical eclecticism. This apparent celebration of difference and individuality through formal variety revealed only the underlying homogeneity of suburban exclusiveness and thus paralleled the repression of heterogeneity taking place in the city.

The inadequacy of nineteenth-century strategies encouraged the Modern Movement to further erase difference – difference between city and country, between classes, between house and housing. Le Corbusier’s 1929 Villa Savoye and housing project in Pessac of 1925, for example, are designed according to a fundamentally similar order despite their profoundly distinct contextual, economic, and social conditions. The International Style imposed an even more aggressive formal unity in an effort to dissolve the barriers separating public and private space.

More to come in Part II...

Where the links come from

Not from this guy of course, former C0-Director/Dictator of City Planning Larry "Beezelebub" Beasley. Just as his work over the past decade in Vancouver has been equally as destructive as additive in the Downtown Peninsula, I've posted a few links that have been equally as informative as disinformative in my research over the past short while.

The Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association is pretty much self-explanatory, and certain executive members have taken an interest in UBC Architecture studio's dealing with Vancouver's urban fabric and continual attempts at renewal. There is definitely a vested interest in business with an emphasis on reversing the current condo conversions happening throughout the downtown peninsula. Among some ideas that I would highlight to give you a sense of where they're coming from: removing alley garbage bins entirely, massive tax breaks/incentives for new venture creation, panhandling eradication, etc.

Price Tags is the blog site of past city Councillor and current Director of the City Program at SFU. His blogs cover his travels throughout the Pacific Rim and the Pacific North West. He frequently and publicly butts heads with another Vancouver urban critic, Trevor Boddy in an entertaining manner. More on that later.

Small Footprints was a project put together by UBC Planning students which address particularly contextual issues surrounding affordability and value in the current Vancouver real estate market.

Laneway and Thin Homes is a brief but useful source for alternatives to conventional building assembled by the Canada Mortage and Housing Corporation, an extremely useful website for anyone interested in anything related to building in Canada.

SmartGrowth is a non-governmental agency devoted to ethically minded development in different urban contexts throughout British Columbia. Smart Growth, as addressed in the course reading, is a huge buzzword in today's urban conversations. SmartGrowth BC definitely falls within the 'new urban vision' category of alternative styles of managing urban growth in the Lower Mainland in particular.

Intense[City]: An introduction

Tower of Babylon by Pieter Brueghel 1563

Historically, the city as evil symbol finds greatest expression in the ancient superpower of Babylon. Babylon was denounced as the sinful city-state whose politics, military might, and very urban civilization posed an arrogant challenge to God. The fabled tower of Babylon within the city was a powerful symbol of hubris and idolatry.

Residual Space

“Form matters, but not so much the forms of things as the forms between things.” Stan Allen, Points+Lines (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p.17.

While smaller units, higher densities, and locations further from the city center offer a way to provide affordable housing, these units often tend to compromise common perceptions of living comfort, privacy, and independence generally associated with home ownership. The quest for affordable and sustainable communities has encouraged architects and planners to investigate smaller-housing prototypes and densification strategies. These approaches complement socio-demographic changes (i.e. the increase in smaller/non-traditional households), economic constraints (i.e. the increased cost of serviced land in most urban centers), and the attention to environmental issues. The narrow-front rowhouse is proposed as an alternative housing type to the current point tower podium typology designed with cost
and resource reduction in mind.

With macro scale implications of community planning with narrow-front housing, a typological study will be introduced which will attempt to define the human microscale as well as parameters for alternative forms of effective architecture within zoning regulations, building code analysis, and prefabrication. These patterns will address three principal issues: the accommodation of parking and vehicular circulation, private and public open spaces, and unit and community identity - issues which are critical in the design decision-making process of in the context of Downtown Vancouver.

Now having said this, I digress:
I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta and lived in a variety of types and sizes of dwelling. Beginning in a town home, then a 680 sq.ft. house, on to 1,200 sq.ft., then finally to 2,400 sq.ft., the subsequent doubling of floor space accompanied the growth of my family. All three houses were of an older vintage and each required substantial renovation, undertaken by my father who was a carpenter. Each had detached garages, yards, alley access, and were located towards the centre of the city and due to my parents’ fondness for the area, were all within walking distance of each other.

My wife and I have lived in Vancouver for three years now in a 35 year old 560 sq.ft condo in Mount Pleasant, but my real estate expectations – what home means, what a decent amount of space is, how much I ought to pay for it – are undeniably rooted in the sprawling Alberta prairies. When I browse real estate listings, I remind myself that for the going rate of our entry-level condo, we could, in many parts of the country, purchase a farmstead, acreage, or a new 2,500 sq.ft. home in suburbia. This partly explains why new condos in Vancouver don’t appeal to me, although we do own, more out of economic necessity than for a desire to live in Vancouver at current rental prices. And why I’ve come to realize that like most of my generation, I’m probably never going to live in single family home in Vancouver. My wife and I are expecting a child this summer, and we’re doing everything we can to make our shoe box condo feel as spacious as the single family homes our friends in Alberta have the luxury of trying to ‘fill’ with furniture, possession, but mostly just ‘stuff’.

Reduced expectations are at the heart of Vancouver’s density issue, and not coincidentally, what has fuelled the fervour in the latest sustainability movement. I may be generalizing, but I assume that like most of my generation X&Y cohorts, I’m guilty of wanting the level of value [or is it luxury?] that my parents enjoyed. Do I really want to move to the far-flung suburbs in order to have a single-family house that might remotely resemble the ones I grew up in? If so, I would want it to be my choice, rather than the imposition of the current market.

Our friends can rant for hours about real dollars, inflation, speculative bubbles, Olympic hype, and all the factors that appear to have priced us out of the market, but we’re still here. Although to be honest, we have begun to look elsewhere. Smaller, rural, remote perhaps? I think density is a great idea, on both cultural and ecological grounds, but I don’t want the glossy, Euro-clad lifestyle package of the recent condo boom that pervades seemingly every newspaper and street-side billboard. I want density with character, soul, and identity. If I’m going to live in a small space – and more and more Vancouverites are, as people crowd into the Lower Mainland and continue to force vertical development – I want it to be distinctly my own, not some cloned version of granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, or ferro-cement clad row houses.

Density has always been a tough sell in North America. If you live in the condo, where do you put the new barbeque, the sea-doo, or the RV? For the bigoted and the skittish, dense cities also bring the unsettling possibility of living side by side not only with other races and cultures, but with all the other products of urban city living: addicts, artists, the homeless, students, and everything else you can imagine. Given the psychological integration required to deal with such diversity, the popular response has been to flee to the suburban edges. Sprawl is the most important and undeniable contributor to North American city growth.

Vancouver’s response to sprawl and its acidic side effects – urban decay, clover leaf gridlock, gobbled farms and wetlands – has been a bag of urban renewal tricks, with an emphasis on densely populated, mixed-use neighbourhoods. Thanks to the efforts of municipal magicians like former co-Director of City Planning Larry Beasley and marketing guru Bob Rennie, condo living was rebranded from a squalid lowbrow compromise into a ready-to-wear downtown cocktail party, complete with state of the art catalogue companions: granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

In the past 15 years, Vancouver’s downtown population has doubled and the success of the city’s density effort has even coined a now global urban design buzzword: Vancouverism. Now, at least for a certain upscale, trend-conscious audience, the term density no longer means the claw of the urban jungle. It has a visionary loft to it, a conceptual shimmer of a blissful metropolis with a pseudo-democratic and equitable mantra that might go something like this: A condo, a futon and a latte for every citizen – at least those who can handle the mortgage.

Most of the designer condo towers in Vancouver have sprouted from old industrial lands and brownfield sites, which in development terms means low-hanging fruit: no neighbourhood associations to impede progress. Such ripe and ready brownfields are almost all gone, and much remaining square footage downtown is now being reserved for prospective office space, in reaction to the past decade of the city prioritizing residential conversion of commercial space. So as Vancouver proper adds over 4,000 new residents each year, and the GVRD expects to grow from 2.2 million to a projected 3.3 million in the next 25 years1, enter Mayor Sullivan and so-called "EcoDensity".

Sullivan’s initiative makes candid use of the ecological footprint model of UBC community and regional planning professor Bill Rees. “If all people on Earth lived the way we do in Vancouver,” the brochure reads, “it would take four planets, not one to sustain the population.”2 Half the world’s population lives in cities, uses three quarters of its resources, and kicks out three-quarters of the pollution. In this context, Vancouver, like every other city, needs to do more with less to be sustainable. And there are already examples surfacing around Vancouver: townhouses appearing in West Vancouver, infill housing in Shaugnessy, Dunbar’s shrill but ultimately futile resistance before the steamroller of densification. Enter new City Planner, Brent Toderian who calls the new paradigm “resilient liveability.”

The term defines liveable density not as the artful presence of his predecessor’s view condos and corridors but as development that acknowledges global warming and peak oil prices. Resilient density also means that I can say goodbye to any idea of an affordable single-family home in the city, and so can all those of my generation who do no have substantial wealth or a substantial inheritance headed their way. The mayor, the city planners and the development community are using the global environmental crisis to facilitate some profitable projects, but that’s fine by me, because in principle, they are right. Densification, particularly densification that encourages green building practices, is a clear and present need. My question has to do again, with soul, identity, and individual character. Creating living and working spaces that transcend the cookie-cutter version we’ve become so adept at selling to each other.