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.