Istanbul can be seen as an urban flow—it has been the capital of three different empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman, and has a collective urban memory measured in millennia—while it remains questionable if Vancouver is really even a real city yet. In all honesty, Vancouver is still a small city of a half million people with another one and a half million sprawled out in suburbs vomiting off to the east. It’s definitely getting closer, but what will it take to make a real city here?
And what is “real” city anyway? I think many of us have a visceral idea: a liveliness, a vitality, a concentrated structural and cultural environment, a density. I asked Frances Bula, who writes about urban affairs for pretty much everywhere, what she thought about the question:
It is true that when I come back to Vancouver from New York or Toronto it often feels like Winnipeg in the middle of winter here. There’s just so little action. It’s not just the size of the city, it’s the volume and diversity of things to do and look at—it’s really diversity that a dense population brings. You have to have a critical mass of people living within a defined boundary. You just can’t have a real city without density. While the downtown is very dense, single-family dwellings dominate the city and we have to find ways to build the liveliness and bustle of downtown in other neighborhoods. There is that feel in some places, but we really need a lot more. It doesn’t have to be miles and miles of super-density, but concentrated high streets, pockets of real density, to focus neighborhoods.
That density or lack thereof has long been the subject of much hand-wringing in Vancouver, but over the last couple of decades that has changed dramatically, at least in the downtown core, and the city has been able to densify downtown in a reversal that has caught the eye of urbanists and planners across the globe.
Did you know that Vancouver has more high-rises per capita than any other city in North America? It’s true, although those skyscrapers don’t really scrape all that much of the sky. The city is considered to have a “mid-rise” skyline and most big buildings in the downtown only have a height of around 90 to 130 meters (295 to 426 feet), with the highest being the newly complete Shangri-La21 at 197 meters (646 feet) tall or sixty-one stories.
In large part, these subdued heights are a product of strict guidelines that maintain view corridors in the downtown. The height limits are part of trying to protect sightlines both within and below the high-rises of the surrounding ocean and mountains. Those guidelines allow special sites to exceed the guidelines to add some diversity, but the desire to maintain the views has kept the heights down, even while the actual buildings multiply like bunnies.
That skyline—and the residential density it has ushered in—is the subject of much admiration and what many observers point to first when they talk about why Vancouver is “getting it right.” Vancouver’s now-celebrated urbanism is built around the idea of convincing people to move in from the suburbs, to stop sprawling, and to come live on the downtown peninsula. The strategy is called Living First and is perhaps the signature accomplishment of Vancouver’s contemporary urbanism; it stimulated one local journalist enough to call it, “the greatest urban experiment to take place in Canada in half a century, one that has made Vancouver the envy of city planners across the continent.”22
The towers that all those people are moving into overwhelmingly take a very particular form: tall, slim, view-preserving glass towers sitting on a podium of two or three-story townhouses that are specifically designed to be welcoming to families. This form, with slight variations, dominates huge swaths of the city core. “There were exactly six of them in downtown Vancouver a decade ago; now there are more than one thousand.”23
They may be popular but they are not pretty: wall after wall of sterile, glassy towers with upscale, faux-brick townhouse bases on the bottom. Those towers may not be much to look at, but they are a very convenient model for mass replication that keeps everybody happy. The small footprints and number of units ensure high profit margins, the townhouses lure some families back downtown, and the whole thing is designed for density. Very tidy.
It is definitely true that Vancouver’s downtown density has jumped up remarkably, to the point where it is often claimed to have the highest downtown residential density in North America, including Manhattan. That may be a little deceiving, however, because Vancouver’s rate of residential growth is not even keeping pace with the Metro region:
The GVRD [Greater Vancouver Regional District, now Metro] grew by about 13 percent over the past decade, while the city of Vancouver grew by about 8 percent, which means that Vancouver is actually losing its share of growth within the region. Or put another way, the surrounding suburban municipalities are growing faster than Vancouver is.24
But it is true that while the suburbs are booming, the downtown has also been taking on huge volumes of people, which is a major achievement when compared to virtually any other North American city. And the goal of building density in the inner city is a worthy one.
Living First was largely conceived and popularized by Vancouver’s former co-director of planning, Larry Beasley, and his staff who were looking to create “an urban lifestyle that will bring people back from their 50-year romance with the suburbs.”25 The idea is to radically encourage downtown density by altering zoning laws to support condominiums, encourage pedestrian and bike access over automobiles, and to leverage developers for public amenities and subsidized housing in exchange for sweet profit margins.
This collaborative process—offering developers density in return for public amenities and good streetscape design—would become Vancouver’s modus operandi for the entire city core. In 1991, Beasley’s department rezoned much of the commercial core to allow residential development where once only offices, small commercial, small industrial and parking lots were permitted. This “Living First” strategy gave the core a shot of adrenaline. Developers snapped up empty lots, underutilized office buildings and warehouses, converting them all to condos and other residential units. Real estate became a high-energy sport.26
Larry described his thinking like this, after I asked him whether or not Living First and the condo-ization of the downtown core has created a developer’s profit-friendly city where the grail of density has exacerbated a housing crisis and urban inequality:
It’s a peculiar proposition to wish that developers would make less money. That’s like wishing I was the handsomest man in the world or something. We can wish it, but it’s not going to happen. I’ve taken another view. I’m perfectly happy to see developers make money. What I want to see is a significant amount of that created wealth come back to the commonwealth of the city.
So, there is a quid pro quo in this city which is relatively unique in North America saying that it is a privilege to develop in our city and you will make contributions back. Real contributions. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions. And this is not just amenities. A lot of the housing we have built for low-income people has been built through leveraging wealth and land from developers. It’s not just about creating a park—that’s part of it because our theory is that the only way you’re going to entice people to come back to the city and create the vitality you’re talking about is to give them something they’re going to want to come to in a free society.
We live in a system where profitability is a driver, and whether I like that or not is beside the point. My point is to say, “let’s take some of that profitability back.” But don’t kid yourself. In Istanbul, in Paris, in Shanghai, in Taiwan, in every city in the world, developers are getting rich. They are exploiting every city in the world, and they are exploiting Istanbul just as much as here. The difference is: in Istanbul they are not putting a nickel back in. They’re telling the government: you manage it. Which is why cities like Istanbul are falling apart, because it’s impossible to manage.
So,