CITY SKYLINE: Olympic-related construction projects will have a dramatic impact
JIM JAMIESON
Province
An artist’s impression of the $495-million Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre currently under construction in Coal Harbour — THE PROVINCE
The major projects
An estimated $16 billion worth of construction projects are on the books between now and 2010. Here are some of them:
1 A $1.7-billion RAV line between Richmond and Vancouver; 2 A $495-million Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre expansion; 3 A $162-million Olympic Village on False Creek; 4 A $1-billion expansion of the Port of Vancouver’s container terminals; 5 A $1.4-billion upgrade of facilities at Vancouver International Airport; 6 A $600-million bridge across the Fraser from Langley to Maple Ridge; 7 Expansion projects at both the University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University.
Vancouver will have not only a different look but also a different feel when the world comes to visit for the Winter Olympics in 2010.
Certainly, the slew of mega construction projects that will come to fruition in the next five years will transform the city’s landscape in major ways.
The downtown core will boast a number of new structures and features, starting with the $1.7 billion RAV line linking it with Richmond and the airport, the $495 million Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre expansion off Coal Harbour and a $162 million Olympic Village by the edge of False Creek.
Vancouver’s downtown skyline will also have a new focal point when the posh 60-storey Shangri-La hotel tower at Georgia and Thurlow becomes the city’s tallest building in 2008.
But the city — and region — in 2010 will be more than just the sum of its physical parts. Residents and tourists can expect to find a city that finally, after decades of construction, starts to feel finished.
The Vancouver core, says economist David Baxter, executive director of the Urban Futures Institute, will be starting to come into its own as a community.
“Five years from now, the down town is finished, the convention centre is finished, all of these condos are finished,” says Baxter. “So we’re going to be looking at a downtown that has become oriented to the downtown residents. That will make it more comfy to tourists and visitors because it will have more of a 24-hour feel to it, like Montreal.
“There will be more small restau rants, more small shopping, a wider range of hours. It will feel more like a community or neighbourhood, like the Denman-Davie intersection does now. It attracts a lot of tourists but on Friday-Saturday nights the parkside restaurants are full of locals.”
Baxter says the traditional boundaries of downtown will also expand.
“It will be creeping east,” he says. “There will be some tension over the next five years over the Downtown Eastside.
“There’s an evolution happening there already. I was looking at a small manufacturing building three blocks east of Main and it had a sign saying please don’t throw your needles in the garbage, so the impact is already being felt there.”
Baxter says the growing number of downtown residents will spur an already burgeoning arts community.
“What will be driving it will be the high density of downtown residents, who have a relatively small square footage of space to live in, so they’re not going to go home at night and weed a garden,” he says. “They’re going to go to a play or a gallery. As our population grows we’ll be able to support more of that.”
This will also be driven by an upsurge in retiring baby boomers, who have more time to attend cultural events, Baxter added.
The expanded convention centre will ramp up the city’s ability to attract visitors, says Paul Vallee of Tourism Vancouver. The expansion will increase the centre’s exhibit space from 91,205 to 322,000 square feet. This will improve the facility’s ranking in North America from 76th to 37th.
“All of the development we’ll see running up to the Olympics will be significant in terms of the tourism industry, but particularly the convention centre,” says Vallee. “It will be a significant contributor, long term. Right now, we have a terrific convention centre, but the increase in size is going to allow us to host two conventions at the same time and slightly bigger groups. We’re not going to become a Las Vegas, but it will put us into a bigger league.”
Vallee says the RAV line will also become a magnet for tourists.
“You’re not going to have people choosing a destination because of RAV, but getting in and around a city is a very important factor for the toursim industry,” he says. “Cities that have a strong transportation infrastructure reflect well in a visitor’s experience.”
Improved transit will allow visitors — and residents — the opportunity to more easily get around a growing region that will experience worsening transportation problems.
Hugh Kellas of the Greater Vancouver Regional District planning department says the Lower Mainland is going to be a bigger, more populous, busier place.
“There’s going to be 150,000 more people, 80,000 more jobs, another 80,000 vehicles running around,” he says. “There will be significant change in some areas. In the Vancouver-Richmond corridor there will be construction taking place along there in anticipation of the RAV line opening — just like it did along the Millenium line.”
Kellas sees a people-centred, community-focused Greater Vancouver in five years’ time.
“A lot of the construction that’s underway is designed to have a strong interaction with the public,” he says. “When people build restuarants these days, they build them with outdoor aspects. There’s a lot of attention going into pedestrian quality, shopping quality, the small parks that relate to people in local areas.
“We’ll see a community that’s more mature and more strongly tied together by strong transportation networks.”
