Frances Bula
Sun
VANCOUVER – The firm that sparked a revolution in urban planning is coming to Vancouver to help design the city’s least-known megaproject.
Andres Duany, who with his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk has headed the New Urbanism movement, will be leading a week-long design workshop aimed at creating a preliminary plan for the city’s East Fraserlands project.
Duany’s firm, DPZ, is renowned for its work in designing new projects that, in a conscious counter to the problems of many suburbs, re-create small-town-like developments that are walkable, compact, diverse, and connected. That means building different housing types, so that people from different income levels live together, and creating communities that provide places and activities for all ages. As well, the firm makes a point of intimately involving local residents and community representatives in the design process.
“I have a very high opinion of the planning in Vancouver,” said Duany, whose firm has not done any work in mainland B.C. until now. “We think we can take New Urbanism to the next level there, maybe by being more environmentally sensitive.”
Duany and his team, working out of a tent on the East Fraserlands site, will conduct a seven-day design workshop open to the public.
Duany said he doesn’t know yet whether the development company will allow a mix of housing types that would include lower-income units. One of the criticisms made about developers who say they are building New Urbanist communities is that they adopt some of the superficial ideas, but not the more challenging ones, so their developments end up being uniformly middle- or upper-income.
Vancouver has a policy of requiring that 20 per cent of development in megaprojects is dedicated to affordable housing.
East Fraserlands is a 51-hectare parcel of land in Vancouver‘s southeast corner, with Southeast Marine Drive on one side and the Fraser River on the other. It is intended to provide housing for about 10,000 people when it is built out by its owners, ParkLane Homes and WesGroup Income Properties. Until now, this has been the city’s most suburban-feeling neighbourhood, with winding roads in an exclusively residential neighbourhood.
While many see Southeast Marine as a river of traffic horror that cuts the site off from the city, Duany said the road gives the new development a potential for shopping and vitality.
“Having it gives the potential for a more complete community,” said Duany, who is currently in Atlanta.
Nearby residents have said in the past that they, too, want a development that has more life and urban feel than the Fraser River project developed in the 1980s, the West Fraserlands.
Norm Shearing, the ParkLane vice-president of development, said the company wanted to bring in DPZ to get the public involved in planning what will be a whole new community.
“East Fraserlands is so complex and it needs more than the normal process for planning. DPZ is the best at this.”
As well, he said, the area needs a full neighbourhood plan that will help create both a community with a centre and one that connects back to the city.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
