Vancouver, often named one of the world's most livable cities, didn't get that way by accident. It took a series of not-so-obvious decisions.
A former British Columbia premier and a longtime urban planner just released a book describing their list of nine key turning points. Apparently their point is that currently planned transportation and development projects in Vancouver now threaten to undo many of those successes.
There's little in the book about Vancouver's "irritating and potentially dangerous sense of self-satisfaction," according to The Tyee. But the list is still fascinating:
-- Creation of a regional planning board after a 1948 flood forced officials to prepare for potential disasters.
-- The battle in the 1960s against plans to tear down urban neighborhoods and build in-city freeways.
-- Creation in the 1970s of an a regional reserve of agricultural land.
-- Regional planning based on neighborhood "livability" starting in the 1970s.
-- Remaking of the False Creek area after Expo 86.
-- A series of laws in the 1980s and 1990s mandating regional planning.
-- Creation of a regional transportation agency.
-- Shifting power and responsibilities to local government, away from the province.
Some of the elements of regional planning were also implemented in Portland. Seattle's list is much shorter, including regional water service decades ago, the package of 1960s reforms that created bus-transit system and cleaned up sewage, and the beginnings of regional transit in the 1990s.
Across Cascadia, the combining regional planning for infrastructure and local buy-in for neighborhood decisions still seems the best bet for coordinating new growth. It's worth considering this list of mistakes the book's authors came up with when asked by the Vancouver Sun:
1. Lack of authority in the regional government to enforce development near transit.
2. Slum clearance in the 1950s and 1960s.
3. Keeping the rural grid pattern south of the Fraser River, which makes density and transit difficult.
4. Allowing business-park sprawl.
5. Allowing the proliferation of underground malls that robbed streets of pedestrians.
6. Getting rid of the region's interurban rail and streetcars, which destroyed a comprehensive transit system and promoted more car use. The last interurban stopped in 1958.
7. Not containing the sprawl into farmland sooner.
8. Failing to consider sooner whether the region needed a vast rail system.