New Urbanism: "The Vancouver Model" [Speaking of Places]

New Urbanism: “The Vancouver Model” Trevor Boddy [To pontificating jerk in movie line-up:] “I just happen to be Marshall McLuhan, and I heard what you said — you know nothing of my work.” — Herbert Marshall McLuhan, In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, 1978 While the San Francisco Planning Commission’s public hearings on December 4, 2003, had fewer one-liners than a Woody Allen movie, the meeting had — to my surprise — the same tone of angry ennui. At issue was the fate of four bulky highrise towers planned for the Rincon Hill and Transbay areas south of Market Street, near the western landing of the Bay Bridge. As a visiting architecture critic from British Columbia, it seemed to me that all through that long afternoon, every- one who took to the podium had something to say about whether Vancouver-style, tall, skinny high-rise towers set on townhouse podiums were the best prototype for the city’s planned new high-density residential neighborhoods. And as each speaker rattled through their allotted three minutes, it occurred to me that landowners, developers, and the architects who work for them generally agreed the Vancouver direction would be a horrible mistake. Mean- while, citizens, city planners, and San Francisco designers without pending commissions in the area all thought this direction just right, the bees’ knees. After listening to a dozen citizens make both positive and negative comparisons between these proposals and recent housing in my own town, I just had to get up and say something. And as I got in the speaker’s lineup for my own three minutes, I flashed on the scene from Annie Hall in which Woody Allen casts my cultural hero, Marshall McLuhan, to play himself. Suitably rumpled and 1970s-mustachioed, McLuhan professorially corrects a pretentious pseudo-intellectual in a movie lineup, who is loudly spouting a Cliff’s Notes version of his communication theories. McLuhan had developed his ideas on the power of con- temporary media from the vantage point of Edmonton and Winnipeg — places of cultural consumption, not cultural production. As I considered how my Vancouver perspec- tive might similarly contribute to the housing debate in San Francisco. Almost everything I heard San Franciscans say — on both sides of the issue — about Vancouver was wrong, or at least partially wrong. This, too, then, was to be the substance of my comments: “You, sirs, know noth- ing of our work.” Shock value aside, my intent that day was not to discour- age San Franciscans from applying the “Vancouver model” to their planned new near-downtown neighborhoods. Truth be told, I believe our experience provides the best possible solution to many current issues of urban housing and livability there and elsewhere, and it would please me immensely if San Francisco could avoid some of our mistakes, and even do us one better to regain its tradi- tional role as the West Coast’s most enlightened center of city-building. The Vancouver Innovations As anybody in attendance at the Planning Commission hearing that day could surely attest, the block typology of small-plate high-rise towers on townhouse podia is an extremely hot topic in planning and architecture circles these days. But this typology, which predominates on the downtown Vancouver peninsula, is the result of a particu- lar inheritance that has yet to be adequately explained. 1 To understand Vancouver’s urban design revolution, one must first understand something of the general climate of Canada’s tax, transportation and housing policies. In the urban design realm many of these have to do with expen- ditures the Canadian government has not made — virtues of omission, not commission. Many Americans find it hard to understand how their public treasury provides extensive subsidies to urban sprawl, partly in the form of tax deduct- ibility for mortgage payments, unknown in Canada and nearly every other nation. Similarly, immense public sub- sidy initiated through the Department of Defense built the Interstate highway system. Lacking these defense-driven subsidies, Canadian cities built freeways only where required. In global terms, the wholesale destruction of inner-city neighborhoods for highways is an almost uniquely American phenomenon, prompted by specifically American politics and notions of the “public.” Yet — even by the standards of Canadian Boddy / New Urbanism: “The Vancouver Model”

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