July 14, 2006
By Neil Fraser
WHEN I visited Vancouver a couple of years back (Citichat 36/2004), I was impressed more with the quality of city planning than with some aspects of the city itself. It has consistently been dubbed North America's most liveable city and has a most beautiful natural setting that reminds one of Cape Town, one of the mildest climates in Canada, great public spaces and so on - but I wasn't crazy about the architecture. I found the repetition of dozens upon dozens of similar looking glass-clad skyscrapers somewhat monotonous. But on the planning side, they were way ahead of the game.
In October 2004 I wrote – "The city took a conscious decision to become lifestyle oriented and, because of its natural beauty, tourism focused. It adopted a "living first strategy" and employed a number of visionary planners. "Urban design matters", says the City Manager Judy Rogers, "because urban design is an economic issue – if the public realm is hostile, people won't want to live close together and that doesn't fit with our policy of compactness." Zoned agricultural areas surrounding the city can't be used for residential so development is inward focused. The City Manager says thatcompact development forces one to improve the areas where you live and that this doesn't happen where sprawl is allowed 550 000 people in 47 sq kms (the city not the metro). Putting people first, not cars (they voted against any freeway system going through the city 30 years ago) has resulted in the number of city residents growing off a low base to 40 000 by 1986, double that by 2004 and projected to grow to 120 000 by 2021. A superb public transport system has resulted in the number of cars coming into the city actually decreasing from 1986 whilst residential population has doubled. Office vacancy is almost zero."
In the quotation above, I've marked in bold the issues that we should be taking to heart!
The 'Living First' strategy, first introduced some 15 years ago, was evidently the brainchild of their chief planner, Larry Beasley, and was predicated on "creating an urban lifestyle that will bring people back from their 50 year romance with the suburbs". It was incredibly successful in achieving this. North American cities seldom have as much as five percent of their residents living in their downtown areas – Vancouver has reached 20 percent. In terms of city residential densities the closest comparisons are evidently Hong Kong and Rio.
We are quite thin on decent statistics but I reckon that if you take into account Hillbrow, Berea and the centre city areas, we are probably at about 5.5 percent and growing!
But all is not well in Vancouver and we must take cognisance of some of the signs and outcomes they are experiencing. An article appeared in last week's edition of The Economist that highlighted some of the problems.
Firstly, there appears to be criticism of the fact that the authorities have been slow to respond to the city's growth, particularly in terms of transport. "Only now are suburban railways being built. Opponents worry that a C$3 billion roadbuilding plan by provincial government threatens to reverse Vancouver's relative success in containing sprawl, and funnel thousands more cars into the city. "
Secondly, there appears to have been a massive increase in drugs and crime particularly in the downtown area – "homeless panhandlers yell at theatre-goers, while young addicts deal drugs on street corners. "
But it is the third issue, possibly at the core of these two previous issues, that we must be particularly concerned about, and that is the balance between commercial and residential space in the downtown (or, in our terms, the core of the inner city). This was not dealt with in the article in The Economist but in the cover story of the June edition of 'GOVERNING.com' entitled "Extreme Makeover". This article states that "Vancouver has what every city wants these days: a vibrant, safe, glamorous downtown, full of residents who have money to spend and enjoy themselves spending it at all hours of the day, every day of the week." However, the article continues: "Vancouver has begun to realise that its downtown is such a magnet for urban condo dwellers that it runs the risk of ceasing to serve the other purposes downtowns have traditionally served – as centres of commerce, corporate employment, jobs and overall economic life."
(We may shrug this off as we appear to be far off the Vancouver density, but we actually do come off a very weak base as we lost a huge amount of 'traditional' purposes.)
While Vancouver's downtown is still the major employment centre within the metro area – providing about 77 000 jobs – there have been no new major office buildings built since the turn of the century, and land available for new commercial development is almost non-existent. The article suggests that within a decade or two, Vancouver could become a place where huge numbers of people live but not many work.
The article then refers to a similar trend of downtown residential population growth in a number of American cities.
- Philadelphia's centre city population grew by 11 percent between 2000 and 2005 and is predicting this to grow to 25 percent by 2010. However, office space has remained static since 1990 and the number of jobs in the centre city has declined by 10 000 in 15 years.
- In New York, older commercial space is being converted to residential 'at a rapid rate' – 800 000 square metres in five years.
- In St Louis the office vacancy rate has fallen but evidently not because of an enlarging commercial market, but rather because of conversions to residential living space, 130 000 square metres in the last couple of years.
So what does this have to do with us? I've always expressed the view that we need more residential occupation in the city centre particularly of middle and higher income residents. I still believe that. A survey we did a little while ago reflects a massive amount of conversion of office space into middle-income residential, particularly in Braamfontein, the Jeppe, Bree and Plein Street areas centring around the Smal Street Mall. Then there is the upper-middle to high-income node in Commissioner Street around Corner House, Diagonal Street, the southern end of Rissik Street, the one I referred to last week in Anderson/Marshall Streets. And, of course, new-build residential projects planned for Newtown, at last count probably an investment of between a half and one billion rand.
Our zoning regulations are such that you can literally convert buildings anywhere; all you have to comply with are health regulations. But are we providing the infrastructure for these new residential nodes to function effectively? Are we creating the requisite amount of public open space? Education and health facilities? Transport?
While we have a Spatial Development Framework, what we urgently need is a new urban design framework for the city core – the one for Newtown is reasonably current and has proved its value as developers start taking up opportunities. But the city core is much neglected and reactive. As much as we need residential opportunities in the city, the current laissez faire attitude to planning is going to land us in trouble in the long term. We need to plan where we want residential units and where we definitely do not want them; if current zonings cannot be changed, then we need a carrot and stick approach to direct residential where we want it and to discourage it where it isn't wanted. And we need to plan for the public space and the infrastructure needed to support residential accommodation. We need to have a clear policy regarding the integration of all economic levels in precincts, high, middle and low. While Vancouver may have been over-planned, we are at the other end of the scale – we need to find the balance.
New Community Structure in process of establishment.
On Tuesday evening a meeting of about 100 citizens of the city supported the establishment of a new community structure, the Hillbrow-Berea Broad Based Community Initiative – good news because citizen involvement has deteriorated over the past decade. What I found particularly interesting was that many of the participants represented religious organisations within the inner city. African-American churches have played a significant role in inner city regeneration, housing and social services in American cities and I have never understood why we were unable to get such support for our own urban regeneration efforts over the past decade or so. The initiative is being promoted by Ishmael Mkhabela under the auspices of his Interfaith Community Development Association (ICDA) that has done great work over the years in the inner city under his leadership. For more information, contact the ICDA on 011 339 3474.
Street art worth visiting
During Wednesday lunch-time a group of about 40 people gathered together in Juta Street, Braamfontein, to witness the 'unveiling' of nine
large scale steel tree sculptures installed between Bertha, De Beer and Melle Streets. This area has recently been upgraded in terms of pavements, lighting, planting etc under the urban design of Albonica Sack Mzumara Architects.
The initiative flows out of conceptual design workshops conducted in 2005 by the highly talented Trinity Session with Claire Regnard and a group of students from the Imbali Visual Literacy Project. This was in response to the City's desire to create a 'cultural arc' stretching from Constitutional Hill through Braamfontein to Newtown that had to be curtailed due to lack of adequate funding. However, the Johannesburg Development Agency were able to put a small budget aside as part of the public space upgrade project in Braamfontein.
The design concepts that came out of last years' workshops have now been translated under the artistic direction of Claire Regnard into "human scale expressions of tree-like forms; the positive-negative shapes profiles of the sculptures will respond to daytime and nighttime light in the form of shadow play, reflection and movement".
They inject some much-needed whimsy into our streetscape and are great fun - another must-see. Slip in over the weekend!
Cheers, Neil
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