Brad Pettitt, the Mayor of Fremantle, Australia, was visiting Vancouver 
last week – and he did what every good urban politician should do.
He went for a walk.
Specifically, he wandered through the West End, taking notes on his iPhone on what he observed. Canadians (like Aussies, no doubt) are always interested in what outsiders think of us, and so I asked him to send his notes along.
Here, with some of my added illustrations, is what Brad thought Fremantle could learn from the West End.
Ten Commandments for medium density urban design:
1. Activate the street. There should be an activated frontage every ten metres.
2 Ground floor usages should be diverse meet local needs and be open diverse hours.
3 Frontages should be at the same level as the street with no more than a 30cm step up.
4 Plant street trees and lots of them. They are awfully generous towards dull modern architecture.
5 Mandate a diversity of housing types sizes
and levels of affordability. Rich people are boring on their own.
6 Invest in quality public parks and spaces for people to meet and recreate in. Make space for community.
7 Embed high quality and high frequency
public transport into the development from the start. Preferable light rail or street cars that create investor certainty.
8 Traffic calm streets so cars are last in the hierarchy.
9 Have it within walking distance of transit such as heavy rail.
10 Don’t obsess over height. It’s not a significant amenity factor if you get the rest right.
Include high quality public art.
I like the inclusion of being open diverse hours. That’s one area where enclosed malls really fail, in that they mandate specific hours the shops are open and none others. It’s either very alive or very dead, but always very artificial feeling.
Except that the West End isn’t really within walking distance of rail transit, in the way that high density neighbourhoods in New York, Montreal, London and Paris are with a metro station at the corner. From a mass transit perspective, the West End exists as a kind of island in the city. It is interesting to see how the Canada Line is taking on the traditional function of an urban subway, as a high speed shuttle between major activity centres. People in Yaletown now go to Oakridge to shop in about 10 minutes, and judging by mid-day volumes, lots of others are using it to move across the city quickly. Shooting down to Richmond from False Creek for a first class Asian dinner (or even lunch) is probably happening all the time now. Unfortunately due to the primarily journey to work commuter mind set that has governed the development of the skytrain network, the West End is not able to share in this urban convenience benefit.
Love #10: Don’t obsess over height. It’s not a significant amenity factor if you get the rest right.
Where I live (Victoria), we squash (literally) good proposals because of a fear of height.