Density in a City of Neighbourhoods (1)

On June 5 2012, Carbon Talks and the City of Vancouver brought together representatives from communities throughout the city to discuss:

The role of density in Vancouver’s development
How density can be applied in individual communities and to what extent it is desirable
To what degree increased density may enable the City to meet its Greenest City Action Plan goals

For this session, I wrote a discussion guide, Density in a City of Neighbourhoods – my perspective of a journey from the earliest years of land-abundant settlement to the towering glass city of 2012.

Here’s the beginning the first section of many that I’ll be posting on this blog over the next week or so.

Early Days

There has never been a time when density in Vancouver wasn’t increasing.

Unlike older urban settlements, this city was exclusively suburban from the outset: residential subdivisions surrounding a compact downtown. Each house had its own lot – single-family home or rooming house – separated from its neighbours. Subdivisions were strung along streetcar lines stretching to far parts of the region. Vancouver was a city continually opening up more cheap land primarily for single-family subdivisions. It largely stayed this way until the 1940s.

This idea of a single house for every family was, for most of our history, the dream. An immigrant anticipated that he might buy his own piece of land, build his own house with a front lawn and a back garden, and that all his neighbours would do the same, whether in working-class Strathcona or upper-class Shaughnessy. Vancouver was a rare city in which during times of prosperity a majority of the workforce would be homeowners, not renters.

This was the realization of a Canadian Dream, as it was in other frontier societies such as America and Australia – a dream that attracted people from all over the world.

For the initial decades of Vancouver’s development there were almost no terraces or flats in Vancouver, no rowhouses or shop houses, no hutongs or lilongs, no apartment-house districts or “multiple-family zones” – save for the rooms-to-rent in Gastown, tenements in Chinatown and hotels along Granville. Only the poor and ethnically excluded would have to live in dense living environments, which then became characterized as ghettoes or slums by outsiders – not places of aspiration, regardless of how valued by the community inside. For many, density was associated with decay, both physical and social.