Part 4 (first of two sections) from 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 – written for Carbon Talks at SFU.
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THE MODERN ERA – Transition
After World War II, communities that had seen little maintenance for several decades were considered by planners to be afflicted with ‘blight,’ ready for urban renewal.
Coupled with the demand for apartments close to jobs in the burgeoning white-collar and service-oriented central business district, for the first time, Vancouver had to think about redeveloping existing neighbourhoods. In the heat of post-war optimism, the City pursued wide-scale urban renewal in the spirit of progress.
Down came many of the old houses and up went new housing stock, mainly in the form of three-storey apartment blocks.
These simple stucco buildings built predominately from the late 1940s through the 1950s still exist in discrete districts, from the West End to Marpole. Today, they still provide affordable housing for middle- and lower-middle-income renters. (More here on the development of the ’10-suiter.’)
However as Vancouver soared in the post-war boom, planners at City Hall felt that such buildings were a poor use of precious land close to downtown. With urban-renewal projects funded by Ottawa, in conjunction with freeway proposals, the City had an opportunity to rebuild whole neighbourhoods – Strathcona for social housing, and the West End and Kitsilano for private-sector redevelopment.
On June 18, 1956, City Council passed Vancouver’s first real Zoning and Development bylaw, the product of its first Planning Department that had set up shop in 1952. The first highrise zoning district – RM-4 – was approved for the West End in 1957.
Inspired by this new zoning, along with theories and designs of European modernists and new construction techniques and favourable tax treatment, Vancouver began to build apartment buildings on a whole new scale. Thus began the era of the highrise. (More here on the origins of ‘Vancouverism.’)
The first one was Georgian Towers, built in 1956 at Georgia and Nicola. The developer hedged his bet: would Vancouverites really want to live in the sky? The building was first a rental property, then a hotel, then a rental property again.
By 1962 when the boom took off, there was no doubt; demand seemed almost unlimited. Local developers, including the future mayor of the city, Tom Campbell, poured money and concrete into the square mile west of Burrard. Ultimately, almost every building over five storeys in the West End was constructed in the decade between 1962 and 1972.
In 1963-64, highrise zoning – labelled RM-3 – was introduced in Kitsilano, Kerrisdale, South Granville/Fairview Slopes, Mt. Pleasant and Grandview-Woodland.
Embedded within the development bylaw was a new way of measuring density: Floor Space Ratio (FSR) – a calculation that determined the amount of floorspace as a multiple of the area of the lot on which it could be built. So a thousand square-foot lot, with an FSR of 2, would allow for a two thousand square-foot building.
Other factors such as set-backs, height limits, open-space requirements and ultimately building materials would determine the form, but the basic calculation was simple – as was the architecture. This was the era of the concrete box, of little apartments in the sky, perhaps with a sliding glass door and a six-inch balcony, and a surface parking lot out back where there was once gardens and grass.
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Part 3: The Beginning of Densification
Density in a City of Neighbourhoods (full document)
