When asked for an opinion, in The Province article below, as to what Kelowna should do, I suggested “focus on increasing transit and public infrastructure investment downtown.”
In fact, there is no shortage of municipal institutional development in downtown Kelowna: art gallery, civic theatre, library, stadium, law courts, City Hall. But one big thing is missing: a university.
In fact, next to overbuilding motordom, that’s the single biggest error this Province has made in urban planning. Ever since SFU, we’ve insisted in putting our new universities on tops of mountains:
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby:
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UBC Okanagan, Kelowna:
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University of Northern B.C., Prince George:
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Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops:
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Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo:
.
Call it the ivory-tower syndrome. Ever since Gordon Shrum in 1963 pointed to Burnaby Mountain from his top-floor office in the B.C. Electric building as the place he wanted to locate an ‘instant university’, we’ve wanted to make the big statement. (Though, on reflection, locating UBC to the end of the Point Grey Peninsula in the 1920s is perhaps the precedent.) And no doubt a greenfield site with cheap land and the opportunity to master-plan overrode any consideration of an expensive, complex downtown campus. Even UVIC rejected the opportunity to locate in the Old Town heritage buildings gifted to the university by Michael Williams.
But what a loss to the civic core. The presence of so many students, and all the facilities that could serve them, not to mention the vitality they bring, can regenerate a decaying area of the city – a particular need in Prince George’s suffering downtown and the area south of Bernard Avenue in Kelowna.
And it’s no gift to the students to isolate them in a part of the region expensive to serve by transit, with insufficient housing, some distance from the places they want to be and the services they need, plus the interactions and serendipity that occurs in urban places which make up a part of a real education.
Few great cities are without centrally-located academic insitutions – Concordia and McGill in Montreal, the University of Toronto and Ryerson in our biggest city, not to mention the smaller colleges, public and private, that create a critical mass. It’s beginning to happen in Vancouver, in the quadrant north of Dunsmuir and east of Granville, thanks to the multi-building presence of SFU (Harbour Centre, Wosk, Segal, Woodward’s), BCIT, VCC, (even UBC in Robson Square), plus the Vancouver Film School and countless ESL ‘colleges’.
The Prince George and Kelowna campuses are basically variations on suburban office parks, and only reinforce the fragmented, single-use, car-dependent fabric that has and will weaken these communities in the long run.
And Quest University in Squamish, closely tied to a lucrative real estate play. Some of these universities (eg UBC) are backfilling by creating real communities on and around the campus.
Two more to add to either side of the ledger:
Mountain-based – Thompson River University (http://www.tru.ca/__shared/assets/aerial22264.jpg)
Downtown Core – SFU Surrey
You’re definitely on to something. Perhaps it even extends to the role of academy in the social life of BC. The City Program is in this respect quite a pleasant respite. Of course and while SFU was the first university to be developed on a mountain, the university green-fields movement began with the removal of UBC to Point Grey early on in its history in 1908. It’s good to see SFU’s “3 downtown campuses”, UBC’s Law Courts campus, etc.
The amount of time and energy that has been expended on the alternative access route to UBC Okanagan in Kelowna and Camosun College in Victoria are examples of the costs of suburban campus planning. Lack of good transit access, lack of student housing, and rapid growth exacerbate the problems of poor access. I am sure that UBC’s Point Grey campus and SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus have many examples of this too.
And the Vancouver Island University Nanaimo campus —http://www.thesidewalkballet.com/2013/02/from-price-tags-biggest-public-sector.html
You should also think about the flip side, however.
Universities want to create their own community – centred on campus life – not urban life.
St UBC, you have 10,000 or so 18 year olds entering first year and you want to nuture and assist them in learning – not plunge them into a downtown urban environment. Many are from other perhaps rural areas of the province and live on campus in residences. There are high rates of depression and even suicide among univeristy students who feel alienated. Creating a sense of community in a park-like university setting helps teh students, though not the urban economics of the City.
The University of Toronto is often called a “commuter” university without any real university spirit. That is somewhat tempered by the division of the university into the largely religion-based “colleges” to create community.
Yay for SFU Surrey and SFU and UBC downtown campuses. McGill is a good university in the middle of the city in Montreal.
It is interesting that UBC in downtown Vancouver, SFU downtown in the beginning, and probably others, were not installed in purpose-built campuses, but were both repurposed from existing, obsolete buildings (Robson Square Conference Centre, Sears downtown department store). Someone convinced the universities to go in there and the timing was right for a relocation/expansion.
It is not the vision of most universities to go into a downtown setting. It is more difficult for them to extablish a strong physical presence in a downtown, and expansion is a lot harder than a greenfield campus. SFU has been trying to do so valiantly, but it is the exception.
It is also interesting that Gordon Shrum in 1963 pointed to Burnaby Mountain from his top-floor office in the B.C. Electric building as the place he wanted to locate an ‘instant university’. I wonder what he thought about all the parking lots in downtown Vancouver.
I went to UNBC. I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to spend all my time in the river valley due to the air pollution, but putting the school downtown would’ve be amazing for the city.
1) Instead of two frequent bus routes going up to the campus, they could’ve increased frequency for the rest of the transit system.
2) The students would spur the economy downtown.
3) No more getting trapped up on the mountain after transit shuts down.
It really is a missed opportunity.