Tom Durning passed on this piece in The Guardian: High-rise living is the only way to protect the green belt – part of the debate in the U.K. on how to provide housing while avoiding development in their geen zone.
This jumped out:
Here in the UK, apartments or flats – especially in high-rise developments – have never been a tenure of aspiration. They are either synonymous with poverty, as many council or housing association properties remain in the high-rise brutalist housing estates of the late 1960s and 1970s, or they are a luxury that remains out of reach to anyone who can be meaningfully labelled as middle class. Apartments near the top of the Shard, with breathtaking views across London, are selling for £50m. Less than a mile away in south London, former council flats in tower developments are selling for little more than £100,000.
Not true in Vancouver, where highrise rental or condo is a housing option for a broad middle-class, whether West End renters or Yaletown professionals – and that’s just on the downtown peninsula. In Metrotown, Ambleside, Lonsdale, Kerrisdale, Oakridge or Minoru, there have been highrise options throughout the region for the last half century.
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Because Vancouver ran out of land earlier than most urban regions, we had to find a way to provide dense housing that appealed to a broader section of the population than just the public-housing projects that characterized urban renewal in the 1950s, or the luxury accommodation that was typical only of eastern cities, generally from the 1920s. So we did: small-floorplate concrete blocks, ranging from twelve to 25 storeys, set into the existing grid, usually within walking distance of a nearby shopping village served with transit.
And that’s what missing in most low-rise European cities – and what ‘Vancouverism’ is really all about.
“Vancouver ran out of land earlier than most urban regions…” I cringe every time I hear this.
It’s like the “Europe is full up” fallacy, as if it’s Venetian midrise and thin streets all the way from Cork to Moscow.
There’s no “running out” of land. There are simply policy choices.
No land is inherently cheap either. There’s simply more or less, better or worse, infrastructure provision.
When did Vancouver run out of land? I must have missed the memo as did all those folks building houses in Langley and Maple Ridge. Or were you referring to the artificial construct of the City of Vancouver, as opposed to the true, organic conurbation?
If we haven’t run out of land, then we may be lacking communities tolerant to change. That is more challenging to manage. Bob appears to believe that we should expand east and south as much as required.
Highrises are banned under most zoning, which is a municipal responsibility. After rezoning all of its greenfield land, a municipality can rezone other land, usually starting with industrial land, or it can stop growing. Because municipalities often fund themselves through growth, a lack of greenfield land within the boundaries of a municipality can convince a council to rezone to allow highrises.
Metro Vancouver is out of land in the sense that land prices are sufficiently high to make tightly packed single-family houses, townhouses, and rowhouses most common on greenfield sites. Vancouver proper is out of land in the sense that highrises would be built if allowed on nearly any site in the city.
What was missing in most European cities was in fact buyers for this building form
Many European cities, have seen high rise development targeting middle class/ professional in the 70s: but most failed to sell to their targeted audience.
A poster case, are certainly the high rises of the XIII district in Paris built in the 70s:
They didn’t find buyers in despite of an acute shortage of accommodation in the city, and that more than any public outcry has terminated the Parisian experience with High rises.
If you wonder why this district (XIII) is now the largest china town in Europe when it was virtually no Asian before 1970, it is because it reflects the only demographic segment which was buying highrise flats in Paris…
As Louis Chevalier, a Parisian historian once stated:
Euopean are not unfamiliar with high rises, they have always built them, be a dungeon, a church, …always to represent/celebrate a public power,…but the idea that someone can live in a highrise is “uneuropean”.
Albeit, The latest high rises Paris built (into his city limit), are the towers of the National library (by Perrault), and it is may be very “french” to have a cultural building dominating the skyline
Vancouver is not in Europe…
For the record, my point is not that we should “expand east and south as much as required”. Clear urban boundaries are vital, preserving T1 wilderness, as is public space like parks and squares in the urban transects T3-T6.
My problem is with useless non-places as described here http://stroadtoboulevard.tumblr.com/post/35810999068/places-and-non-places
Neil, thanks for the link. Many would say that those urban boundaries were established years ago and that Vancouver has been densifying from within, since the 1960s, when the West End was shouldering up to 1,000 new residents a month (with little opposition). Do we now preserve large areas of single family residential neighbourhoods from 2-4 storey row housing, or concentrate density on selected sites and corridors (‘non-places’ by your linked definition)? Bear in mind that even False Creek renewal was opposed by Fairview slopes residents in the 1970s.
There’s a big difference. People romanticize the West End, forgetting that pre-highrises it had become an area of largely clapped-out rooming houses. The same is not true for Vancouver’s current single family home neighbourhoods.