CITY CONVERSATIONS: The Future (and Past) of Burnaby, Centre of the Region
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Bob Prittie Metrotown, Burnaby Public Library
The way Burnaby is changing, and will change in years to come, is based on a pioneering plan to create a city of five town centres— Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed, Edmonds and Hastings— connected to each other and to the region by excellent transit. This highly livable design fits the Lower Mainland’s regional vision of “cities in a sea of green.” So in some important ways it’s Burnaby, not Vancouver, that is the centre of the Lower Mainland.
We want to hear what you think of the ways that Burnaby’s current growth and planning is being expressed, and particularly how Burnaby plans to address future growth of residences, businesses, industry and public resources and amenities.
To start the conversation, we have urban planner David Pereira, author of a definitive history of Burnaby’s design; Gary Begin, Constituency Assistant to MLA Richard Lee; and others.
This event is presented by SFU Public Square and the City Program. For more information, visit City Conversations online.
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I dunno. Is it all that hard to build tower clusters around Skytrain stations that were or are surrounded by industrial lands or mall parking lots? That still hasn’t stopped Burnaby from allowing affordable walk-ups to be torn down.
Sorry to poo-poo on Burnaby, but nothing cutting edge or revolutionary happening there.
One “revolutionary” idea was to not culvert Burnaby’s major salmon streams. Their riparian areas have been encroached upon over the decades, but there have been policies in place to allow large single family streamside lots to be assembled into townhouse and low rise development sites with greater density placed away from the riparian edge, and some of the lots replanted with native riparian species. Other single streamside lots have been purchased outright by the city and converted to riparian landscapes. This incremental greening has resulted in a phenomenal gain in forested land next to streams over the years.
Fully 22% of Burnaby’s land area is parkland and conservation areas. In some places you have the unusual juxtaposition of these evolving high density town centres situated directly adjacent to stream habitat (Edmonds / Byrne Creek; Lougheed / Stony Creek) or forested parkland (Metrotown / Central Park), not unlike the West End / Stanley Park. Talk about edge definition.
Another “revolutionary” idea was to trade the development of the Burnaby Mountain SFU campus for the conservation and rehabilitation of 1,700 acres of forested conservation land below the ring road. That was Mike Harcourt’s last act before he resigned as premier. The development was limited by spatial, transportation and environmental constraints (e.g. fairly stringent stormwater management policies) and I believe the unique elements about UniverCity evolved in part from these constraints / trade-offs and through the hard negotiations with the Planning Dept., notably senior planner Robert Renger and assistant director Kenji Ito, both of whom are now retired. I’m sure Michael Geller can testify how hard those negotiations were, and how successful the results became.
The criticisms about the characteristics of local urbanism are not unique to any city in the Metro and I would argue all cities need work much harder to address the multiple challenges of urban design, human scale and context at the street level, the urban commons currently subsumed by vast automobile infrastructure, architectural quality, and so forth. But Burnaby cannot be faulted for its 5,000++ acres of protected green space and for following the original intent of the Livable Regions Strategic Plan
I don’t particularly want cutting-edge or revolutionary. I don’t care whether Burnaby is original compared to other cities. I don’t live in other cities: I live here. I just want a vibrant, healthy city that is a good place to live. If that means doing things the boring old way, or copying good ideas wholesale from elsewhere, great. If it means making a big deal out of what’s really not so special in order to secure the political capital to make it possible, I’m OK with that too.
In any case, there is no getting away from the need for some innovation to account for local circumstances, like the problem of disappearing walk-ups. To use Kuhn’s terminology, this is probably a place for normal science, not revolutionary science.
I would like a little less green space, though: particularly less emphasis on space that is green for its own sake, and more on space that is green for ours. Hopefully that will come with time.