Vancouver, B.C.: Transportation, suburban growth, and centrality

One of the most remarkable sights of the Vancouver, B.C. area is not the high-rise downtown or the dramatic mountain scenery surrounding the Burrard Inlet, but the presence of high rise towers in the suburbs. An all-day tour of the city via SkyTrain — the region’s largely elevated heavy rail transit system — gives one the impression of a highly sprawled, increasingly decentralized city. Coming from the Portland area, where the idea of metropolitan scaled increases in density is a key component of urban planning, I knew that I had to visit these places. I want to highlight three here: Richmond, Surrey, and North Vancouver.

Richmond is ethnically diverse, suburban, and… walkable?!?

Richmond sits at the end of the new SkyTrain Canada Line. It’s mostly suburban sprawl, but there are also some newer towers in the area. I wonder how and why these towers were even built? Was it natural market forces, or was it from a government incentive? Regardless, if it weren’t for these towers, the town would look like nothing more than an average North American suburb. Oh, except for the SkyTrain, which runs like a backbone through the area, parallel to the Number 3 Road. It is actually amazing how unobtrusive this is, given its elevated nature. It doesn’t feel overbearing in the way that other more traditional elevated railways do.

This area, by conventional standards, is not pedestrian friendly, and yet the place feels more walkable than downtown Vancouver does. Perhaps it is scale — the buildings are shorter and feels more human sized, despite the massive car parking lots and the wide boulevards with their fast traffic. In addition, the place is bustling, busy, and awash with visual richness. Everywhere are signs in Chinese as well as English, even on big national bank chains like Scotia Bank and the Bank of Montreal. Many businesses have signs only in Chinese and no English at all, simultaneously intimidating and fascinating.

I think that the reason for its feel of greater walkability, however, lies in the blocks. In Richmond, most of the blocks of land are occupied by low density strip-mall type development. This means the blocks, thanks to parking lots and driveways, are permeable, allowing the pedestrian to cut through them. Instead, these lots and alleys became unofficial pedestrian ways and undeclared streets. Downtown, by contrast, fills up blocks completely with large multistory structures, leaving only an occasional, uninviting dark alley.

Surrey: There be cranes here!

Another burgeoning edge city is Surrey. It is evident simply at a glance that Surrey is nowhere near as important as downtown, but it does have some rather tall towers, which is no small achievement, and they appear very newly planted on their hilltop nest. It is in every way a young city, with a “Brasilia” feel of having just been air-dropped in. Empty grass fields and acres of low density suburban sprawl mark the community’s youth. Terri Evans, from the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, mentioned that the area will soon be bigger than Vancouver itself. I laughed at this, more out of ironic enjoyment than anything, but Terri took the laugh for a scoff, and rejoindered with “it’s true!” I can’t help but think that a Vancouver urbanist, marking up a map of the metro area, might label Surrey with the words “there be cranes here,” and shudder in despair.

North Vancouver: seen one betowered suburb, seen them all?

The last suburb I’ll note is North Vancouver, hunkering down on the hillsides north of the Burrard, the last bastion of urbanization before the Coast Range’s wilds begin. The community can be reached via SeaBus, a high speed ferry that sails between the town and downtown’s Waterfront Station at regular intervals all day long.

Despite a beautiful setting, North Van was no more or less distinctive than any other suburb of area I had seen. As impressive as the towers in a suburb are, it was hardly unique; Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby, and North Vancouver all had towers also. The town was mostly eighties concrete bunker blocks, vaguely second-rate shopping malls, the bland sameness of the condo towers, and relatively few and not very well maintained older storefronts. Once you’ve seen one mixed-use betowered Vancouver suburb, you’ve seen them all.

Downtown Vancouver’s Manhattan-like north shore looms through the rain spotted windows of Seabus.

The view back at the city center on the return trip via SeaBus was not bad at all, with the north shore of downtown looming on the Burrard Peninsula with an imposing, Manhattan-like feel of multiple layers, with its waterfront terminals for shipping, ferries, and cruise ships. It has a little more than a taste of Seattle’s waterfront presence on the water, and like Seattle it had almost no pleasure waterfront. The resemblance is strong enough that I can see why Douglas Coupland said that the Vancouver looks at Seattle as a model of what it could have become had it openly embraced the freeway and the expressway.

Looking at the view of downtown, I found it hard to believe that the suburbs like Surrey, despite their growth, would ever supplant the Burrard Peninsula. Surrey and Richmond both have no waterfront, no majestic mountains, no cluster of infrastructure. Transportaiton links helped to stimulate denser growth, but those same linkes continue to foster their relative place in the geographic food chain. Richmond and Surrey are and remain end termini of SkyTrain lines, while North Van, although more central, is isolated from most of the region by the Burrard Inlet. None of these suburbs enjoy the status of multi-modal regional hub as downtown Vancouver does. Transportation is arguably the most important reason that a point remains the locus of a given geographic scope, and Vancouver is the heart of the transportation network. When all roads lead to Rome, Rome remains a capitol. Place advantage remains king, and downtown remains central, literally.

Is Richmond a glance into the future of Portland suburbs such as Beaverton?

Still, the growth of Vancouver’s edge cities should give one pause. Soak in the visual play of high rises soaring behind a stripmall and a Best Buy in a significantly ethnic suburb. Is this Richmond, B.C., or is this the future of, say, Beaverton, Oregon, or Portland’s Southeast 82nd Avenue? Of course, Portland will never hold the political prominence in the U.S. that Vancouver has in Canada. That said, Beaverton — like Richmond — is a significant suburb whose ethnic diversity is growing rapidly. Over the last decade, Beaverton has become the home to more and more small businesses catering to Japanese, Korean, and other Asian and Latin ethnic communities, a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Beaverton has ambitions as well, as evidenced by projects such as The Round, the recent proposals for mid and high rise towers on the old Westgate Theater property, and an attempt to secure a stadium for the soon homeless Portland Beavers AAA baseball team. Rapid transit, high rise towers, acres of parking, strip malls of ethnic small businesses. This is the vision of Richmond, B.C. today. Might it also be the vision of Portland’s suburbs in the next few decades?