CITYSCAPES: Vancouver planner Larry Beasley is lauded for making downtown cool again
Mike Roberts
Province
CREDIT: Ric Ernst, The Province People were flowing out of downtown Vancouver at a startling rate. Then Larry Beasley and his team turned things around.
CREDIT: Ric Ernst, The Province Larry Beasley is slightly biased, having worked to improve Vancouver for nearly three decades. But he also looks to Paris, London, New York and other cities for inspiration.
As a boy, Larry Beasley drew his towns on sketch paper and organized his cities in the sand. Where others merely played, he planned and built.
Today, the man credited with transforming downtown Vancouver into the most vibrantly livable, fastest-growing residential core in North America still bubbles with boyish enthusiasm when discussing his lifelong passion — the building of cities.
“We wanted to create a 24-hour, exciting city, a city based on ideas and people’s experiences,” says the architect of 21st-century Vancouver. “Our citizens are happier with their city than they’ve ever been, [whereas] most cities are going the other way.”
Larry Beasley’s is hardly a household name. Yet the co-director of planning and director of current planning for the City of Vancouver is a bona-fide celebrity on the world stage of New Urbanism.
He is a leading light in this revolutionary planning movement, a new philosophy of cities that promises a healthier, happier, more sustainable future built upon dense, integrated urban building blocks that would have us all living within cities of compact communities where work, home, amenities and entertainment are all within easy walking distance of each other.
For nearly 30 years and under six disparate mayors, Beasley has toiled tirelessly in Vancouver’s planning department, tooling and tinkering with both a design paradigm and a development process that have become famous internationally as “The Vancouver Model” and “Vancouverism,” respectively.
For the theoretical knowledge and real-world expertise he brings to the urban planning table, Beasley, 57, is in high demand, both here and abroad. He is an adjunct professor at the University of B.C.‘s School of Community and Regional Planning. He advises both Ottawa‘s National Capital Commission and Toronto‘s Royal Commission on the Harbourfront.
The senior city planner has been honoured by the United Nations for establishing one of the “World’s 100 Best Planning Practices” and will be formally invested into the Order of Canada for “lifetime achievement” next Friday.
Beasley also informs and advises cities around the world looking to repopulate and enliven their darkened urban centres, from New Zealand to China.
He’s also working with the City of Seattle in its struggle to revitalize its shrivelling downtown core by shifting its focus from commercial to residential density, one of the founding principles of New Urbanism.
“I initiated contact with Beasley some months ago,” says Peter Steinbrueck, a veteran Seattle councillor and chair of the Urban Development and Planning Committee.
“I’d already known about Beasley and had been impressed and an admirer of him and the Vancouver Model.”
An eloquent man of cultivated tastes — he collects works of art by the old masters, restores engravings and, of all the chairs he holds, sits most proudly on the board of the Vancouver International Film Festival — Beasley is loathe to take credit where it is most certainly due.
“What we do here is not an individual thing, it’s not about one person, it’s not about me,” he argues graciously during a conversation with The Province in his sprawling office at the nexus of the City Planning Department. “What we do is a collective activity.”
Born in Savannah, Ga., and raised in Las Vegas, Beasley was fresh out of Arizona State University with a degree in geography when he first arrived in Vancouver.
“I came here on a holiday and fell in love with the city and the people,” he fondly recalls.
Beasley obtained a degree in political science (Simon Fraser University) and a master’s in planning (UBC) before joining the City of Vancouver in 1975 as a neighbourhood planner.
Today, the senior city planner lives with his partner of 36 years in a textbook example of The Vancouver Model, a Granville Slopes row house at the foot of Hornby Street, one of the most residentially dense areas of the city.
The Vancouver Model was developed in the late 1980s and adopted by the city in 1991, just as large swaths of the downtown peninsula were undergoing redevelopment in the post-Expo building boom.
It is a unique approach to high-density housing based on tall, thin residential towers skirted by a diffuse layer of row- and townhouses and then, at street level, by pedestrian-friendly retail services.
“We haven’t settled for what I call pigs in space, where bare towers sit in these plazas,” explains Beasley.
“Instead, we always have very active uses at the ground level up to the first five or six floors. That creates a very vibrant street life and urbanity. We’re becoming famous for that form — rowhouses and shops with more housing above, and then the tower.”
None of it would be possible, argues Beasley, if his city-planning predecessors had allowed the freeway into the city core. “They made a very powerful and counter-intuitive decision all those years ago. They didn’t want to wipe out parts of the city just to give auto-access to the core.
“That’s proven to be a very wise thing because other cities are now tearing those things up . . . trying to get rid of those inner-city freeways.”
But give credit where credit’s due. Beasley is responsible for a development model that has seen Downtown Vancouver’s population double in little over a decade by some 40,000 new residents.
Maureen Enser, head of the Urban Development Institute of B.C. — which represents more then 400 members of the development industry — sings Beasley’s praises.
“We have a lot of respect for him,” says Enser, adding Beasley is held in such high regard that he sits on the jury of her organization’s annual Awards of Excellence. “We often get visitors and they want to know why our development industry gets along so well with our city planners. That is due, largely, to Larry Beasley and his vision for this great city of ours.”
Enser says Beasley understands the “development side of the equation” and is able to balance industry and city interests. “Not only does he have the vision, he has the plan to achieve that vision, and we now are the envy of North America and elsewhere.”
Beasley would blush at the compliment before gracefully deflecting it toward his 200-member, “world-class” planning team at the City Hall annex at 10th and Cambie.
He’s not one for blowing his own horn. “If we can help other cities figure out how to do what we believe cities need to do, which is to develop ways for people to live comfortably and happily at high densities in the heart of the city, get out of their cars, and regenerating the culture of cities, then I’m very happy to do it.”
There is another key element to the work that Beasley has done for the city he loves. It is not as sexy as shiny glass towers floating seamlessly above trendy shops and sidewalk cafes, but it is a unique development process envied by planners worldwide, including Seattle‘s Streinbrueck.
Vancouverism, as it is being called in the latest journals, is a process whereby major developers must submit their plans to a review panel of top architects and urban designers.
That panel then advises a permit board (of which Beasley is a member) that ultimately greenlights a project.
The process not only ensures the highest standard of design and development, it also brings value-added amenities into the public realm.
“In the inner city [of Vancouver] you have no outright development rights at all,” explains Beasley. “You can’t come into the city and say, ‘I insist I get a permit,’ and that exists everywhere else.
“Instead, we say, ‘Well, if you get all the aspects right and you pay for the amenities that have to come in then we’ll give you the permission [for] development.'”
Steinbrueck says Seattle, which has twice the commercial density of Vancouver and only half the residential density, is currently proposing to “blow the top off” downtown height restrictions in an effort to attract high-rise residential developers.
“What Vancouver has emphasized is livability and housing in its downtown for 20-plus years,” says Steinbrueck. “What we have emphasized is commercial development and employment in high-rise buildings
. . . [but] it’s got to be more than building heights and commercial densities. That doesn’t get us there.”
Steinbrueck says he would like to change the way his city deals with developers in the spirit of Vancouverism. “My interest is in advancing a more performance-based approach to development versus a prescriptive one,” he says. “I think we’d get better results and I think that’s been Vancouver‘s experience.”
Beasley’s not nearly done building his city. In the works: More affordable row housing for middle-income families, low-income housing leveraged from developers, secondary suites as mortgage helpers, the diversification of underground parking stalls to provide closed garages for hobbies and storage, and more diverse floor plans so unit layouts can be changed and merged.
For Beasley, it’s all about bringing people back into the city core.
“We actually say, ‘Congestion is our friend,'” he says, laughing.
“Maybe it’s not the scale or nature of the place they might find in the suburbs, but if they prefer to live in the city, they’ll make some of those trade-offs . . . they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I can live downtown. We can live downtown.'”
Larry Beasley believes these initiatives are his legacy to the City of Vancouver
Sunday, June 05, 2005
1 The Living First strategy for Downtown Vancouver whereby the primary focus in urban planning and development is on comfortable, well-functioning livability.
2 A new transportation plan for Downtown Vancouver, including traffic pattern changes, and bus, rapid transit and rail linkages and layering.
3 An emphasis on design and quality of life in all policy making.
4 Sixty-five acres of new, accessible parks added in the Downtown Peninsula over the last decade.
5 The concept and development of new downtown neighbourhoods — living environments where home, work and amenities are all brought together in one place.
“It’s really the environments we’ve created rather than individual buildings,” says Beasley, describing the legacy his generation of city planners will leave behind.
He imagines a city stroll along Davie Street from Granville Street down to the waters of False Creek.
“You see Davie, which was just a dead, negative place 15 years ago and then Yaletown — this vibrant, historically preserved community which, 15 years ago, was non-existent,” muses Beasley.
“And then you go into the new part of Concord Pacific and you see this wonderful, livable place and a vibrant shopping street.
“Then you go to the water’s edge and you see the waterfront walkway and the parks and the green.
“That to me is the experience I want people to remember my generation for.”
AROUND THE WORLD: Larry Beasley’s top five cities
Sunday, June 05, 2005
On his own dime and his own time, Vancouver senior city planner Larry Beasley travels the world helping cities in their efforts to turn dark, empty downtown cores into vibrant, livable urban communities.
Last week he was in Portland, Ore., speaking to the World Housing Congress. A few weeks prior, he was in Boise, Idaho, touting Vancouver‘s celebrated vision of an urban utopia.
“I go everywhere,” admits the tireless frequent flyer. “Recently I’ve been in San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland.”
The globe-trotting director of city planning holds dozens of international cities dear and Vancouver dearest of all. But hometown aside, his top five cities are:
1. Paris, France
Paris is an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. It’s got buildings that are really designed to generate cultural and social activity.
It’s got beautifully designed historic and modern buildings. It’s got beautiful, glorious public spaces. It’s a healthy and safe city with a very rich political life.
And it’s one of the easiest cities in the world to move around in without the use of a car — there are layers of public transit and it’s a very great city to walk in.
2. London, England
London is actually is a city of houses. They’re row houses, but they’re houses. Even though it has its high elements, a lot of the city is quite low-scale.
So it’s a very domestic city where you see very dense
but very vivid, livable neighbourhoods.
It’s a fantastic city for families with children to live right in the heart of the city . . . with private gardens and quiet, safe areas.
For me, a lot of the inspiration for Vancouver‘s rowhouses comes from that experience.
3. New York, N.Y.
New York is the crucible of our culture. The other cities are European culture — that’s not quite our culture.
North American culture is manifest in New York, the best, the worst. It’s a huge place of creativity, it’s a place of very innovative approaches to using buildings. It has great cultural institutions, and Central Park.
4. Bath, England
Just because it’s the single most, gloriously beautiful city ever created.
5. Charleston, S.C.
I’m a buff of the 18th century and it’s a beautiful 18th-century city.
© The Vancouver Province 2005
