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Book Review: The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Planning and Design

Vancouver regularly appears at or near the top of international rankings of cities with a high quality of life (Florida 2004), and it has become a place of pilgrim-age for North American planners. The Vancouver Achievement can serve as a pilgrim’s guide or as a reference for others curious about how the city has developed. The book is a thorough and detailed examination of planning and urban design in Vancouver from 1970 to 2001. It focuses on the City of Vancouver, the central community of five hundred thousand within a fastgrowing metropolitan area triple that size. Based in the United Kingdom, and having practiced in Canada in the 1970s, Punter brings to his analysis an outside expert’s viewpoint broadly situated within North American, British, and European planning contexts. He studied Vancouver in extensive visits, interviewing forty-three key informants, walking the streets and reviewing hundreds of planning documents. The book is firmly rooted in the present. It opens with just enough history and social geography to set the scene for the political changes that reformed Vancouver planning in the 1970s, resulting in widely admired projects like the Granville Island mixed-use district and False Creek South neighborhood. It is easy to dismiss the city’s high quality of life as a function of its spectacular natural setting, but Punter’s analysis of the politics, art, and craft of planning demonstrates that it took a determined long-term effort to move the city beyond the rather ordinary downtown redevelopment projects of the 1960s. The central core of the book contains chapters that describe Vancouver’s neighborhood planning, new comprehensive plan, waterfront megaprojects and downtown development. Unlike most Canadian cities, Vancouver is not required to maintain a comprehensive plan, so the description of how planning advocates built a political mandate and engaged an extraordinary, multicultural cross section of the population may resonate with readers in the United States. The chapter on the waterfront explores the change from public development in the 1970s to a cooperative planning model for 1990s’ private developments. Downtown Vancouver adopted mixed uses and higher densities, using a combination of townhouse perimeter blocks and slim towers that preserve views. Punter is clearly impressed with what he finds but avoids civic hagiography, with frank discussions of housing affordability problems, “not in my backyard” in the neighborhoods, and the concentrated social problems in the Downtown Eastside community. The final chapters on regulatory development and improving design contain the book’s strongest analysis. The City of Vancouver has taken advantage of strong residential demand to adopt a system of development levies that finance community facilities, some affordable housing, and high-quality public spaces. Punter is particularly effective in evaluating, on the basis of detailed analysis of scores of cases from recent years, the effectiveness of the city’s Design Review Panel in improving the quality of high-density infill development. Punter’s urban design background and focus on inner-city issues strengthen this book, but he overlooks other planning achievements on the outer edges of the metropolitan region. Vancouver has its share of suburban sprawl, but the provincial government and the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) have protected much agricultural land, avoided expressway construction, built a light-rail system and now promote transit-oriented development. The GVRD’s Liveable Region Strategic Plan is regarded as perhaps Canada’s most effective regional plan (Hodge and Robinson 2001). A chapter on Vancouver’s regional planning achievements would have expanded the impact of this important book. The Vancouver Achievement should be the first point of reference for anybody studying Vancouver’s planning and urban design. It is extensively referenced and was thoroughly vetted for technical accuracy. The text is heavily illustrated with more than 160 photographs, plans, and maps, with many figures redrawn for clear reproduction. There is sufficient design content to serve as a case study in planning or urban design courses. The affordably priced paperback edition may prove tempting for practitioners, since it includes many useful urban design drawings and detailed descriptions of regulatory processes that other cities may wish to consider. Although The Vancouver Achievement is refreshingly free of academic jargon, it may not appeal to a general audience because it deals with technical issues in