Vancouver Planning Laboratory

This course is designed to offer students a distinctive opportunity to undertake critical research studies of experience of urbanization and development planning in a city widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most instructive exemplars of progressive urbanism: Vancouver City and Region. This new course will be situated as a ‘recommended elective’ within SCARP’s Urban Development Planning (UDP) domain.

The course will be offered jointly by a consortium of the UBC School of Community & Regional Planning, and BTAworks – the research and development division of Bing Thom Architects . The course will include an element of initial presentations and discussion, but will largely be conducted ‘in the field’ and student will assume the role of “consultant teams”. The Instructors will be Andy Yan and Eileen Keenan of BTAworks, and Tom Hutton, of SCARP. Our purpose is to provide students with a stimulating experience of applying theory to development, and including critical professional planning skills. 

Initial sessions of the course will include overviews of development planning trends, issues and exemplars in the Metro Vancouver case, as well as discussion of student interests. These may be linked to the students’ thesis or project interest, and/or to professional planning goals and aspirations.

As regards subject sites, we are proposing that our field studies and research focus be centred on two instructive municipalities within Metro Vancouver: The City of Vancouver, located in the core of the metropolis; and, secondly, the City of Surrey, the largest suburban municipality, and increasingly branded as Metro Vancouver’s ‘Second City’, the latter reflecting not only its unique scale and growth trajectory, but also its engagement with progressive ideas about urbanism, including sustainable communities, green buildings, and urban design.

The assignment will take the form of a project, the subject of which will be negotiated between the individual students and the instructors. 

Situating the case study cities

The central area/downtown of metropolitan cities represents a distinctive urban terrain, comprising a uniquely complex mix of specialized functions, labour, landscapes, and social groups. The theoretical saliency of the urban core is reflected in its centrality to defining urban theory and models (e.g. the Chicago School of social ecology, the postindustrial and post-Fordist city, the ‘new middle class’, global cities and urban transnationalism), and indeed an even richer polemical and political history which includes Marx, Engels, Dickens, Balzac, the Fabians and so on. Even with the emergence of the ‘regional city’ which sees an ever-larger proportion of population, employment and capital distributed within the suburban (and exurban) districts of the metropolis, the central city has been successfully recast as a defining zone of culture, experience, urbanism, and  design – as well as comprising a territory of contestation and conflict.

We will be offering an interactive and collaborative exploration of planning and development issues and experiences in Vancouver’s central area, acknowledged as principal site of the progressive (and widely-emulated) planning model proclaimed as ‘Vancouverism’. There is of course the projection of a crude binary, which juxtaposes the glittering condo towers and ancillary amenity of the ‘new inner city’ with the deprivation and disorder of the Downtown Eastside (DTES). But there is a much richer and more complex palette of possibilities for instructive research and study, including (but of course extending beyond) interdependencies between spatiality and the new economy; between built form, lifestyles and social class; and between density, travel patterns, and innovation. Then there are the many examples of place-remaking and marketing which abound in Vancouver’s central area, including the (now 40-year-old) saga of reconstructing False Creek, progress on the City’s ‘official’ cultural district (which largely omits many of the most intense sites of cultural production and amenity), and the ongoing civic battles concerning city skyline, building heights, and Vancouver’s evolving imaginaries.

All this said, suburban areas of Metro Vancouver are bearing the largest burdens (pressures and opportunities) of growth, and offer their own learning opportunities in the realm of development policy and professional planning.  These areas of Metro Vancouver both reinforce and challenge the development model through which have shaped Downtown Vancouver in its assumptions, generalities, and applicability. Planning case studies from other cities in Canada and the United States will also be examined.

While students will have an option to pursue their own final projects, an element of the course pedagogy is to give students a sense of a planning work environment, mainly that of a private sector consulting firm.  Academic and intellectual comfort zones are intended to be challenged in the face and practicalities of real world employability.  As a consequence, assignments will not only face a standard of academic rigor, but professional attention as students will face assignments that will teach and train them about theory and practice in the transnational metropolis.