Beautiful lamp commissioned by my friend Patrick Tubajon, proprietor of gorgeous Gudrun Restaurant in Steveston, BC. Steveston is a historic and still operating fishing and cannery village in the mouth of the Fraser River, just half an hour S. of Vancouver. Historically it was a dominantly Japanese community until most of the population was interned in WWII and their possessions confiscated in one of the most disgraceful acts in Canadian history. Some have returned, but not many. But Steveston still retains its fish port and its cannery buildings.

I love this restaurant because in addition to its exellent food and wine it has referenced local history and tried to avoid the generic. The bar is in the shope of a small wooden boat, with a traditional Japanese charred finish done by Patrick himself. The lamp has the look of both sails and clouds (and cheese? note the mouse), the table is handmade of local Douglas fir, and the restaurant otherwise respected the building’s features and history. Patrick says that the lamp was made by designer Jon Johanssen – we think I may have the spelling of his name wrong, however (will correct when I find out). Apologies for the iPhone photos – I was on my bicycle that day. The bar doesn’t appear blue – it’s a deep charred black.

Low-rises in Vancouver’s S. False Creek

Quebec City, successful lo-rise/high density combination

This short essay by Richard Florida in Atlantic Cities magazine has been making the rounds. It is just the latest in a long string of arguments from many quarters that highrise density isn’t the right density: usustainable, human-unfriendly, sterile, and inimical to innovation, interaction and arts. Highrise density primarily benefits the large developers who build it. We need a different model for Vancouver.

Density is all the rage these days. Urban economists, some of whom could be heard extolling the praises of “sun, skills, and sprawl” just a few years ago, now see increasing density as the key to improving productivity and driving economic growth. In his story for The Atlantic, “How Skyscrapers Can Save the City,” Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser put it this way: “As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs … tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself.” Well-intentioned planners and preservationists drive up prices when they stand in the way of taller and taller buildings, he argues. Overly restrictive height limitations not only impede economic progress, but make cities less, not more, liveable.

There can be no doubt that density has its advantages. In general, denser cities are more productive, more innovative, and more energy efficient. But only up to a point.

The key function of a city is to enable exchange, interaction, and the combination and recombination of people and ideas. When buildings become so massive that street life disappears, they can damp down and limit just this sort of interaction, creating the same isolation that is more commonly associated with sprawl. As Jane Jacobs aptly put it: “in the absence of a pedestrian scale, density can be big trouble.” Skyscraper canyons of the sort that are found in many Asian mega-cities, and that are increasingly proposed in great American cities, risk becoming vertical suburbs, whose residents and occupants are less likely to engage frequently and widely with the hurly-burly of city life.

Edward McMahon of the Urban Land Institute cuts to the chase, differentiating between density and high-rise buildings in his recent post for Citiwire, “Density Without Highrises?”. If the pendulum originally swung too far in the direction of sprawl over the past 50 years, the risk today is that it is swinging way too far back toward high-rise skyscrapers. “To oppose a high-rise building,” he writes, “is to run the risk of being labeled a NIMBY, a dumb growth advocate, a Luddite — or worse. Buildings 20, 40, 60 even 100 stories tall are being proposed and built in low and mid-rise neighborhoods all over the world. All of these projects are justified with the explanation that if density is good, even more density is better.”

Stop and think for a moment: What kind of environments spur new innovation, start-ups and high-tech industries? Can you name one instance, one, of this sort of creative destruction occurring in high-rise office or residential towers, in skyscraper districts? The answer is no. High-rise districts typically house either corporate office functions or residences. During the post-war era, while they were building these towers for their corporate functions, large U.S. companies housed their research scientists in green, low-rise R&D campuses, where the scientists could interact more freely.

America’s high-tech, venture-funded start-up model of innovation came of age not in skyscraper canyons but in places like Silicon Valley, which provided such an ideal eco-system for creativity because of its city-like aspects. As Jonah Lehrer told Cities recently, “Silicon Valley manages to replicate the essential function of a dense city, which is to foster a diversity of interactions and knowledge spillovers,” albeit largely across industrial parks and based on the car.

Similarly, you don’t find great arts districts and music scenes in high-rise districts but in older, historic residential, industrial or warehousing districts such as New York’s Greenwich Village or Soho, or San Francisco’s Mission District, which were built before elevators enabled multi-story construction.

The urban tech districts that are emerging today, from SoMa in San Francisco to New York’s Silicon Alley and London’s Silicon Roundabout, are housed in similarly walkable, low to mid-story neighborhoods.

What we need are new measures of density that do not simply count how many people we can physically cram into a space but that accounts for how well the space is utilized, the kinds of interactions it facilitates. “By this measure,” McMahon writes, “one block of an older neighborhood might include a community theatre, a coffee shop, an art gallery, two restaurants, a bicycle shop, 10 music rehearsal studios, a church, 20 apartments and a couple of bars, and all with much more 24/7 activity and intensity of use than one block of (much taller) office buildings on K Street [in Washington, D.C.].”

Too many people today conflate density with height. Real interactive density can be better achieved by other means. “Yes, we do need more compact, walkable higher density communities,” writes McMahon. “But no we do not need to build thousands of look-a-like glass and steel skyscrapers to accomplish the goals of smart growth or sustainable development.” Neighborhoods like Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and the Fan in Richmond were largely built before the age of elevators and they are all dense. New Orleans’ “French Quarter has a net density of 38 units per acre, Georgetown 22 units per acre.” The real issue isn’t just height and the massing of people and work, but of enabling interaction and recombination.

“Density does not always demand high-rises,” notes McMahon. “Skyscrapers are a dime a dozen in today’s world. Once a low rise city or town succumbs to high-rise mania, many more towers will follow, until the city becomes a carbon-copy of every other city in a ‘geography of nowhere.’”

Richard Florida is Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here. 

Vision Vancouver, and Vancouver’s developers who erect giant carbuncles on the Vancouver landscape far from even a whiff of a reputable architect: take note.

See also Martha Rosler’s “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism” and search this blog for “highrises” to find many other posts on this topic.

Petulia, starring Julie Christie, George C. Scott (who looked a little like Sean Penn then) and Richard Chamberlain, was shot and set in San Francisco in 1967. An odd film but interesting in that it’s one of the few in which the villain—if he is a villain—occupies traditional decor while our main protagonist, a divorced doctor, occupies the modern. This bucks a pretty solid trend of villains or generally immoral types living in the coolest decor while heroes enjoy Queen Anne chairs and overly baroque curtains.

In the midst of this small current wave of 60s nostalgia (in music anyway) it’s interesting to remember what 1967 actually looked like, or at least what an art director thought San Francisco looked like in 1967, which was of course the height of Haight-Ashbury. Full photo set here.

I heard those lyrics over the car radio last week. It’s interesting that the Emerald City is actually close enough to hell that you can see it from there.

As everyone knows, the Emerald City is the fictional capital city in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The city’s outer walls are green, but the the city itself, with its tall glass towers, is not; it only appears so because all who enter the Emerald City are required to wear green-tinted eyeglasses. Supposedly this is to protect our eyes from the “brightness and glory” of the city, but in effect it makes everything appear green when the city is, in fact, “no more green than any other city.”

Sound familiar, Vancouver?

Baum’s Oz series, beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was written in the U.S. during the financial crisis of the 1890s. Everyone knows the story of Oz, but not everyone knows that it is in part a political economic allegory based on early features of the takeover of the economy and politics by lending institutions, a phenomenon with which we’re now all too familiar. The yellow brick road represented the gold currency standard. But I digress.

I consider myself an environmentalist and am deeply in favour of green urban planning. I was initially in favour of Vision Vancouver’s “Greenest City Initiative,” but that support has evaporated. Tall, speculation-driven glass condo towers are almost certainly not green (see link above). They cause numerous problems, are not energy efficient, have no longevity, and don’t bring adequate density to offset the resources they use and the extreme property value distortions they create. Vancouver’s Greenest City Initiative, resting as it does far too heavily on highrises built by megadevelopers , is the green sunglasses of Oz. I wonder what property values are like in the Emerald City? And what’s the point of a policy that contributes to a commuter city no workers can afford to live in? By the way, the ever-present highrise policy is noticeably de-emphasized on the GCI website.

Let’s remember that the Emerald City’s magical wizard turned turned out to be a secretive, inaccessible, fraudulent guy behind a curtain, creating grand illusions with smoke and projections.

PS. I know I’m probably getting repetitive on this topic. But it’s only going to get worse. I’m finding history repetitive.

UPDATE: Read The Limits of Density:
“Density does not always demand high-rises,” notes McMahon. “Skyscrapers are a dime a dozen in today’s world. Once a low rise city or town succumbs to high-rise mania, many more towers will follow, until the city becomes a carbon-copy of every other city in a ‘geography of nowhere.’”

PPS. from Wikipedia:

In Gregory Maguire‘s revisionist Oz novels… the Emerald City is an even darker place than in Baum’s novels. It does have splendid palaces and gardens, but also sections beset by crime and poverty… The green glasses that are worn by the citizens are often used as a way to stop them seeing what is going on around them. Video Game Emerald City Confidential portrays the Emerald City as a film noir place with private detectives, widespread corruption, mob bosses, smugglers, and crooked lawyers. Set 40 years after the events of The Wizard of Oz, it’s described as “Oz, seen through the eyes of Raymond Chandler“.^[16]

PPPS. Light at the end of the tunnel? “Hey Toronto condo owner: Why so glum?“

What follows is the Preface of Don Gutstein’s 1975 book Vancouver Ltd., a thorough and, as it turns out, prescient analysis of the way in which Vancouver is overtaken by real estate developers and realtors. I know Don from my postgraduate days at Simon Fraser University. He’s one of the few who really took a magnifiying glass to the way money moves in this city and I think it’s about time this book is reprinted. Everyone thinks it’s out of print, and perhaps it effectively is, since no one knows that the publisher Lorimer does still have a handful of hardcover copies. C$45 each. Very hard to find online but you can call or write Formac Lorimer Books, email is orderdesk at formac dot ca, phone 1-800-565-1975. Mailing address 5502 Atlantic Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 1G4.

Some of the names have changed, but the city Gutstein describes in 1975 is still the city we’re in now – a town whose City Hall is controlled by the real estate industry, and whose every other sector is crippled by housing unaffordability. The issue of highrises is at its beginning in ’75; we’re just at a later stage.

Fascinating, beautifully written (as you can see from its preface below) and understandable to the layperson, this is required reading for any Vancouverite. Or beyond. It’s a primer in the way in which developers rig the system.

“Far too quickly Vancouver has reached a watershed in its short 90-year history. The choice is clear: to continue on the mindless drive toward a high-density prestige ‘executive’ city — a Manhattan with mountains; or to redirect itself toward providing adequate housing and a decent environment for all classes of people. The first route is being promoted by those who currently control Vancouver’s development. The second route will require drastic changes in the priorities of the decision-makers.

I was more hopeful when I started work on this book four years ago than I am now. Somewhere during those years we seem to have passed a point of no return and embarked on that disastrous journey toward developer city. Yet I may be wrong. The course of Vancouver’s future could be redirected, given the collective will to do so. This book is my contribution to such an enterprise. I hope to show who does control our city, what is the structure of that control, and why decisions are being made that lead to the steady deterioration of the urban environment. I also present some ideas for discussion about what we need to do to get us going in that other direction.

This book is not about the grand abstractions of planners and geographers. I do not talk about pressures for redevelopment, market forces, location theories. In our society development is not caused by pressures. It is caused by individuals and corporations searching for profitable ventures. Neither is this book a biographical account of the lives and loves of those nasty developers. Individuals do appear throughout the book, but by virtue of the roles they occupy—the mayor of the city, or the president of the corporation. To understand these roles we need to look at both the formal prerogatives of the role—the mayor has the legal power to appoint aldermen to committees—but just as important is the informal culture surrounding the role—most recent Vancouver mayors have been millionaires or developers or both.”

Don Gutstein, Vancouver Ltd., 1975

Via The Guardian:  ”A status symbol is a book… that’s status.” ”Punk was just an excuse for people to run around…it was just a fashion that became a marketing opportunity.” “The whole 20th C was a mistake… throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” “Study art and you become a freedom fighter.”

More from Westwood here.