West Coast lessons

>> Former Vancouver city planner
Larry Beasley gives Montrealers a
course in building a better city

WAY BEFORE, BEFORE: Pine-Parc Interchange, 1956 (L), 2005 (R)

by CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF

Montreal is in the midst of a construction boom. Interchanges are being demolished, superhospitals are being built and, in just about every corner of the city, from St-Leonard to Verdun, condos are emerging as fast as graffiti on a blank wall.

Montreal’s economic engine might be firing on all cylinders, but how do we make sure that all of this growth is actually creating a better city, not a disjointed landscape of tacky condo towers and malls?

Listening to Larry Beasley might be a start. The recently retired director of city planning in Vancouver is credited by many with the complete transformation of Canada’s West Coast metropolis into a lively, urbane city where high-density living has become widely accepted.

This Monday, Oct. 29, Beasley will share his advice on how to design great cities at a lecture hosted by McGill’s School of Urban Planning. The next day, he will apply that advice to Montreal as he leads urban planning students as they imagine possibilities for redeveloping the space left over from the demolition of the Pine-Parc interchange.

“You’ve got to have a strong vision for the city if you want people to do the right thing,” says Beasley. “Unless you articulate that in a way that they like, and that they’re interested in, they’re doing their own thing. But if they see a vision, they can say, ‘I can do that and I can do my own thing.’”

Part of his recipe for good urban design is to encourage people to live downtown or near rapid transit lines, which gets them out of their cars. He also advocates the construction of high-density projects that meet the street with retail or townhouses, which creates an engaging cityscape.

In Vancouver, the city took advantage of a booming condo market in the mid-1980s to develop a new urban plan with strict guidelines on building design, height, density and relationship to the street. City planners, led by Beasley, were given the power to evaluate each proposed building and order property developers to change elements they didn’t like.

But the plan didn’t end with new condo towers. In exchange for increased density, developers were also expected to make public space improvements, and they did, building new parks, fountains, social housing, community centres and even a new elementary school.

“Vancouver is a city that has risen very rapidly, but it’s not messed up,” says Raphaël Fishler, the McGill professor who organized Beasley’s lecture. “It’s a very liveable city that has maintained a quality of the urban environment. Larry Beasley has been able to do that. It’s not every day that a planning director can exercise such leadership.”

But it’s not just about leadership, explains Beasley—it’s also about collaboration.

“What every city has to do is work from a series of principles unique and special to [itself]. You can’t just import it from somewhere else,” he says. “What worries me as I work around the world is just how bad cities are. Most are alienating and dysfunctional. What I hope to remind people is that they should look at their city as an object of design, a social, collective design exercise, not just a personal one.”

“Making a Great City by Design,” at
McGill’s Macdonald-Harrington Building
(815 Sherbrooke W., rm G10), on Monday,
Oct. 29 at 6:30 p.m. It will be followed the
next day at 5 p.m. by the unveiling of ideas
for developing the new Pine-Parc intersection