Frances Bula header image 2
← →

The world’s love affair with Vancouver

November 18th, 2008 · 3 Comments

My latest column in Vancouver magazine looks at the way cities around the world are trying to reproduce Vancouver — some of them right down to the street names and hand railings, others in a more nuanced way.

Categories: Uncategorized

  • Corey

    Paris 2.0? Please, don’t make me laugh. Vancouver barely holds a candle to the place, much less a comparable city like Melbourne.

    Maybe people need to sort out the difference between “Vancouver” and “one or two of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods where the planners came close to getting it right.”

    Go to any decent city in Europe or Japan, and you’ll realize the your article is simply a reflection of a lie that we tell ourselves, akin to the Province’s “Best Place on Earth” slogan – laughably, blatantly untrue. But some suckers believe it anyways.

    Beasley was invited to Abu Dhabi because they like what they see in Vancouver: a modern city that gives precedence to the car and slick shiny towers. They are still impressed with things like that in that area of the world. Places like Paris, however, have moved on and are now building places for people rather than cars. Separated bike lanes, at-grade electric rail and car free urban places are all part of that vision. Vancouver is so far behind that we barely recognize that they even HAVE such a vision. In the meantime we build more Skytrain to ensure that the cars run freely and the roads will be able to accommodate ever more cars.

    Paris 2.0….. ha!

  • Aurora

    Way to go, Corey, for telling it like it is. This city, with its newly implanted glass towers (going up ever higher – let’s obscure those unnecessary view even more), soon to be complete neighbourhood-destroying airport cadillac-train for 2010, and silly Skytrains is fast becoming the city of tomorrow. If growth be the mistress of ruination, this city has rapidly proven that. Vancouver continues to fall further and further behind in critical 21st century urban attributes like superior public transit and affordable housing. It will be interesting to view the city post-2010 once the Olympic hullabaloo is over. The Emperor will be exposed.

  • foo

    I wish it was possible to get the high and mighty to notice that the city of Vancouver extends south of Broadway and east of Main. But I guess they all prefer to have the region’s money spent on beautifying their little enclave, and screw the little people who can’t afford to live in it.