The Vancouver enclave of Shaughnessy, established in the early 20th century, is perched on a hill near downtown. It is similar to neighbourhoods in other Canadian cities, centrally located and specifically planned to house relatively few people on prime civic real estate.
Such city planning defined the last century across Canada: using a lot of land for a small number of people. Apartment buildings were widely prohibited. This was all orchestrated at city halls. Planning garnered a false air of science for what were arbitrary decisions – enforced by rigid regulations. Shaughnessy exemplifies the many ways planning has gone wrong. Over the past four decades, the neighbourhood’s population plummeted 20 per cent even as the City of Vancouver’s surged more than 50 per cent.
The failings of planning became clear in recent years but policy change is only now starting to emerge. In the past year, the crush of high prices to buy and rent finally pushed politicians, from reluctant city councils to provincial and federal leaders, to start to rewrite old rules. Yet areas ideal for new homes, such as Shaughnessy, remained shielded from change.
What cities need is a lot less planning.
Consider Alain Bertaud, himself an urban planner whose work focuses on urban economics. Planning, he says, is “based on the illusion that a city is a complex building that needs to be designed in advance by competent professionals.” Mr. Bertaud, who gave a lecture in Vancouver in September, declares the strict zoning planners loved for so long to be “obsolete.” His main argument is the proof everyone can see. Planning has led to a foolish allocation of a scarce supply of land.
It’s also grossly unfair. In Vancouver, about one-third of households occupy four-fifths of the residential land. Everyone else is squeezed into small parcels. City councils and planners have also intentionally consigned taller buildings to the noise of heavily trafficked streets to protect neighbourhoods of detached homes.
Less planning doesn’t equate to no planning. Governments need to co-ordinate infrastructure. Sewers have to be modernized and expanded – something planners failed to adequately plan for. Governments also need to plan for better transit, so people can more easily move around cities.
These are the pillars of planning Mr. Bertaud endorses, because he views, perhaps too clinically, cities as labour markets. Cities thrive when people are able to flock to them to work. “The larger the market,” Mr. Bertaud asserts, “the more innovative and productive the city will be.”
And interesting. Big, vibrant cities pulse with energy. These are the kind of city streets Jane Jacobs fought for. Cities that thrive with life (and, yes, some disarray) are the cities most widely celebrated.
The high price of housing, as this space has long argued, is a major impediment to a city’s economic, cultural and social potential: Keeping people away undermines what a city can become. Those high costs in Canada exist in part because supply of housing has long been restricted. If rules were looser, there is no way that people would universally deem the best use of a central neighbourhood to be a bunch of large homes that each house only a couple of people.
As Mr. Bertaud puts it, households and businesses should not be prevented from locating in an area because of regulations or a perceived lack of space. Costs should also be reasonable, so individuals, families or businesses can move “when their circumstances change.”
It’s all a little technical but it’s about the idea of a city as a living, breathing entity, one that is amorphous and always evolving. Cities are human. They shouldn’t be overly managed and in part suffocated by rigid concepts of how cities should be, rather than more simply allowing them to be.
Political leaders and communities need to be bold in change and resist siren songs such as claims of “neighbourhood character.” Some may venerate Shaughnessy’s quiet and leafy streets but ignore the character of Shaughnessy in 1908, when the forest was razed to make way for houses. It’s also claimed the land in places like Shaughnessy is too expensive to redevelop. That’s not true either. A recent analysis showed that 17 large houses were for sale at prices that could lead to 800 rental homes.
If only city council and planners didn’t explicitly prevent it.