and other tales from Vancouver's

by SEAN ROSSITER

Vancouver has been basking in the glow of international approval for some time. We’ve become an award-winning city. Not that we don’t deserve every word of praise. We do.   

We’re out there at the sharp end of sustainability. We are building a rapid-transit system that is making possible, for the first time, a car-free downtown lifestyle here, in Dream City. Say what you will about politics determining routes and the hardware—because it’s all true—but you can get from Burrard Street to Columbia Street, New Westminster, with change from your half-hour. Such blessings are not accidents. We’ve been here before. Vancouver had an earlier golden era that gave our great-grandparents not-quite-as-rapid trollies before the First World War and buildings that would have been outstanding in any city.

Another view of CIRS, image courtesy of Busby Perkins + Will (see "The Greenest Building In the World", below)

But, lately, things have been going wrong. Little things, mostly—or big ones, when they involve you. Water, the one resource we thought was pure and plentiful, has “particulates” in it. Hundred-kilometre winds uproot trees in Stanley Park. Electricity goes down with the street trees. Newspapers publish lists of items to stock in emergency shelters, just as they did during the Atomic Age. Is this climate change working its contradictory sorcery upon us? Three snowstorms before mid-January? Not to mention The Big One, gathering intensity out on the ocean floor, waiting to let go.

We should listen carefully to the lonely voices shouting into the wind. Sustainability can take many forms and can affect almost every aspect of our lives. There are lots of improvements from which to choose. If only more of us lived by the simple principles of sustainability (most of them actually ways of living healthier lives), we could make a difference.

Canadians are known for stepping into deadly situations around the world and getting things sorted out. Too bad we can’t do the same thing right here at home. Why not? Except for a few lonely voices barely audible upwind, such as those of Dr. David Suzuki, Vancouver City Councillor David Cadman, and a handful of others, there is too little leadership driving sustainability in Vancouver right now. If we want to come closer to meeting our Kyoto commitments, we will have to do it the way we always do the difficult tasks: as a community, for the community.  –SR

The Universal Solvent

Water. The one thing about Vancouver we thought we could count on. If you’re like me, you chose Vancouver with water very much in mind. No matter what else might go wrong, cold, clear water would always be available at the twist of a tap. Most of Vancouver’s water doesn’t even have to be pumped. Water flows downhill, all by itself.

So that was the deal. Me traded for water. I moved to Vancouver at the beginning of January, 1972. It was raining when I arrived and it continued to rain for 28 days and nights.

Fast forward to 2006. How could anyone possibly have imagined water shortages, which were bad enough? But muddy water? Water you need to boil before drinking? I drank directly from the tap anyway, just to collect on my personal deal with Vancouver. Vancouver water, even with turbidity, beats Lake Huron water with its heavy-metal aftertaste.

As for the turbidity, that can be fixed in two ways: when the GVRD’s $600 million purification plant comes on-stream in 2009 and when the province finally decides it can do without stumpage fees from logging in the North Shore watershed. Reducing the combined length of active logging roads there by 20 kilometres is only a start. The roads undermine the watershed’s natural forest-filtration process.

It could be worse. Karen Wristen, executive director of the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation (SPEC), is thankful that, in Canada, our water supply is not privatized. “Quite frankly, our water supply regulating system stinks,” she says. And “the continued push to privatize services that have been provided by government,” in general, has her worried.

There are two ends to the water pipe, the other one being the sewage overflow pipe in the Georgia Strait. With a lot of visitors coming in just three years, Cadman would like us to tidy up the bathroom, as it were. All we do now to process human waste is remove the lumps. “This,” Cadman says of 2010, “is the occasion when we’ve got to fix the toilet.”

Postage on the Lettuce

Andre LaRiviere is familiar to Shared Vision readers as a foodie who embraces trends in the culinary world with a typically Gallic relish. Today, he is looking at replacements for the plastic cutlery that fast-food outlets and airlines offer. What he sees is inexpensive wooden cutlery that looks and works almost as well as metal. By way of reassuring this carnivorous questioner, LaRiviere says he could cut steak with the wood knife.

Like all food enthusiasts, LaRiviere is a lover of life and its gastronomic possibilities. He is aware of the connection between land use and the availability of fresh produce, such as blueberries. He doesn’t think of Granville Island as a real farmer’s market—at least, not like the ones at Trout Lake or Mole Hill—because farmer’s market items are harvested much closer and arrive for sale much sooner after being picked. And he is aware of the role of the Agricultural Land Commission and Reserve (ALR) in making urban life richer by making it easier for farmers to bring their produce or rural crafts to the city. Some of the few recent positive steps taken by the ALR recently, SPEC’s Karen Wristen believes, only mask the fact that “we’re not saving the best land.”
Urban sprawl adds distance from farm to market, and longer distances contribute more greenhouse gases (GHG) to the climate-change problem. Since half the food Greater Vancouver eats comes from the Fraser River Basin, the loss of farmland to other uses, LaRiviere says, undermines the welcome trend toward greener and more sustainable farming.

False Creek 

It might have happened earlier, if Bruno Freschi had gotten his way. The original architect of Expo 86 proposed a waterway connecting False Creek with Burrard Inlet through Chinatown, as the inlet and harbour were connected at high tide during the First Peoples’ era. Had Freschi’s scheme—and, sadly, Bruno himself—survived the cost-cutting stage of the world’s fair preparations, the creek might have cleaned itself up a little faster. As bad as the water was for Expo, I know a guy who swam across the creek every night of the fair.

Just because an earlier generation did the spadework, doesn’t make the self-purification of False Creek any less noteworthy as an environmental milestone. The edges of Downtown Vancouver’s liquid belly button have been the sites of so much innovation in housing, so many projects that utterly defied convention, that it’s nice every once in a while to give some air time to the creek itself, marvel that it is.

Despite the toxic industrial wastes dumped into it, and its having been reduced by infill to one-quarter of its size at the time of European contact, there is something almost mystical about the body of water that once supported populations of sole, perch, sturgeon, flounder, smelt, and crab.
And now, False Creek’s most amazing transformation: salmon fingerlings were found in the creek the summer before last, not far from the Science Centre. Some say herring have been spotted in the same area.

“My understanding of the process is that the water pretty much cycles about every 11 days,” says Tom Osaba, the City of Vancouver’s sustainability manager. “So the water that’s here won’t be here for any more than 11 days. It is cleaning itself up. There would be lots of concern if something stirred up the bottom, because I think a lot of the contaminants have sort of settled out of the water at this point.”

A Short History of Being World Class       

Vancouver’s been lucky. Leadership in architecture, land use, urban design, and now, we hope, sustainability has been almost a birthright in Vancouver for a century. Sometimes by sheer good fortune, sometimes with luck as the residue of design, but always with the city’s spectacular backdrop in sight, Vancouver’s architects have been its great innovators. Many of those architects were imported.
Barely short of 100 years ago, in 1910, the lumber-market boom in the American Northwest collapsed. Canada’s wood continued to find markets throughout the British Empire and architects based in Seattle moved north, following the work. Perhaps the best of all the newcomers was Woodruff Marbury Somervell, who designed what is now SFU’s Centre For Dialogue and the B.C. Electric trolley barn at Hastings and Carrall Streets—cast as the police headquarters in Da Vinci’s Inquest, among other shows.

By the immediate post-war period, Vancouver’s residential and commercial architecture was second to none, with the great Ned Pratt leading the city into the international world of modern architecture. Pratt went so far as to employ the young Arthur Erickson, briefly, despite his doubts about Erickson’s baguette-and-cheese lunches.

Land use is an issue in a city and region bound by mountains and water. Forward-looking civic leaders, such as Tom McDonald, and pioneer regional planners, including Peter Oberlander, evolved the concept of a string of regional town centres connected by rapid transit, an outcome that took 35 years from inception to operation in time for Expo 86. Rapid transit made possible today’s high-density residential downtown, and that high-rise downtown is the key element in the fast-growing but livable Lower Mainland.

Double Your Fun: Twinning Gridlock

Planning was a different matter in 1950. “Progress” was a leftover from the war years. Peter Oberlander summed up his planning philosophy in a Greater Vancouver region that had no Trans-Canada Highway, no Lougheed Highway, and certainly no rapid-transit line spanning the Lower Mainland. Look for the jobs, Oberlander said in those days, and build roads to them. But Oberlander resigned as chair of the Vancouver Planning Commission, when his colleagues endorsed Vancouver’s as-yet-unbuilt east-west freeway.

Cheeying Ho is the executive director of SmartGrowth BC, a non-governmental organization that spends a lot of time lobbying governments for sustainable solutions to issues, often, in their case, to do with transportation. SmartGrowth and Oberlander have developed more in common than you might think during the nearly 60 years since it was all Canada’s construction industry could do to house returning veterans. Where a subdivision was approved, a road and underground infrastructure appeared first. Nobody questioned the process. Likewise, the Gateway project is going to be built, no matter what anyone other than Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon says. Former Vancouver City Councillor Gordon Price says, only half kidding, that Falcon is the chief planner of the Highway One corridor. There will be a twinned Port Mann bridge and a doubling of the Trans-Canada’s lanes, whether Greater Vancouver wants them or not.

“It will open urban sprawl,” Ho says. “There will be greenhouse gases from more cars. It’s a very expensive way of providing a short-term solution to [the commuting] problem.”

What about the public process? “They have meetings to discuss parts of it,” Ho says, sounding incredulous. Which parts?

Talkin’ Southeast False Creek Blues

Whatever happened to False Creek Southeast? The greenest facility for the first sustainable Winter Olympics is now starting construction and, already, it’s a disappointment. On the waterfront section of False Creek’s last available 38 hectares of waterfront, between the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World, the 2010 Athletes’ Village at Southeast False Creek (SEFC) is being compromised “fundamentally,” says David Cadman. Cadman is a lifelong environmentalist, former head of SPEC, and a leftover from the last council’s active interest in SEFC.

It took 10 years to generate the excitement this magazine (Shared Vision, September 2004) reflected in calling it “The Greenest Urban Neighbourhood on Earth.” So what happened since then?

Good question. There was the issue of SEFC’s greenhouse-gas-free thermal energy source. None but the specialists were breathing hard over the choice. The first idea was to drill heat wells on and around the site, a proven technology used by Harold Kalke’s 4th Avenue Capers mixed-use building. Then, someone discovered that the mainline sewer running from the site south along Cambie Street is heated more by its contents than the heat wells.
But the system chosen by city council is, believe it or not, burning wood pellets. The pellets are what’s left of trees after the pine beetles have finished. B.C. is already exporting pellets to Sweden. Burned in low-pollution, bio-mass plants, the pellets,   nevertheless, emit one-and-one-half times the particulates than the sewer option (in which the odours are almost fully contained within the pipe). So, in a community founded on zero outhouse and greenhouse gases, wood-stove heat is chosen not only for the city’s part of the project, but is now required of private developers on the site. “Back to the future, eh?” says one of those involved with the decision.

Other changes include the addition of 100 parking stalls at the community centre, just what you don’t want at a sustainability demonstration project. And the installation of air conditioners is another throwback to the venetian-blind era. Both were demands by high-end developers. But the biggest disappointment is the reduction of low-income housing units on the site to 20 per cent from the one-third of all units that False Creek shoreline projects have usually set aside for non-market housing.

Another issue left hanging is the fate of the Interfaith Spiritual Centre at SEFC, a promise to the religious community made by the Larry Campbell council two years ago and as yet unconfirmed by Mayor Sam Sullivan.
Sam? Sam?

Coming soon: “The Greenest Building In the World”

Often, breakthrough designs come about as a new combination of proven technologies. Sometimes, it’s a question of new ways to construct a building. The difference may be how the various builders and trades people work together. All of these approaches are informing the design of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), soon to rise on the multi-school campus along Great Northern Way.

“What’s it like working on such a thing as a future greenest building in the world?” architect Martin Neilson is asked.
“You mean, such a beast?” he jokes. Neilson is project architect on behalf of Peter Busby Perkins & Will, a firm with as much expertise in designing LEED gold and platinum buildings as anyone in Vancouver.

Well, there will be beastly aspects to the CIRS. It is being designed all at once by its architects, and structural, electrical, and mechanical engineers in a process referred to as the Integrated Design Process. Instead of shuffling in and out of the project, its designers are working together, so the requirements of each specialty can be recognised and resolved in an ongoing, continuous effort.

The CIRS has attracted the attention of sustainability mavens such as Mark Holland and Busby client John Robinson, a UBC geographer and sustainable-cities colleague of Mike Harcourt. Now that the greenest neighbourhood is being built, many of those who sweated the details of Southeast False Creek are shifting their attention to the site of the future Greenest Building In the World. After spending much of his time over the course of 10 years working on SEFC, Holland (former city manager of sustainability) has surprisingly little sentimental attachment to it.  He sees CIRS as a next step for sustainability.  It seems early to be designating anything that’s a year away from completion as the best anywhere, but there is an understandable element of one-upmanship in the race to be the best.

The building’s official title is impressive, right off the bat. By Interactive, its builders mean the sustainability departments of UBC, SFU, BCIT, and the Emily Carr Institute will be represented and, presumably, bounce ideas off each other, bathed in 100 per cent natural light in a GHG-neutral atmosphere, with a sustainable-mobility program and zero liquid- and solid-waste production. Not only will CIRS be capable of 100 per cent rainwater capture and purification to potable standards, it will ”harvest” daylight. Movable louvres will change the building’s exterior appearance and receptivity to sunlight. The CIRS will, of course, be a net energy producer.

To keep the CIRS current, modular heating and lighting systems will plug in and be removable, to upgrade their functions. “A thousand points of monitoring will be built into CIRS, to collect data on the building’s performance and to develop a set of indicators applicable to the monitoring of other buildings,” the new Greater Vancouver Green Guide to sustainable architecture informs us.

“When it opens in 2008,” the Guide predicts, “CIRS is anticipated to be recognized as the most innovative and high-performing building in North America.”

Not to mention keeping those other buildings on a very short leash.

Sidebar: The Green Guide

As it is, the Greater Vancouver Green Guide is, at least, a handy and authoritative architectural guide to recent sustainable buildings and landscapes. It’s a bargain, at $18.65, for anyone who wants to get updated. It is the only up-to-date architectural guide to Vancouver, with the essential third edition of Exploring Vancouver now 12 mostly boom-time years old. But the Green Guide is more than that. It is a page-by-page demonstration of how many often-unexpected ways sustainability affects each of us.

I was astounded but pleased to see, for example, False Creek South (1975-1990) listed as an environmentally advanced and influential project envisioned by the urban thinker of his time, Walter Hardwick. FCS was built on the basis of the most inclusive public participation program up to its time and seldom equalled since. Its most laudable feature is its 33-33-33 per cent mix of incomes and rental, lease, and mortgage arrangements.
The book also features rehabs such as the West End’s Mole Hill neighbourhood, the sheer green-ness of which is enhanced by the re-use of the original materials from which Vancouver’s largest group of surviving Victorian and Edwardian houses were constructed. Other sustainables at Mole Hill are the summertime farmer’s market that appears in its big front yard during the harvest season and the big, English-style gardens out back. The Mole Hill example shows how, as concepts of sustainability grow to embrace old buildings as well as new, it will come to be the guiding factor in shaping our surroundings.

When not drinking brown water, Sean Rossiter is putting the finishing touches on his forthcoming book City Making in Paradise: Nine Decisions That Saved Vancouver's Livability, co-authored with Ken Cameron and Mike Harcourt.