The Bluegrass and Beyond

I first visited Vancouver to cover the opening of Expo ‘86. When I next returned in 2002, I noticed that a lot had changed in western Canada’s largest city.

I didn’t realize how much had changed until last Saturday. That’s when I attended a seminar at the University of Kentucky, Planning for Livability and Sustainability: Lessons of the Vancouver Achievement for Lexington and the Bluegrass.

It looked at how Vancouver’s focus on people-friendly development has improved the quality of life. In fact, the research arm of Britain’s Economist magazine calls Vancouver the world’s most livable city.

The seminar was organized by UK professors Ernest Yanarella and Richard Levine. Like the annual Commerce Lexington trip, it was an opportunity to look at other cities’ experiences.

Of course, it’s not that Lexington doesn’t already have a lot going for it. It could teach other cities a thing or two. But Vancouver is a good example of a city that never seems to be content with good enough.

Vancouver is twice the size of Lexington, with a metropolitan area population seven times larger. But the cities have some similarities, such as being surrounded by uniquely beautiful landscapes that are both valuable assets and barriers to growth that increase the cost of living.

The seminar’s main presenter was Ian Smith, Vancouver’s former senior planner and now project director for a large mixed-use development that will begin life as the 2010 Winter Olympic Village.

Smith said Vancouver’s approach to city planning and development has changed dramatically in the past two decades. The process began with Expo ‘86. When the world’s fair was over, its 165-acre site became the first of several old waterfront industrial areas to be redeveloped into mixed-use urban neighborhoods.

It isn’t just the look of Vancouver that has changed, Smith said. It is the development dynamic. Vancouver has become more aggressive about working with developers to make sure projects are as good for the city as they are for the developers.

“We needed to create a different model between the city and private developers that was win-win,” Smith said. “Local government needs to take a leadership role. It can’t be left to chance.”

Smith’s description of Vancouver’s development process reminded me of a similar system in downtown Columbus, Ohio, that I wrote about in February. Rather than asking developers to submit detailed plans based on a complex set of rules to a fragmented city bureaucracy, there’s a collaborative process aimed at making developments the best they can be.

That process includes public participation and a professional urban design review board, which in Vancouver’s case has 12 members — six architects, two landscape architects, two engineers, a developer and a city planning commission member.

Vancouver emphasizes good urban design, especially human-scale streetscapes friendly to pedestrians, bicycles and public transportation. Planning for large mixed-use projects doesn’t just consider utilities, roads, stores and schools, but child care, parks, indoor recreation facilities, public art and environmental impact.

Vancouver’s housing prices are among Canada’s highest, largely because of the constraints of being surrounded by water and mountains.

But Vancouver has shown that high-density, mixed-used neighborhoods can be great places to live.

With each new development, Vancouver has pushed for environmental innovation. A showpiece is the 2010 Olympic Village, the first phase of a new urban neighborhood that by 2018 could have 18,000 residents.

Like other cities Lexington has looked to for ideas, Vancouver has plenty of flaws. But its experiences offer some good lessons:

Lexington’s mayor and council must be aggressive about setting standards that encourage exceptional development. That means articulating a clear vision for high-quality downtown growth rather than reacting to disparate projects as developers propose them.

It also means engaging the public in meaningful participation and empowering the city’s professional staff to focus more on innovation and excellence than local politics.

One more thing: Lexingtonians must get comfortable with increasing density in urban neighborhoods. More density is good for the environment and will protect precious farmland. It also can make neighborhoods better. That will require leadership.

Madison is a “green” city, and for any of the Commerce Lexington visitors who didn’t believe it, there was a pair of green-colored glasses and a copy of the booklet Green Living for Dummies at their seat.

Seriously, Madison, WI, has long been a pioneer among American cities in looking for ways to improve environmental sustainability. It was among the first cities with curbside recycling, and energy conservation has always been big — thanks to high power costs and below-zero winters.

Other cities and businesses are following Madison’s examples, not just because it’s a good thing to do, but because it makes economic sense and will make even more sense in the future as energy prices rise and the world grapples with increasingly complex environmental issues and depletion of fossil fuels.

“The environmental movement is not a trend,” said Sonya Newenhouse, president of Madison Environmental Group. “It’s like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement.”

Newenhouse was an interesting example not only of Madison’s focus on sustainability, but how its quality of life attracts and retains talented people who build its economic future.

There’s an often-told joke here that Madison’s cab drivers all have PhDs because they came here to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, didn’t want to leave but couldn’t find jobs.

When Newenhouse finished her PhD at the university and couldn’t find a job doing what she wanted to do — environmental sustainability consulting — she started her own firm. It has grown substantially, and now she has started a second company, too.

“I was one of those PhD students who never left,” she said. “I got into the transportation business, although not cab-driving.”

Newenhouse’s firm helps companies become more environmentally friendly and energy efficient — and save money. Among its many services is developing parking and commuting plans.

Her firm also helps companies that are demolishing buildings figure out how to minimize waste. In Madison, 40 percent of landfill waste is from construction and demolition, and the city has laws that require as much as possible to be recycled so the landfills don’t fill up so fast.

A second company she started, Community Car, rents cars by the hour to people who occasionally need a car but don’t want the cost — or environmental impact — of driving one more than they really need.

Jeanne Hoffman, Madison’s sustainability coordinator, said many of the city’s environmental efforts are done in partnership with local companies. “The business community cooperates greatly with the city and with non-profits,” she said.

Among the initiatives are incentives to build environmentally friendly LEED-certified buildings and use sustainable energy. The city’s fire stations have solar thermal systems. There’s a growing interest here in developing wind power.

There are many rebates and tax incentives for installing solar panels to generate power, which people and companies can sell back to the local electric utility for a higher price than electricity they buy.

“It’s a wildly popular program,” Hoffman said. “Businesses had better start thinking about this because it’s going to affect their bottom line.”

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