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.

It takes a pretty good seminar to keep me inside on a warm, sunny Saturday when I could be out biking. But Planning for Livability and Sustainability: Lessons of the Vancouver Achievement for Lexington and the Bluegrass was fascinating.

The seminar today at the University of Kentucky was organized by UK professors Ernest Yanarella and Richard Levine. It was a followup to a similar seminar at the Kentucky Horse Park in 2007.

About 40 people attended, including Vice Mayor Jim Gray, Urban County Council member Diane Lawless and David Mohney, chairman of the Downtown Development Authority. I wish some others from council, the city planning staff and Commerce Lexington whose name tags I saw on the registration table had been able to come.

Ian Smith, Vancouver’s former senior planner and now project director for the 2010 Olympic Village, gave a terrific presentation about how his city has in just the past two or three decades transformed itself by bringing many segments of the community together around the goals of making Vancouver a model for urban livability and environmental sustainability.

Early next week, I’ll write more about that, as well as about the presentation by Mark Roseland, director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. He talked about what that university is doing, and the role universities can play in helping a city and region improve its environment and economy.

But here was an interesting sidebar from today’s session:

Gray, who has been critical of the Downtown Development Authority for supporting the secretive development of the controversial CentrePointe project, said during a discussion that Lexington’s council members and the mayor need more help and leadership from senior planning staff members to make good policy decisions.

“We don’t have the level of competence that our city deserves in these roles,” Gray said. He added that Lexington government needs a change of political culture to allow senior staff members to feel empowered to seek out innovative ideas and help lead policymakers and the public toward good solutions.

That brought a sharp response from Mohney, who in addition to being the DDA chairman is a UK College of Design professor and former dean who has worked for years to involve students in helping Lexington do a better job of urban planning.

“It’s a tough town to make this work,” Mohney said. “It’s going to take time.” (quote corrected from initial post)

Lawless jumped in, complaining that the city’s bureaucracy is too fragmented. “It’s often like a shotgun, with each pellet being powered by a different division,” she said. “We need an urban planner who has that over-arching vision.”

Lawless said the result is a slow decision-making process where each interest group works with a different part of city government, but there’s too little coordination, leadership or vision. To help with that, she is pushing to have 16 recommendations from the lengthy Downtown Master Plan process finally adopted into  law.

Mohney noted that Lexington was at the forefront of American urban planning in 1958 when it created a growth boundary to protect Bluegrass horse farms. “The problem is we did nothing after that to redefine our growth strategy,” he said.

Lawless said this is a good time to do that, noting that the current mayor and council seem to have the political will to address tough, long-neglected growth issues. “The only way it’s going to happen is for us to roll up our sleeves and do something about it,” she said. “Now is the time.”

Soon, it was time for Roseland to begin his presentation. But the discussion continued for a few minutes on Twitter, with Gray, Mohney and Lawless — along with me and local bloggers Eric Patrick Marr and Taylor Shelton — typing away on their BlackBerrys.

Thanks to that social media platform, several hundred people could follow that conversation. It even prompted one of them — Rob Morris, owner of Lowell’s Toyota repair shop downtown and a budding blogger — to leave work and come over to listen to the rest of the seminar.