Metro Vancouver's urban planning needs to prioritize economics: planner

Metro Vancouver's urban planning considerations need to prioritize urban economics, says renowned planner

Skylines of downtown Vancouver (background) and Burnaby's Brentwood Town Centre (foreground). (Shutterstock)

When it comes to how cities should be planned, it all comes down to urban economics.

That was the core message internationally renowned urban planner Alain Bertaud had to share when he recently visited Vancouver upon being invited by former mayor Sam Sullivan.

Throughout his career, Bertaud, the principal urban planner of The World Bank for two decades and a senior fellow at the Marron Institute of Urban Management for New York University for the past decade, has essentially served the globe-trotting role of the “doctor of cities” in identifying the problems and potential solutions for fixing the urban condition.

In 2018, he laid out half a century of accumulated learnings in his book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.

In an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized, Bertaud says contemporary urban planning does not put enough of an emphasis on urban economics in large part because newer generations of urban planners do not understand economics, and more specifically, the importance of the labour market.

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“Strangely enough, a lot of planners, whether they’re in the United States or I’m sure in Canada, too, have very little understanding of economics, and therefore they like to design a city but they don’t understand that a city designs itself. You only need to provide the infrastructure to support the activities of all the people living and working in the city,” Bertaud told Daily Hive Urbanized.

He brought up the vicious cycle pattern of the labour market, with people moving to a specific city for its great job opportunities, and companies choosing to open up in a specific city for both the quantity and quality of people who live there to find their ideal workers with the necessary talent and skills.

“You cannot design a city if you don’t understand the economics of the city. A city is economics first. If you come to a city, it’s because there are good jobs there or people you want to work with,” he said.

But increasingly, urban planning is focused on purely qualitative goals instead of measurable quantitative outcomes.

The City of Vancouver’s urban planning mantra is largely focused on qualitative objectives, with an intense focus on aesthetic design, and a utopian ideal of livability and sustainability.

But these longstanding ideals are being challenged by the current Vancouver City Council, which is looking to, for instance, review the building height restrictions due to protected mountain view cone policies and building shadowing guidelines for its impacts on inhibiting greater housing, job growth, and economic development in Vancouver’s central areas — where the concentration of jobs, opportunities, and public transit services are highest.

“If you prioritize social values, you should look at being efficient. To have a good sentiment is not enough, you have to deliver at the end. And to deliver means being efficient,” he said, adding that there is a false notion that good aesthetics will automatically result in economic value.

“Otherwise your good feelings are absolutely worthless, and they’re probably bad because they distract you from finding the real solution.”

Although he insisted he did not want to be prescriptive, Bertaud suggested Vancouver’s housing and economic challenges may stem from having the wrong type of zoning and policies for its geographical conditions.

Within a circle with a 25-km radius extending from the downtown Vancouver peninsula, the Central Business District (CBD) — the economic core and the largest hub of the regional labour market — only about 39% of the land is buildable, based on his calculations. The vast majority of the area inside this circle is water, protected regional parks, and the North Shore mountains and reservoir watershed, with the measure of 25 km distance generally being used as the baseline for a tolerable commute distance.

metro vancouver alain bertaud 25 km radius

A 25-km radius circle extending from downtown Vancouver, which is the Metro Core of the entire Metro Vancouver region. Light green areas indicate protected agricultural uses. (Alain Bertaud/Google Maps)

25-km radius around the City of London, the British capital. (Alain Bertaud/Google Maps)

Much of the buildable land within the circle in Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, and Coquitlam sees low-density residential uses.

Some of the closest buildable land to downtown Vancouver is to the north within West Vancouver and North Vancouver. However, those jurisdictions are inhibited not only by zoning but poor transportation connections across Burrard Inlet to reach downtown Vancouver.

Metropolitan regions like Calgary, Austin, Toronto, Chicago, and especially London comparatively have more buildable land within 25 km of their CBD.

By the same logic, Surrey City Centre — which is identified by the regional district as Metro Vancouver’s secondary “Metro Core,” on the same level as the main “Metro Core” of downtown Vancouver and Central Broadway — has more buildable land within a 25 km radius, although it has more protected agricultural uses within its circle.

“What strikes me is that as an urban planner, you have a combination of mountains and water, which is relatively rare. Usually, a city is constrained by mountains or water, but not both at the same time. That’s something I think that makes it even more challenging to build, although it makes Vancouver even more attractive compared to other cities,” he told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“But that means there’s even less land available for development, and at the same time while walking through the city, I was surprised by a lot of zoning regulations which prevent the recycling of land,” he added, reiterating the importance of efficient land use.

Everything comes down to having a healthy labour market, he emphasized, and the steps that are taken to achieve that.

He suggests labour markets that are primarily geographically centralized are ideal if they are to be most productive, as they unleash economies of scale, which is only possible in cities with a large major market.

“If those young people are discouraged from settling in Vancouver because of the high housing costs, the city is going to age. Even very skilled workers are going to age, and eventually, the city will decay,” he said.

“I’ve seen this happen over the long range. There will be a very slow decay of the economy because of the aging population, not replaced by young people. This should be taken very seriously.”

There are four general commuting trip patterns to explain how the labour market functions, he says.

The monocentric model has one big core where all the jobs and opportunities are located. Cities that have a monocentric pattern are generally smaller metropolitan areas with about a million residents, such as Calgary and Edmonton. It can be easier to build a public transit network as while the origin of trips is dispersed, the jobs are concentrated.

Metropolitan regions like Los Angeles and Atlanta — known for having a large geographical area with sprawling low-density uses, and very weak city centre densities — have the dispersed model. With both the origin and destination of trips being dispersed, it is difficult to serve such regions with public transit.

According to Bertaud, Metro Vancouver is the composite model, where there is a strong primary city centre (downtown Vancouver and Central Broadway), but many jobs are also dispersed elsewhere in the region. This is a product of the various officially regionally designated secondary city centres and town centres, such as Brentwood, Metrotown, Richmond City Centre, Lougheed Town Centre, and Lonsdale, with many of these areas well served by major public transit services.

Four different types of metropolitan regions when their commute patterns are explained as labour markets. (Alain Bertaud)

Composite model of cities, where there is a strong core but the jobs are also dispersed elsewhere to smaller secondary nodes. Metro Vancouver is an example of a composite model. (Alain Bertaud)

Map of Metro Vancouver’s urban centres. (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

Under the composite model, he says, cities that begin with a high concentration in the core see their jobs disperse over time for reasons such as rising land costs in the central city.

But he says the composite model comes short of the highly contemporary concept of the fourth model — the urban village model, where there is no longer a single strong primary labour market but rather numerous equally sized urban cores. This is also more commonly referred to as “The 15 Minute City,” which Bertaud ridicules as being a pure fantasy.

Simply put, he says, The 15 Minute City does not exist in real life. And if it does, that means the urban region’s labour market is highly fragmented and therefore incredibly unproductive.

“It means you do not have a labour market anymore, you have 20 labour markets,” he later said at an event. “We have a lot of flying carpets in urban planning. It sounds wonderful but in the long run, it never works.”

However, there is increasing pressure to have the Metro Vancouver region stray into attempting to transition into the theoretical urban village model because the region, located within a relatively small geographical area, is carved up into 21 different municipal governments — each with their own differences in governance methods, priorities and values, egos, zoning and regulations, and tax revenue considerations. There are essentially 21 fiefdoms within a small land base, even though the labour market transcends their municipal borders.

The geographical size of Metro Vancouver (TransLink jurisdiction) compared with the City of Toronto (TTC jurisdiction). (TransLink)

The geographical size of Metro Vancouver (TransLink jurisdiction) compared with the City of Montreal. (TransLink)

The geographical size of Metro Vancouver (TransLink jurisdiction) compared with the City of Chicago. (TransLink)

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