City's chief planner emphasizes creating a 'Vancouver approach' to taller towers

Vancouver has entered a pivotal conversation about the future of the skyline of its city centre, as the municipal government launches a review of its nearly three-decade-old Higher Buildings Policy amid growing public interest, developer activity, and pressure on limited land space on the Downtown Vancouver peninsula.

Josh White, the City of Vancouver’s General Manager of Planning, Urban Design, and Sustainability and Director of Planning, says the review is ultimately about balancing growth, public benefits, architectural quality, and the city’s identity as it considers how taller towers can play a larger role in the city centre.

The review also comes after the 2024 changes to the City’s protected mountain view cones, which opened up new development opportunities in the Downtown Vancouver peninsula and sparked interest in building towers taller than what has historically been permitted in a number of strategic areas.

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Speaking about the City’s in-person public consultation exhibition at the Vancouver Lookout observation deck attraction atop Harbour Centre earlier in May 2026, White said the response far exceeded expectations.

His team transformed the observation deck into an interactive public consultation space where residents could enjoy the skyline and views from above, while engaging directly with the planning concepts, including a 3D-printed model of the Downtown Vancouver peninsula.

“It was pretty amazing, actually. More than I think anticipated,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized in an interview, sharing that approximately 3,000 people showed up over the free periods over three dates to go up the Vancouver Lookout to see the City’s exhibition.

During the event’s final Saturday, which saw the attraction open up to the public for free for an entire day, he said attendance had become difficult to manage. There was a queue on the sidewalk of well in excess of an hour to get inside the Vancouver Lookout, with the line cut off about 90 mins before closing time.

“At the end, it was sort of beyond capacity, you know, because the interest was so high,” said White.

He says the event revealed intense public interest in the future of Downtown Vancouver and a broad range of opinions about how the skyline should evolve. Still, White said several common themes emerged consistently throughout the engagement process.

“When you have that many people, you’re going to get the full spectrum of opinions, which we did hear,” he said.

“We definitely heard about, you know, wanting to ensure design excellence. We heard a lot about making sure that it contributes to, you know, the public realm.”

He also said many participants emphasized the importance of maintaining a uniquely local approach to city-building.

“A Vancouver approach to this is what we heard, which was affirming, because that’s really our goal of this endeavour, is to have a Vancouver-based approach to higher buildings,” said White.

Higher buildings are “punctuation marks” for the skyline

The City’s Higher Buildings Policy was first introduced in 1997 following earlier debates over public view protections and the city’s evolving skyline. The policy established where exceptionally tall towers could be built and under what conditions.

White said the original intent of the policy remains highly relevant today.

“I think the Higher Buildings Policy has always been about acknowledging and understanding that we have high intensity in our downtown peninsula,” he said.

Vancouver has long embraced high-rise tower development downtown, but White emphasized that the city’s tallest towers carry special significance because of their visual and civic impact.

“In Vancouver, it’s part of what downtown is,” he said. “But recognizing that the highest or the tallest amongst them really are city shaping in terms of our identity as a community.”

White described skyscrapers as “punctuation marks” within the skyline that must contribute more than just additional floor space.

“Our skyline is prominent, wanting to make sure that those sort of punctuation marks in our skyline and in our cityscape contribute exceptionally to our environment,” he said.

That contribution, he added, extends beyond architecture itself.

“Both in terms of architectural quality, what they can contribute in public space and that experience of the ground level, the spaces that can deliver, and also the public benefits that are created from creating that kind of value out of a high density, high rise buildings,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized.

The current review, he said, aims to preserve the spirit of the original policy while adapting it to contemporary conditions.

“I think the exact same spirit for which it was created is what we want to continue with it and make sure that it remains contemporary in meeting all those objectives,” said White.

Downtown density and scarce land

The review is taking place at a time when Downtown Vancouver is increasingly constrained by limited redevelopment opportunities and competing land demands.

“Downtown is very built out,” said White flatly.

He described the scarcity of redevelopment sites as a natural force pushing the skyline upward.

The municipal government is now trying to determine where greater height makes sense and how those projects can deliver the greatest possible benefit to the public.

“With that sort of scarcity of redevelopment opportunities, the natural evolution of the skyline in places is to incrementally go up,” he said.

“This helps give us the guidance that will help us shape those to the maximum possible benefit of the city and our public space.”

The pressure on land downtown extends beyond housing and office development. Vancouver is simultaneously trying to accommodate future infrastructure, parks, schools, open space, and potentially major institutional or entertainment uses.

“We’re going to have demands needs for civic space, for open space, for new and emerging things that naturally want to situate near downtown,” said White.

But while White stopped short of describing taller towers as a deliberate land preservation strategy, he acknowledged that limited land supply is fundamentally shaping planning decisions.

He also argued that concentrating the greatest density within the downtown area remains a foundational planning principle.

“I think it is a reflection of the reality of kind of a heavily built out downtown kind of scarce land supply,” he said.

“The highest and tallest buildings, the greatest density we would expect to be within our downtown core,” said White, citing access to jobs and existing urban context.

Launch of the City’s international design competition for higher buildings concepts

One of the central issues facing City planners is how to ensure very tall towers still contribute positively to life at street level.

White repeatedly emphasized that height alone is not the City’s objective.

“As we introduce buildings that are higher, it raises the degree of difficulty in terms of making sure those buildings can contribute really positively to public,” he told Daily Hive Urbanized.

The City is now exploring new ways to examine those questions through an international design competition process — called the Vancouver Tall ideas competition — tied to the review.

The initiative, he explained, will focus heavily on how taller and supertall buildings interact with pedestrians and public space. His team is particularly interested in how architecture can soften the impact of extreme height.

“One of the things that sort of ideas competition will do is really focus on how can tall buildings, given they’re bigger, they’re higher, they require things like bigger floor plates, they’ll interact with the ground plane differently than more modest scale projects… How do we make sure that they contribute really, really strongly to the public realm at the pedestrian scale? So how do you make tall, pedestrian or human scale, very tall buildings?” he said.

He said the answers will likely depend on architectural design, public space integration, and the uses concentrated at the base of towers.

The Vancouver Tall ideas competition on exploring concepts and principles for a “distinctly Vancouver approach” to building higher will have its free public launch event at the Vancouver Playhouse from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Monday, June 1, 2026.

The City is also examining how the financial value created through additional height could potentially support broader public amenities and infrastructure.

As Vancouver’s municipal government studies the future of its skyline, planners are also examining how other cities around the world have regulated taller towers.

“Anytime we do a policy update like this, we want to see what other cities have done, what they’ve learned from it,” said White.

“There’s lots of cities in North America and around the world that have built taller than we have in Vancouver, and there’s positive and negative examples to draw from that. We can help influence what’s appropriate and necessary in our Vancouver context,” reiterating the importance of the quality of public spaces, architecture, and urban design.

He asserted that the importance of thoughtful planning only increases as buildings become larger.

“No more is that important than when we’re dealing with buildings of the highest scale,” said White.

One of the major technical questions surrounding taller towers in Vancouver involves seismic risk. Modern building codes already carefully address earthquake resilience.

At the same time, City planners are studying how other earthquake-prone jurisdictions have addressed similar challenges with their taller towers, including supertalls.

Taller towers would likely require additional engineering measures to manage sway and seismic performance, such as mass dampers installed near the top of the towers.

“One thing we know for sure is that buildings taller will have to contemplate those seismic things,” said White.

White also suggested that economics and engineering realities may naturally constrain building heights in Vancouver even before policy limits are considered.

“There’s economic factors and there’s structural factors that will naturally kind of limit how high buildings probably will go in Vancouver,” he said.

An online survey for the City’s initial public consultation opened early this month and will close today. City staff will use the input to draft the policies in Fall 2026 to Winter 2027, with the final updated policy reaching public hearing for Vancouver City Council’s final consideration in Spring 2027.

Vancouver versus Burnaby and Surrey

As Vancouver debates whether to allow taller towers downtown, the neighbouring suburban municipalities of Burnaby and Surrey are increasingly seeing proposals, approvals, and under-construction projects that exceed Vancouver’s existing tallest buildings. Globally, the tallest buildings within major metropolitan regions are typically found within the main city centre area, but Metro Vancouver is increasingly an outlier.

The 708-ft.-tall, Two Gilmore Place in Burnaby’s Brentwood district became Metro Vancouver’s new tallest building in 2023, overtaking the 2009-built, 659-ft-tall, Park Hyatt Vancouver (former Living Shangri-La Vancouver) in Vancouver.

Later in 2026, Metro Vancouver is expected to gain a new tallest building from the continued construction ascent of Concord Pacific’s 755-ft.-tall Grand Tower at Concord Metrotown in Burnaby. It will reach full completion in 2027.

Just east of Concord Metrotown and Metropolis at Metrotown, WPJ McCarthy and Company is proposing to build an 853-ft.-tall tower with retail/restaurant, residential, and office uses, as well as a First Nations art gallery, a bowling alley, and a public observation deck attraction on the tower rooftop.

As it currently stands, Metro Vancouver’s tallest buildings will be located next to SkyTrain’s Lougheed Town Centre in Burnaby, where Pinnacle International is proposing to build towers of 863 ft., 797 ft., 716 ft., and 571 ft. Pinnacle Lougheed will contain condominium, rental housing, office, hotel, and retail/restaurant uses.

And in Surrey City Centre, the Surrey City Development Corporation — a for-profit real estate company owned by the City of Surrey — has plans to build a 754-ft.-tall office and institutional tower next to SkyTrain’s Surrey Central Station, as part of the Centre Block complex.

Currently, the tallest proposal within the Downtown Vancouver peninsula is a 650-ft.-tall, mixed-use tower with hotel, condominium, social housing, and retail/restaurant uses at 601 Beach Crescent, next to the north end of the Granville Street Bridge. This project by Pinnacle International would also have destination restaurant attraction on the tower rooftop.

As well, Concord Pacific is in the very early stages of considering the inclusion of two “gateway” towers for its Northeast False Creek Plan. Both towers could also be higher than Vancouver’s current tallest building. However, a formal rezoning application has not yet been submitted.

Also, a First Nations-led proposal next to SkyTrain’s Renfrew Station in East Vancouver could feature towers as tall as — or even taller than — the Park Hyatt Vancouver.

However, White said he does not view taller buildings rising in the suburban cities as unusual for reasons such as sit conditions and the larger parcel sizes available in the suburban urban centres, compared to the small parcels on the tight city blocks of Downtown Vancouver. He pointed to the larger site sizes for where taller buildings are slated in Burnaby and Surrey.

As well, the size of development parcels alone changes what is physically and economically feasible.

“We have a polycentric regional growth model,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“We have very different types of site constraints in Burnaby and Surrey and other places compared to say a place like Downtown Vancouver.”

White emphasized the City of Vancouver is not approaching its review as a regional competition over height. Instead, he said the City is focused on determining what residents believe is appropriate.

“Downtown Vancouver is a big part of the Metro Core area, not just of our city but also our region. It is an appropriate place for higher buildings, but it’s not about saying we ought to be the tallest because we’re Vancouver,” he said.

“We want to hear public input to what citizens or residents believe is appropriate, how high and where.”

“We don’t want to relitigate or review the protected views”

Under the current Higher Buildings Policy, the tallest permitted towers in Downtown Vancouver generally range around 650 ft,, with some locations permitting heights approaching 700 ft.

White said the review will examine whether different parts of the city centre should accommodate different tiers of building height.

“Are there different kinds of tiers of heights, like at the very centre centre ice type locations within the downtown peninsula?” he said.

One of the city’s key principles, however, is that the review will not reopen Vancouver’s protected mountain view cones, which last went through extensive amendments in 2024 to enable taller buildings at many locations. Recent view cone revisions already created additional development opportunities in certain areas, but City planners are not looking to introduce towers directly into the protected mountain view corridors.

Instead, the City is focusing on areas between those view corridors.

“We don’t want to relitigate or review the protected views,” emphasized White.

“We’re not looking to introduce higher buildings where there are protected views. It’s really those in between places that with that overlay of protected views that we’re going to be looking at is one of the first principles on deciding where it could be appropriate to situate taller towers.”

The City is also considering whether tower heights should vary geographically across downtown.

He noted that the varying topography of the Downtown Vancouver peninsula further complicates height comparisons.

“Could it be a lower tier than right at the centre of downtown?” asked White.

“The actual geodetic height is going to be quite different. A 50-storey building here isn’t quite the same as a 50-storey building somewhere else.”

For example, Sheraton One Wall Centre, previously the tallest building in the city throughout much of the 2000s, is the eighth tallest building in Vancouver. But when viewed from afar, it appears much taller in the skyline as it is located on one of the highest ground elevations — about 120 ft. above sea level — on the Downtown Vancouver peninsula. The nearby The Butterfly tower also benefits from an enhanced skyline appearance due to its specific location’s geodetic height, which is the overall height of the structure when combining both the land elevation height above sea level and the height of the structure.

New uses emerging in taller towers

White said the City has observed changing development patterns in recent years, particularly as developers increasingly mix residential, hotel, and amenity uses within single projects. Those combinations can help improve project economics.

“We’re certainly seeing a lot more kind of hotel combined with residential uses,” he said.

“One of our sort of outputs of the hotel policy was showing that like a residential use mixed with a hotel helps the viability of a project.”

The blending of uses is also helping produce more amenity-rich towers. White said those changes reflect broader trends in urban development rather than being caused solely by Vancouver’s policy changes.

“When you have those types of mixes within a building, things like, you know, like a rooftop amenity or a restaurant or something like that might make more sense,” he said.

“I view that as kind of the natural evolution of kind of buildings, regardless of their scale.”

He added that the desire to maximize rooftop and shared amenity space is becoming common across the city.

“That’s not just happening downtown,” he said. “It definitely is happening all over Vancouver.”

Growing developer interest

The City has received growing interest from developers exploring taller projects downtown.

Some proposals involve combinations of residential and hotel uses, which White said can push developments into the higher-building category.

“There definitely is some projects either in the application stage or kind of in the pre-application stage where they’re considering opportunities for taller buildings in certain locations,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“When you start stacking those uses together, that in some instances could push the project into the higher building sphere.”

Among the major projects currently under review is the Bay Parkade redevelopment proposal by the Holborn Group, which has attracted significant attention in Spring 2025 because of its proposed tower heights.

Holborn Group envisions three new towers, including a full hotel tower with a one-of-a-kind public rooftop observation deck attraction rising more than 1,000 feet — a height that would make it not only the tallest building in British Columbia, but the first technical “supertall” in Western Canada. The main tower would reach 1,034 ft., while two additional towers, at 889 ft. and 783 ft., would further reshape the city’s core and skyline.

The project’s tallest tower would see 100 per cent hotel uses, containing over 900 hotel rooms, over 70,000 sq. ft. of conference space including three ballrooms, and the observation deck within a giant enclosed dome with viewing areas, lounge space, and a restaurant. The remaining two towers would see a mix of strata market ownership condominium and secured purpose-built rental housing uses, along with retail/restaurant uses, a major publicly accessible plaza, and a new additional major entrance into SkyTrain’s Granville Station. As well, as a substantial public benefit, the developer is also committing to building a 38-storey tower with social housing and childcare on a separate site in Gastown, which would be built in the first phase and entirely gifted to the municipal government upon completion.

The Bay Parkade rezoning application has already gone before the City’s Urban Design Panel, which endorsed the conceptual architectural concept, with recommendations for refinement. White shared that his team is still reviewing the application, and is unable to specify when it could reach public hearing for City Council’s consideration.

This large parkade site — spanning almost the entire city block, on both sides of the laneway that bisects it — is one of the few obvious sites within the Downtown Vancouver peninsula where a taller or supertall tower can be accommodated.

The City’s review of its Higher Buildings Policy arrives at a moment when Vancouver is confronting multiple competing pressures simultaneously: housing demand, land scarcity, economic uncertainty, seismic resilience, architectural identity, and public expectations around livability.

Throughout the discussion, White repeatedly returned to the idea that the debate is not fundamentally about maximizing height. Instead, he framed it as a broader civic conversation about what kind of city Vancouver wants to become.

The review, he further emphasized, is intended to establish a distinctly local framework for how taller buildings can contribute to Vancouver’s future while preserving the qualities residents value most.

“We want to come up with solutions, and we want to hear public input to what citizens or residents believe is appropriate, how high and where,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized.

You might also like:
• New renderings of Western Canada's tallest tower in downtown Vancouver, featuring an observation deck attraction
• Holborn Group proposes 38-storey social housing tower for Gastown
• Downtown Vancouver's skyline soars with proposal for landmark towers up to 1,034 ft
• Canada's tallest building with a public observation deck proposed for Vancouver
• Proposal for Metro Vancouver's tallest tower in Metrotown features a public observation deck attraction
• Gateway landmark condo and hotel tower with 10,000 sq. ft. top-floor destination restaurant proposed beside Granville Street Bridge in Downtown Vancouver
• Burnaby's future 863-ft-tall tower in Lougheed to feature a hotel with a sky-high restaurant and bar destination on the 86th floor