城市规划中的住宅生态密度概念

One of the most tragic victims of the current civic strike — inching towards a settlement after three months — might turn out to be an EcoDensity policy with teeth.

To be sure, Mayor Sam Sullivan is so associated with the slogan that he cannot fail to roll out some set of policies under this rubric in late fall, when city staff are back in their places with glum-looking faces. But whether these announcements-to-come will kick Vancouver into international leadership on sustainable urban development is very much in doubt.

The idealist in me waits for a bold set of recommendations from Mayor Sullivan, but the student of real-politik in me is doubtful.

My skepticism has been stoked by two things: Vancouver's political clock, and some dismal communications management from city hall lately on urban density matters.

We are one year and one month away from our next municipal election, and our civic political machines are moving into high gear. Mayor Sullivan has expended enormous political capital in backing up city manager Judy Rogers' quest for flexible work and hiring conditions. This, and not wages and benefits, is what has made the strike endure so long, and the mayor is being blamed. Spent political capital in this area has left him much less room to stick his neck out with an aggressive set of EcoDensity policies.

Moreover, the mayor and his Non-Partisan Association colleagues are in fund-raising mode, and the development industry is getting uneasy about the EcoDensity push. Sure, developers like density, but they like predictability even more, and this is a fundamentally conservative industry that has prospered by getting things done behind closed doors. As demonstrated by significant development industry support for Vision Vancouver's Jim Green in our last civic election, developers are less interested in ideology than in getting someone they can work with in the mayor and councillors' seats.

Complicating Mayor Sullivan's diminishing options for an EcoDensity policy is city hall's bungling of communications on proposed land use changes in the Norquay neighbourhood, along Kingsway on the far Eastside. Opponents have risen in noisy opposition to mild proposals for slightly increased housing densities along their pleasant streets, and the Norquay proposals have been widely reported as the first public test of EcoDensity.

Clearly irritated, planning director Brent Toderian rejects that analysis, suggesting that it is simply the legacy of a neighbourhood planning process that began years ago, under different managers.

But the unfortunate Norquay flare-up is simply filling the vacuum of what is now, 18 months after Mayor Sullivan first announced it, a near total lack of specific planning policies on this crucial dossier. The civic strike has meant that Mayor Sullivan and Mr. Toderian have lost crucial months of staff time in preparing their package.

EcoDensity discussions to date have brought the sausage-making process of city-building into uncomfortable public scrutiny and raised profound questions. How did we originally decide to make some neighbourhoods and streets denser than others? Are we vaporizing our small remaining stock of rental accommodation for yet more over-priced condos? Why have previous density experiments on the Eastside gone ahead, while those on the Westside get delayed or cancelled? Why have civic policies so concentrated poverty and social housing in the Downtown Eastside?

EcoDensity was born in the run-up to the 2005 civic elections in the regular dinners Sam Sullivan hosted at the Opus Hotel for a mash-up of guests with different backgrounds and points of view over red wine and tossed greens.

UBC ecologist William Rees was invited to one of these dinners, the professor having gained an international profile with his theory of "ecological footprints."

At about the same time, one of Prefessor Rees' academic colleagues, retired professor of architecture Abraham Rogatnick, threw himself into the centre of Sam Sullivan's mayoral campaign. Before the campaign even commenced, Professor Rogatnick told me "I think Sam should run with density. What this city needs is density, density, density."

The mayor's brilliance was to conflate the two ideas into one marketing handle: EcoDensity.

It's a great name, but the crucial challenge of Mayor Sullivan's public life will be to flesh out EcoDensity with tough, original and politically sustainable policies.