Brent Toderian

The Most Important Urban Design Decision Vancouver Ever Made?

2013-03-02T10:11:38-05:00

Last weekend at a book launch party, our host, Simon Fraser University's City Program Director Gordon Price, began the evening by asking each party-goer to answer a fun and provocative question: "Tell us an urban design decision that you love." For a group of city-making wonks like us, it was an even better icebreaker than the wine.

As you might imagine, each respondent had their own flair in answering, which is what made hearing all the excellent responses interesting.

When it came time for my answer, it should have been hard to choose just one, especially here in Vancouver. It could have been the decision to always have public access, and thus public life, at our water edge, even in the recent design of the new Convention Centre. Or protecting public view corridors to the mountains and water from across the city, thus always connecting us to our city's beautiful setting. Or essentially banning blank-walls at eye level along city streets, to always make walking inviting and interesting. My list of urban design loves in our city is actually very long.

But as it turns out, my answer was easy, if perhaps a bit surprising depending on your definition of urban design. In Vancouver, often referred to as "a city by design," the most important urban design decision we ever made, the decision I loved most, is actually usually referred to as a transportation decision.

In 1997, the city approved its first transformative Transportation Plan. Co-written through a first-time (and not easy) partnership between city planners and transportation engineers, the plan was a game-changer for our city-making model in many ways, most notably in its decision to prioritize the ways we get around, rather than balance them.

The active, healthy and green methods were ranked highest -- first walking (our top priority), then biking, and then transit, in that order. The prioritization then went on to goods movement for the purposes of business support and economic development, and lastly, the private vehicle. As far as I know, we were the first city in at least North America to do that -- and certainly the first to try to actually make it real.

Since cars aren't going to disappear any time soon, Vancouver still spends a considerable amount of energy trying to make driving a greener and healthier proposition, with examples from electric vehicle charging station pilot projects, to policies and zoning incentives that have contributed to our incredible growth of car-sharing. However the private vehicle remains the last priority. I always note that we are not anti-car, and we rarely ban the car, but prioritizing it last has had a dramatic effect on the way we design our city.

If you're a driver who is worried about the lazy "war on the car" language that pops up occasionally, remember this: our model of city building understands the "Law of Congestion" and proves that when you build a multi-modal city, it makes getting around better and easier for every mode of transportation, including the car. It makes our city work better in every way.

This decision to prioritize rather than balance our ways of getting around, has been a huge part of the essential "design DNA" guiding our city growth. It's shaped every decision that followed, from thousands of physical design details small and large, to key related decisions like budget allocation.

Has every decision followed it perfectly? No, there are many illustrations around the city where the prioritization hasn't been perfectly reflected. However, enough have, to make our city design fundamentally different than other North American cities.

So my answer to Gordon's question, "What urban design decision do I love?" is our ahead-of-the-curve, 1997 decision to prioritize active transport rather than trying to balance ways of getting around. A decision we reinforced and are taking further in the recent Transportation Plan Update I had the pleasure of working on.

A transportation decision, sure -- but also an urban design decision, a city-making decision. The most important urban design decision our "city by design" ever made, I believe, flowing from the most important decision of any type we ever made -- saying no to freeways in our city.

These days, our municipal leaders are approaching some big new decisions for our city-building future, such as the opportunity to finally remove the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts (which I call the only asterisk next to the statement that we have no freeways in Vancouver). Such a decision would leave a stronger and better-connected city in their place.

When we consider a decision like this, in light of this most important urban design decision we ever made, that has shaped every decision that comes after it, the answer is clear.

No wonder I love it.

Re-defining the D-Word: 'Density Done Well' in Vancouver

2013-02-24T02:24:19-05:00

Density can be the most controversial aspect of how cities and communities are planned. It's often nicknamed "the D-Word" because some politicians still actually try to avoid using it in a sentence, and "the third rail of municipal politics" because many prefer not to touch it.

But what I call "Density Done Well" is critically important for any city to avoid the damaging effects of sprawl, while solving our city's toughest challenges, from mitigating climate change, to supporting urban health, energy resiliency, affordability, economic success, creativity, safety, vibrancy and so on. It can make your city much better, in many important ways.

For these reasons and more, despite the political challenges, smart and successful cities worldwide are now tackling the D-Word head on, and looking to model cities who have learned how to do density well, often with the scars to show for it.

Vancouver is such a city, studied and debated globally, not just for our downtown, but for our city and region-wide efforts.

Recently, the Downtown Seattle Association invited me to speak on the subject, to an audience of more than 1,000 people at their annual State of the Downtown Forum. Using our successes and challenges in Vancouver as a model, here's what every city can learn to make the D-Word a cornerstone for successful city-making:

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How Your New Year's Resolutions Can Make Your City Better

2013-01-03T17:43:12-05:00

New Year's Eve in Seattle (Brent Toderian)

At this time of year, most of us are thinking hard about New Year's resolutions to make our personal, family and professional lives better. But before we finalize and laminate the list of losing weight, balancing our household finances, or cleaning out that back closet, what if we picked a few that could improve our lives, while ALSO improving our cities, towns and communities?

It's not as hard as you might think ; we just need to see the opportunities. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

1. Resolve to get around differently.

What if we chose, either all the time or just more frequently, to try new ways of moving around our city? If you're already committed to losing weight, improving your mood, dealing with stress better, lowering your household expenses, and improving your quality of life, the beauty of walking, biking and taking transit is that they help kill all these birds with one stone.

Just a few more trips each week by foot, pedal or transit can be cheaper, healthier, happier and greener for you, and for the whole city.

If "active mobility" choices aren't practical just yet, how about getting a Zip Car or car-share membership? The growth of such programs has been incredible — plus each car-share car replaces 20 cars that would otherwise take up considerable space in the city for driving and parking.

If you're really ambitious this year, a life-changing resolution might involve rethinking where you live relative to where you work. Consider even working occasionally from home. Although we tend to change our jobs more often than our homes, much of our quality of life, household finances, and carbon footprint is tied to distance, traffic and travel time between work and home. Closing that distance makes our lives, and our cities, better.

Healthy ways of getting around, make our city better. (Brent Toderian)

2. Resolve to know & love your 'hood.

How well do you know your neighbourhood? Your neighbours? This year why not resolve to get to know both better? How about using every opportunity in the design of your community to help with that?

If you have a porch or walkable streets where you can meet neighbours, spend more time on them. If you have a community centre, visit it more often. If you live in a high-rise home, get to know the people on your floor, and be friendly in the fitness rooms or common areas.

The greatest asset a city provides is proximity — to different people, with different perspectives, talents and things to teach. Taking every advantage of that proximity is one of the best things citizens can do for themselves and their city.

Loving your neighbourhood though also means getting involved in making it better — and not just when you oppose something. It's all too common for citizens to get active in community affairs only when something is upsetting or worrisome. It's also common for discussions to be dominated by individuals who aren't necessarily reflective of the diversity and demographic mix of the community.

If you were to speak your mind, what kind of positive change would you champion? Think about going to City Hall and voicing your support for a proposal — that can be hard when some of your neighbours might be opposing, but you can make a huge difference in your community by speaking up.

3. Resolve to shop and eat local more often.

Do you support local stores, restaurants and services, or just national/international chains? Chains can contribute to streets and cities, but it's true that spending in local businesses has a significantly greater multiplier effect for the local economy. They also better reflect and strengthen local character and identity. But they need your financial support, because city planning systems can't protect them if you're spending your money elsewhere.

And how about local food? Supporting your local farmers markets, and restaurants or food carts that feature locally grown and produced food, provides community, economic and environmental benefits for your neighbours. So why not do it more often? As Peter Ladner suggested to me today, "Resolve to know the name of one person who grew one thing you eat every day."

4. Resolve to support your public spaces and "third places."

Choosing to spend more time in parks, plazas and along walking streets, gives life and vitality to those places, and makes them more magnetic to others. Never forget that the most important public spaces in your city are the streets themselves!

It's often said that what attracts people most is other people. When you spend time on patios, strolling or sitting, you're adding to the street theatre and the public life of your city. Not just during special public gatherings, such as Canada Day or a car-free festival, but every day. Your very presence makes the city better, more successful and more attractive for everyone, and you're having fun at the same time.

Along with public spaces, your neighbourhood is full of commercial or civic places where social life lives, other than work and home — the so-called "third places." These can be your local pub, coffee shop, community centre, or library branch — meeting places and "talkscapes" for the local community. Supporting them makes your community stronger, while adding to your social life.

Small plazas like CBC Vancouver are magnets for people. (Brent Toderian)

5. Resolve to demand better for your city's future.

For many cities, one of the biggest challenges is a kind of inferiority complex among its citizens and leaders. These cities believe they should "take what they can get" when it comes to city-building, in the form of substandard development and design, costly suburban sprawl, and "free money" for freeways and other counter-productive ideas. Often the fear is that the money or investment will go elsewhere if they say no.

In contrast, cities that have citizens and leaders that expect more, recognize that money for the wrong things costs too much, and know that their city deserves better, generally get much better city-making.

It starts with confidence, with a strong, clear belief in a smart future for your city, and knowing that if you expect better, you'll get better. That confidence comes from every citizen. It comes from you, and you can resolve to have it, and share it.

Adding any of these resolutions to your list for 2013 could make your life more healthy, affordable and enjoyable. You'll also have the knowledge that you're making your city better too. A great way to start a Happy New Year!

Frightful Winter Weather Doesn't Scare Walkable Cities

2012-12-25T01:01:10-05:00

Last week in Vancouver, the city was hit by a significant (at least by our standards) and unexpected snowfall. For a city more used to being wet than white, the truth is that Vancouver has it pretty easy when it comes to winter weather — the generally mild climate means that we always plan for rain, but not as much for snow.

True "winter cities" like Ottawa and Montréal where I grew up, or central Canadian cities like Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton and Calgary, know what it means to plan and design for cold and snow. It's a full-time mindset.

Everyday details factor in the cold, things warm cities don't have to worry about like designing play areas in ways that consider winter micro-climates; inventing creative infrastructure like heated bus stops powered by waste heat from the sewers; and we can never forget the literally life-and-death implications of having too few extreme weather shelter spaces for the homeless.

Some actually think our usually mild weather in Vancouver makes it "easy" to live on the streets here, but distributed, accessible emergency cold weather shelter beds are desperately needed each year — unfortunately with a pattern of annual controversy in neighbourhoods that we really must get past through longer term solutions.

How to get around is always one of the biggest challenges for winter cities, especially when the big storms hit. It can be a good reminder that walking cities are resilient cities in winter — and the rest of the year as well. Unfortunately, many winter city design solutions can actually be unhelpful for a city's walkability.

This can be seen in the design of streets, where the challenges of snow storage can make streets excessively wide, expensive and less friendly to walkers year-round. Similarly, excessive mall surface parking lots can be justified because of snow storage needs on the snowiest shopping days of the year —leading to partially empty parking lots much of the time.

Robson ice rink (Alamy)

Cold weather was the inspiration for whole new pedestrian systems such as Calgary's elevated +15 walkway system, or Toronto's underground PATH system and Montréal's Place Bonaventure subterranean network. Such systems can seem hard to resist when cold weather hits, and in a way can assist walkability by providing a warm, if often indirect and confusing, pedestrian opportunity in winter.

Many cities though now understand they also have harmful effects on the street life below and above them, year round. After virtually turning their back on their streets because of the cold, thankfully many such cities are putting their attention and energy back to lively walking environments at street level.

Much of the media's winter attention tends to focus on "snowmageddon" driving conditions and snow clearance budgets. This year there was a small media and politician-fuelled controversy around how fast Vancouver's separated bike lanes were cleared of snow. Perhaps this is understandable in the early years of our separated bike-lanes, but mature winter biking cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam know that if you want year-round urban biking to be an inviting option, bike-lane snow clearance has to be a priority. And urban biking, like transit, is just an extension of walking, with every trip starting and ending with your feet.

In the broader sense, big snowfalls can illustrate how especially vulnerable car-dependent cities and suburbs are to disruptive weather patterns. Is everything you need widely separated — home, job, shopping, your kids' activities — with driving the only option? If so, snowstorms can really make life difficult or even miserable.

Compact, "complete," walkable, transit-friendly cities on the other hand might feel the effects of snowstorms, with disruptions to transit especially where it shares the roads with cars, but they tend to be more resilient, with things closer together and more options on how to get around.

On the day of Vancouver's big snowfall last week for example, my chores by foot and transit were delightful, if a bit damp. For those in their vehicles though, the experience was very different, whether they had snow tires or not.

What last week illustrated is that even Vancouver — not really a winter city in the common use of that title — needs to think more about our ability to handle tougher winter conditions. With the weather being less predictable, and frequency and intensity of storm events getting worse with the consequences of climate change, anticipating and designing for unusual weather conditions is going to be the new normal for all of us.

But enough about the challenges of winter cities. Although it's looking gloomy out there today and the chances of a white Christmas are slim, there's a brightness that comes from the holidays that we can always look forward to.

The holiday season can be wonderful for a walking city. With lights, banners, animated window displays, winter-themed art, and festivals put on by business associations, streets can come alive and animate the city. It's like an extra layer of life on top of our regular downtown and shopping streets — a layer that can make an average street excellent, and an excellent street fantastic!

One of my best childhood memories of Christmas growing up has always been Christmas shopping on Ste. Catherine Street in Montréal — the snow always made one of my favorite streets so much better.

Rockefeller Center skating rink. (Shutterstock)

Add to that the enlivening of the city's public spaces and parks. The most iconic example might be skating at New York's Rockefeller Center, but here in Vancouver we have skating at Robson Square, turning a usually dead submerged space into a winter magnet for people.

There's the beautiful Christmas lights at Vandusen Gardens and Stanley Park, drawing families out into the cold with hot chocolate and good cheer. Even the usually quiet plaza at Queen Elizabeth Theatre is taken over for the holidays by the Vancouver Christmas Market, drawing lively crowds.

The holidays can inspire people and families to get out walking and enjoying public life in the city — and the city looks more beautiful and jolly regardless of weather or shopping crowds.

It can be a bit sad when that holiday layer goes away, and the streets and public places return to normal. Wouldn't it be great if our city's streets were that full of life every day?

So this holiday season, whether you live in a winter or warm city, perhaps we can take a break from snow clearance arguments and debates about budget priorities, and take the time to walk around, really look around, and appreciate the wonder and life that the holiday Season brings to our cities.

Does Your Neighbourhood Pass 'Trick-Or-Treat' Test?

2012-10-25T12:29:55-04:00

Halloween is my favourite holiday for many reasons. On top of loving to dress up each year, a big reason is it's the holiday most dependent on how we design and build our communities.

In city planning and design, there's an old saying about the "Trick-or-Treat Test." It's often brought up in the context in suburban home design: Can kids easily find the front door to your house, or must they poke behind the huge multi-car garage, past the parking asphalt, to ring your bell?

Homes that fail this Trick-or-Treat Test aren't exactly welcoming, and not just on Halloween. Many such homes seem to be designed to have poor relationships to the street, and the neighbourhood beyond, year-round. Perhaps it's just that the size and location of the garage is seen as more important to the house design than the front door - but what does that say about our community's values?

A Halloween-friendly 'hood though is more than just front door-design. Is your neighbourhood a great place for kids to get a big candy haul on Halloween night? How quickly, easily and safely can kids move from house to house? Do parents actually drive from other communities to yours, because it's a more fruitful candy-collecting location?

When it comes to Halloween efficiency, kids are very smart, and read communities well. They know the streets where the doors are close together and well-lit, what you might call "Halloween Door Density." When it comes to street design and traffic levels, they know where they can criss-cross quickly and reasonably safely if they need to - although kids are always reminded how unsafe that is, and not to do it! What if, though, our streets were designed in a way where this natural kid strategy WAS safe?

Great neighbourhoods for trick-or-treating also tend to be great neighborhoods for families everyday:

Tree-lined streets designed for walkers more than speeding cars.

Enough density and community completeness, to activate what I call "the power of nearness" - everything you need, nearby.

Good visual surveillance through doors and stoops, windows (and I don't mean windows in garages), porches and "eyes on the street."

Connected, legible streets that let you "read" the neighbourhood easily -grids tend to be good for this, but other patterns work too.

All of these are great for trick-or-treating, and equally great for walkable, healthy, economically resilient communities year-round.

At the same time, the number of kids running around on Halloween night can also tell you something. Kids are often said to be an "indicator species" for great neighbourhoods. Kids in costumes on Halloween night are an indicator too, although it can be hard to tell whether they've been driven in from elsewhere!

If kids ARE being driven in, that can mean it's a great neighbourhood from a design perspective (or perhaps just that it's a more affluent community, with "better candy") - but having too few local kids can show that there isn't enough housing diversity, new infill, and family-friendly "infrastructure" to keep kids in the neighbourhood. In fact, in many beautiful, tree-lined neighbourhoods popular on Halloween, the number of local kids may be actually dropping, with resulting pressures on local schools to close. This as household sizes decrease, and new density and "gentle infill" that could stabilize the population and keep kids in the neighbourhood, is often locally resisted.

But back to the suburbs -- are suburban communities as bad trick-or- treating grounds as some urbanists think? The answer depends in large part on how well-designed and dense they are. Not all suburbs are "sprawl," with separated, low-density, garage-dominated landscapes -- but too many are.

Many suburbs have plenty of kids, many of which will brave even those houses that miserably fail the Trick-or-Treat Test to get their candy. The neighbourhood pattern sure doesn't help, though, for reasons that are obvious - simply think about the opposite of all the factors discussed earlier in this article.

This has led in recent decades to trends like suburban shopping malls giving out candy, advertising themselves as the replacement for suburban streets and neighbourhoods, with warm, well-lit, unslippery, safe trick-or-treating environments. A depressing indicator of the failure of the communities themselves, or just an indication of the busy, often fear-driven lives of North American families?

Even perhaps more depressing is the "trunk-or-treat" trend, described by "Wiki Answers" like this:

Picture this: a huge parking lot with the back ends of vans and trucks decorated in a variety of fun themes; complete with games and treats. From babies on up to grandpas and grandmas, there is something for everyone. What a fun way to spend the evening as a family!

In many communities, churches sponsor the fun event and families plan their own theme for their vehicle. Sometimes elementary schools, sororities, and large neighborhoods sponsor one as well. The best part of Trunk-or-Treating is that the parking lot is roped off, freeing kids to skip or stroll from place to place.

Thankfully, walkable communities are seeing a significant rise in market share, while car-oriented developments emphasizing "malls n' trunks" are losing favour. Walkability is now seen as key for real estate premiums - as experts like Chris Leinberger indicate, drivable neighbourhoods have been overbuilt in recent decades, while there's been a strong pent-up demand for walkable, well-designed, "complete" communities.

When it comes to trick-or-treating, walkable communities never fell out of favour. Even in higher density building forms like mid-rises or high-rise towers, if there are front doors along the street rather than blank walls and landscaping, good trick-or-treating is possible.

Here in Vancouver, our walkable streetscapes "by design," our "podium townhouses," or more recently our homes with front doors on the street at the base of mid and high-rises, make trick-or-treating a viable option in even the highest densities. Now if only kids could go from floor to floor easily in higher buildings! That's Door Density!

The powerful real estate tool WalkScore, which measures a neighbourhood's walkability (and increasingly links it to real estate value) recently ranked America's most Halloween-friendly cities. Their ranking shows what we already knew. Cities that are essentially walkable, pass any Trick-or-Treat Test. They are also more resilient, flexible, healthy, green, and economically successful neighbourhoods and cities.

Why is Halloween my favourite holiday? Because it reminds us once a year what great neighbourhoods are made of.

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It's Not About The Bike Or Car -- It's About Better Cities

2012-10-05T10:34:17-04:00

This week, I watched with concern Canada's largest city have a rhetoric-heavy debate about removing the relatively new separated bike lane on Jarvis Street. They even originally had the intention of using bike-lane funds to remove it!

Bike-lane debates have been going on for some time in Toronto, as they have in many cities like Vancouver. In recent years, exaggerated and polarizing phrases like "anti-car" and "the war on the car" have been thrown around irresponsibly by media and politicians alike, making me wonder more than a few times if Fox News had moved to the place once called "The City That Works."

I suppose it illustrates part of the problem, that I feel the urge to point out I don't consider myself a "cyclist." Calling myself that would seem as odd as calling myself a walker, a transit-rider, or a driver. I'm an urbanite, someone who loves living in cities, and an urbanist who has studied how cities work all of my adult life. Really, I'm a citizen.

I point that out because there is too much pitting of self-described "drivers" and "cyclists" against each other. Most North American families are actually multi-modal - they drive, walk, and probably take transit and bike in at least certain circumstances, if not routinely. Certainly many who cycle, also drive, and visa versa.

We need a more sophisticated discussion about how we get around in cities, and it starts with this -- it's not about loving your bike. It's about loving what biking does for cities. If more cars make cities worse, the opposite is true for bikes. Expanding urban biking is about making better, fiscally smarter, healthier, more flexible and resilient cities. Bikes are hardly a silver bullet, but they can be a big part of better city-making.

Canadian cities aren't alone in recognizing the opportunities urban biking provide. In fact, we're behind. Inspired by successful cycling mecca's like Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Bogota, cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Portland in the U.S., Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Paris in Europe, and Montreal here in Canada are transforming themselves around urban cycling. They aren't doing half-measures. They're making big moves.

City-builders across the globe understand the relative cheapness of the bike mobility option, in both cost and space. Dollar for dollar, bike lanes move people more cost effectively from a return-on-investment perspective than any other way of getting around, especially once a tipping point of cyclists is reached -- and that doesn't even factor in the well-documented public health cost savings that come from widespread biking. Global studies have shown investing in cycling infrastructure actually saves society public money per kilometer cycled! The math is enough to make any real fiscal conservative hop on a two-wheeler.

Most pragmatically, city-builders understand that bikes make cities work better because they take a lot less space. Even if cars were clean in emissions, the biggest challenge with car-dependency is a space problem. There isn't enough room on the roads and parking lots of cities, to have everyone drive. They just don't fit, and our failed efforts to make them fit, cost a staggering amount. This striking picture illustrates the point. If all the people we anticipate coming to our cities try to drive, cities fail, our public life fails, and our economies fail.

Even if they prioritize driving, global city-builders recognize the best thing those who feel they need to drive could hope for, is for OTHER people to be able to walk, bike and ride transit. Multi-modal cities make it easier for EVERYONE to get around - including, counter-intuitively, drivers.

For us in Vancouver it's been about becoming more multi-modal for decades, a city of choices and options, and a city where the local economy and quality of life is impervious to the growing car congestion paralysis seen in too many world cities. It hasn't been about being anti-anything. It's been about being pro-mobility freedom. Pro-city.

Photo courtesy Paul Krueger

We've understood in Vancouver for years that mobility flows from smart land use choices, and the best transportation plan is a great land-use plan. Mixing uses, in complete communities. We know that trying to address congestion through more roads always fails, because of the "law of congestion." As the saying goes, trying to address congestion by adding more roads is like trying to solve obesity by loosening your belt.

Watching Toronto's debate, we in Vancouver might feel a big smug. Then we might remember the steady level of controversy that bike-lane construction has generated even here. I would remember that in past weeks of media interviews, they've tended to start with questions like "When will we have too many bike lanes?" or "Don't we have enough already?"

Like walking, transit and car-driving, a few separated routes through a large, still car-dominated city and region, don't create a viable choice in how to get around for people aged 8-80. For people of both genders and all ages to choose a mode of movement, a system or network is needed - complete, connected, efficient, predictable, and safe in both perception and reality. We have a long way to go in Vancouver.

The pragmatic, cost-effective power of urban biking could go a long way in getting Toronto that old nick-name back - "The City That Works." Keeping the Jarvis bike infrastructure, and using that $300,000 to build more, would have shown they're serious about that. Instead, the wrong discussion led to the wrong decisions.

In a recent Globe and Mail article, I called for an end to the oversimplified, polarized debate on bike-lanes, and a start to a more sophisticated discussion on how cities work. The article ended with my statement, "Bike lanes are not a fad. They are part of a multi-modal city, a critical part of the city working well in the future."

Let's have that more sophisticated discussion start now, in Toronto, in Vancouver, and every city struggling to make their city work better.

Want Families Downtown? Design for Them!

2012-09-07T18:19:28-04:00

A few months back, Toronto's deputy mayor started a political flap stating on the floor of city council that downtown was no place to raise kids. "Where's little Ginny? Well, she's downstairs playing in the traffic on her way to the park," he said.

Flap, indeed. Urbanists and parents alike were quick to denounce the comment, including me. In a way though, we might thank the deputy mayor for saying candidly what unfortunately many politicians, and many parents, still think.

I heard a similar message stated with great conviction from a San Francisco urbanist who shared a panel with me at a Rotterdam cities conference. Downtown will never attract families, he proclaimed.

I heard it recently on a tour of Seattle's downtown. Do downtowns really need families to be successful neighbourhoods, they asked? What's wrong with mostly singles and seniors, and lots of 'em?

Having considered this issue in dozens of downtowns I've worked in, I keep coming back to an old saying amongst urbanists: "Kids are the indicator species of a great neighbourhood."

The truth is that many downtowns are currently not great places to raise families, because they aren't designed to be. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. A city and building industry gives up on kids downtown, so no one designs and plans for them. No schools. Little daycare. No playgrounds, facilities or basic public environment to make downtown kid or teenager-friendly. Most importantly, no homes built to actually fit a family. Perhaps a couple, but as soon as baby comes, they start planning the move. This perpetuates the myth that families would never want to live downtown.

My good friend Peter Rees, the chief planner for London, England, once proclaimed to a New York audience we were jointly presenting to, that "kids kill downtowns," referring to the NIMBY that can result when families complain about noise from nightlife and such. Although his point is valid, the success we've had in our Vancouver downtown in mixing families, nightlife and urban energy by artful design says otherwise. Is it perfect? Far from it, and there are indeed tensions, but what it is, is urban, vital, and diverse - what downtowns should be.

So should we want families downtown?

I strongly believe we do. They're a big part of complete, mixed, vibrant and lively downtown neighbourhood. Singles, couples and seniors downtown are great, but kids and baby-strollers make communities more real, more human. They also support a broader local economy, and make the community safer.

Cities across North America and the world are having that tough discussion about what it really takes to attract families downtown. Oslo, Norway mandates that half of all new homes be sized for three bedrooms/families. Minneapolis's mayor has been asking the tough questions around attracting kids downtown. And Edmonton's mayor hopes that their development of former inner city airport lands will specifically attract families. And there's the debate in Toronto.

The good news is that when downtowns are deliberately and proactively designed for families, kids come. The proof is here in Vancouver. Within our success story of downtown population growth from 45,000 decades ago, to over 100,000 people today, our growth in children is unique; about 7,000 kids in our downtown peninsula! It's a huge growth inspired by vision, and achieved by design.

DESIGNING DOWNTOWN FOR FAMILIES

So how do you design a downtown for families? As a general philosophy, it starts with planning with the parent and child in mind. Is this a place kids want to be? A place where parents have what they need, family-raising infrastructure and support systems? We like to say "a neighbourhood that's designed to work for kids, works for everyone."

Even if you get the design details right, families have a hard time making life work downtown without two key elements; childcare and nearby schools. In Vancouver, we've been using density negotiations to have new developments pay for the construction, and sometimes part of the operation, for hundreds of new daycare spaces downtown, designed into new buildings. This is a key amenity for families, as much as a park or a community centre can be. Although there has been real successes in building new childcare spaces, the costs and waiting lists are still daunting.

As for downtown schools, this is one of the toughest parts, especially in American cities. In Canada, the public school system doesn't geographically skew funding of schools to the suburbs, so the key is usually to show the school boards that kids are there, or will be. A sort of "if they come (kids), they will build it (schools)." In Vancouver, we prioritized schools by negotiating two school sites from larger developments many years ago. The first elementary school, Elsie Roy, opened many years ago to full classrooms. The second site in International Village has finally had its construction funding announced by the Province of British Columbia.

Perhaps the most important family infrastructure a downtown can have, not surprisingly, is housing that actually fits families. It's amazing how many downtowns aspire to have families, and still don't ensure that family-friendly housing is built.

This was the exact debate in Toronto that sparked the deputy mayor's comments, a debate over requiring 10 per cent of homes in projects be 3+ bedrooms. Toronto Coun. Adam Vaughan (who made the motion) and his staff have met with us in Vancouver many times, and know well that for years we've mandated 25 per cent of units be 2+ bedrooms, and have debated requiring 3-bedrooms, as two just aren't enough for many families.

Even if all the supporting design is there, will parents choose downtowns over the suburbs? Vancouver has shown that not all will, especially if family-friendly housing downtown is too expensive. However many parents do, and enthusiastically so, because a well-designed downtown is a great place to raise a family.

What's certain is that if cities have this vision, we need to stop designing our downtowns to be unwelcoming to families, and start inviting parents to enthusiastically choose downtown living. Our downtowns, and our kids, will be better for it.