Tsawwassen, British Columbia:
May 13, 2008 saw several downer developments, and it wasn’t even a Friday. First, huge layoffs were announced at Canadian auto-makers, in large part because our factories turn out vehicle lines tending towards SUVs and light trucks, and Americans have stopped buying both.

What’s worse, there was a linked announcement that our countrymen — in relative terms — are still buying these gas-guzzlers. Lulled into false security by a commodity price boom that temporarily shields us “hewers of wood and drawers of water” from global financial and sustainability realities, Canadians are still drivin’ like it’s 1999.

Later the same day things got even glummer. The occasion was the presentation of drawings and ideas for the Southlands project in the Vancouver suburb of South Delta, produced in a design charrette stage-managed by Andrés Duany, the co-founder of New Urbanism. Having its first and best expression in the works of Duany and partner Elizabeth Playter-Zyberk, the New Urbanism is best known for drawing on 19th century urban forms (and all too often, 19th century architecture) as a means of improving the layouts and livability of suburban tract developments. Straddling the communities of Boundary Bay and Tsawwassen, right next to the American border, developer Century Group would like to turn these pastoral fields and woodlots into the hub of an all-new suburban Southlands community for 5,000 people.

Worser and worser, I thought, as I watched as the ever-entertaining architect Duany and his flown-in specialist team presented leafy, low-density suburbia, while claiming for themselves a front line position in the good green wars. In his talk, Mr. Duany boasted the two schemes presented — cutely named “Tuck” and “Sweep” — were “pioneering designs.”

These were “pioneering” solely in the rustic architectural vocabulary that kept popping up in the charrette-produced drawings. Call it Pseudo-Agro Vernacular, Mr. Duany’s presentation cited 19th century rural Swedish agricultural buildings as valid sources for building “up here in the north,” on the shores of “Bounty Bay,” he said.

In the Lower Mainland’s urban fringes, we still take the New Urbanism seriously, in the same way we still lust after Ford Explorers. My own view is that history will regard the New Urbanism as a last gasp attempt to reform suburbanism from within, before high energy prices and new respect for land compels much denser development.

This is the same kind of density combined with high amenity that has turned the very word “Vancouver” into a verb and an ideology: Progressive cities now “Vancouverize” because they believe in “Vancouverism.”

We Vancouverites sell American planners and developers high density, high amenity urban development attuned to the needs of the new century, then local developers like the Century Group go consultant shopping in Miami and end up buying the terminally pleasant nostalgia of New Urbanism. Go Figure.

Going to figures actually helps puncture New Urbanism’s claims, especially the spiel that schemes like the one for Southlands presents a radical increase in suburban residential densities. While this may be true by the standards of sunbelt United States, Canadian cities have historically developed at higher densities, largely because we lack such sprawl-inducing public policies as the tax deductibility of mortgage interest (even for vacation homes!) plus the US Department of Defense-funded Interstate Highway system.

The New Urbanism is so dangerous because it makes claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs but none so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning’s equivalent of the “Compact Utility Vehicle.” The Duany charrette's “Tuck” and “Sweep” models offer us a Honda Element and Land Rover LR2 when what Tsawwassen really needs is a Prius or a Smart Car.

The stakes are huge for the Century Group, owned by the long-established South Delta Hodgins family. I cannot fathom the perambulations of land use policies that left Southlands’ 531 acres outside of BC’s development-inhibiting Agricultural Land Reserve boundaries, but such is the case. A proposal to put 1,895 units here from former owner George Spetifore was defeated in 1989 because planners and politicians objected to the sprawl it would induce across the entire Point Roberts peninsula.

If the Century Group’s current proposal is approved, the 2,000 housing units planned there will be worth between one and two billion dollars, so dropping a few hundred thousand on a lavish design charrette with pricey imported talent is chump change.

The Century Group is sensitive to perceptions (if not land use control reality) of this as a bucolic or natural zone and proposes about one third of Southlands’ site to be left in a semi-natural state, one third to be used for intensive gardens for residents and one third to be yards and houses. This said, the resulting overall density will be barely four dwelling-units per acre, only a 5% increase from the defeated 1989 proposal.

Mr. Duany is a superb speaker and even better salesman, but Vancouver has New Urbanists who are his design equals, notably two teacher-consultants: UBC’s Patrick Condon and SFU’s Michael von Hausen (both advisers to Southlands.) But even in the hands of designers as talented as all of these, the New Urbanism is ever more a dead letter. I hope South Delta rethinks things before this mock-utopia of gardens and lanes gets built.

Andrés Duany’s reply:
[In his May 16 review] Trevor Boddy makes simpleminded remarks about developing Southlands. That is unfortunate. Urbanism — the habitat of the human species — abhors simplification.

Mr. Boddy begins with the bumper-sticker insight that high density is the prerequisite for urbanism. He implies Vancouver is great because it is dense, while Southlands is ipso facto deficient because it is “barely four units per acre.” In so doing he ignores the elemental distinction between “gross” and “net” density. Southlands, which is designed specifically to embody food self-sufficiency, devotes 42% of the land to agriculture and keeps 26% open for other purposes. That kind of diversity — and not a crude single standard — is what authentic urbanism calls for. Such a range corresponds to the immense variety of human needs and desires. It also corresponds to the reality of a Vancouver that Mr. Boddy has only incompletely observed.

Besides, not all urbanism should be like that stereotype of [high residential, inner city] Vancouver: a single simplistic ideal. Tsawwassen is a very different kind of place, with its own history, desires and destiny. There is a pragmatic reason for the difference. The plan for Southlands integrates food security so that it can be more resilient in the long run than the infrastructure-dependent high rises of Mr. Boddy’s “Vancouverism.” For a reasoned explanation of this alarming prospect, see James Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency. It is for such reasons that we must protect and cherish alternative models of urbanism no less than any other kind of habitat.

Mr. Boddy’s demand for only local planners for Vancouver is small-minded. Does he not know that among the virtues of urbanism is cosmopolitanism? It is exceedingly provincial to be Vancouver-centric, and in my grateful experience, it is uncommon. When I have been professionally engaged in Vancouver — planning East Fraserlands, for example — I have encountered a robust pride but never such insular arrogance.

Mr. Boddy’s small town mentality appears in snide comments regarding the Swedish wooden houses which we suggest should influence Southlands’ architecture. He does not explain why he thinks it is a dumb idea (perhaps it is new to him). The architecture of the North European belt corresponds well to Vancouver’s culture and its climate. Wood is the most sustainable technique for Canada, and the wooden versions of these northern buildings have been perfected only in the Scandinavian peninsula. Mr. Boddy, I suppose, would wish us to confine local building to the known brands of the concrete-and-glass downtown and to the arts-and-crafts style which permeates the suburbs — as if those styles were not once foreign!

Although Mr. Boddy dismisses Southlands as old-hat New Urbanism, it is truly an innovative design. Its inventive insistence on intensified agricultural activity at the urban/agricultural edge takes it beyond the one-dimensional, old and failed regional Urban Boundary between the developed and the open — a technique that has proven inefficient for agriculture and untenable in the long run.

It may be that Vancouver does not need to learn anything further about urbanism. But I’ll bet that only Mr. Boddy is quite content with what he already knows; the real experts never stop learning.

Trevor Boddy Responds:
Duany’s response advertently buttresses my analysis, while painting himself into a corner of suburban survivalism swirled with pastoral reverie — Mad Max goes to Sunnybrook Farm. It is revealing that he refers to the last chapters of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, which calls for victory gardens, home-made clothes and loaded shotguns beside every exurban door that he believes will soon become the last stand of civilization, when there is no more electricity to make those Vancouver elevators work.

What hurts is that I admire both of their critiques (Kunstler’s of energy-wasting sprawl, Duany’s of High-Modern urbanism), but reject the updated hippie dreams they propose as solutions. Both men enforce the suburban ideal they pretend to critique — home schooling and re-tooling in Kunstler’s apocalyptic, single-family redouts, while Duany presents lowdensity housing tracts interwoven with flower and herb gardens as the ultimate in enlightened, efficient and self-sufficient city building.

This is because something more than the stock market, automotive industry and banking system has melted down lately. The automobile-oriented, low-density, no-money-down suburban ideal is at the core of this mess. To the degree that the pretty compromises of New Urbanism keep this system operating, it will be as culpable for this continuing mess as any hedge fund crafter or mortgage re-packager. Developers and architects here — after being scrutinized by my pen — will tell you I hardly regard our city as perfect, but Vancouverism makes some fresh arguments about how North American cities can provide a high standard of life while questioning the whole package of freeways, land use separations and impoverishment of the public realm.

True provincials, Duany and Kunstler can only see the future as a variation on the United States of the 19th century. Too bad, because we are now fully immersed in the post-American 21st, with new sources of ideas, political power and yes, money. With crucial city building issues before us, the New Urbanism is only part way there, which is nowhere at all.