Chapter 7 - Living in an Urban place is only a "Choice" for a few and the ideological

Previous chapters:

We have a huge mental hurdle when we talk about Urban development right now. We keep applying "sub-urban" ideas to urban areas. For most of our lives, and for most of us, we have never spent much, or even, any time in really high quality urban areas. For this reason, we don't see how suburban ideas, regulations and ways of living don't translate into urban situations. I want to show you in this chapter how urban and suburban are different things, with different pros and cons, different ways of living, and should have different ways of regulating. And because most of us have spent almost no time in high quality urban areas, we have a tough time imaging what an urbanizing Tranquille or Downtown might be like and how it would or should work.

Urban and Suburban Places look and function very differently


I believe that this difference has prevented urban environments from improving in our country at the same rate as burbs - and that has led to a situation where when considering where to live, for most people, considering an urban environment over suburban is not a comparable choice. Most Canadian, and especially most Kamloops urban properties are more expensive, less safe, less convenient, smaller - and there are few mitigating benefits. But that is not true all over the world, or even in our own country. Good urban areas have great parks, safe streets, many different transportation choices, numerous and convenient entertainment options and amenities, all within a small walk. That centrality, convenience and mixed use is what makes a good urban environment.

I hear time and time again how much people 'just don't want to live in a box in the sky' - and the thing is, because we have so little high quality urban places in our country, I get it why most are so skeptical. As well, there are actually lots of people who would prefer apartment living, as detailed in the last chapter. In good urban areas there is much more than just apartments, but ultimately I don't think we have been giving many people real options in the apartment world, or in the neighbourhoods where their apartments are located, and that has alot to do with the last 30 years of regulating urban places with the same set of rules we use to regulate sub-urban places.

mews houses, found all over central London

What I hope to outline here is that urban places are different than suburban places - and they need a different set of rules, and different parameters to success. All the things I have talked about in previous chapters are important factors in why urban areas are struggling. To make urban areas and suburban areas both a fair choice for those who can choose, we need to understand how they are different.

I am going to start by defining what I mean by Urban area. What I mean is:
  • mixed-use (there is lots of apartments, hotels, shops, offices, and other enterprises all mixed together at a really fine grain - often in the same building)
  • mixed-mobility (single occupant cars are the rare way to get around, not the only way to get around. Bikes, cars, e-scooters, taxis, transit, and especially walking are all more common)
  • a clear distinction between public and private amenities - and how and who benefits from each
  • density - high enough density that supports mixed uses and mobility - that doesn't mean high rises. Most of Tokyo or London, but also little cities like Oxford, Mulhouse or Salzburg it is just some row housing, duplexes with the odd 4 story walk up apartment building. It just needs enough people in a 10 minute walk to support little cafes, shops, bodegas, corner stores, and community spaces
  • it has "two-shifts" and is as vibrant by day as by night - so daytime uses and nighttime uses
an 'urban' scene from Hay-On-Wye, Wales - pop. 1,058 (1% of Kamloops)

Importantly urban does not mean big. I can want to live in a small city and also want to live in an urban area. I can want to live in a tiny village and still want to live in an urban way. I too can want to live in  a big city and not want to live in a townhouse or high-rise but instead a suburban or even rural area and commute. Urban/Suburban and even Rural refer more to the pattern of development rather than the size of the place as you can see in the photo of a 1000 person Welsh town above.

For most of us, the most common way we are likely to have experienced this would be in a resort setting, like Whistler, Sun Peaks, a Mexican All Inclusive or on board a Cruise Ship. Importantly, these urban environments are also usually quite small, on the order of just a few thousand people.

Think about being at Sun Peaks or a Mexican Resort. You rarely drive - you get yourself to your room, your eating, your entertainment, all pleasantly on foot without ever wondering if it could be done better if each hotel guest drove their car to the beach 100m away. The staff too do their jobs on foot with support of all sorts of micro-vehicles, dollies, golf carts and others, but still mostly on foot. There is a clear distinction between public areas, best populated by everyone, like the beach and the pool, and areas that are private, your room, bathroom and balcony. This is important when it comes to managing strangers, which we will touch on shortly.

can you spot the 6 lane arterial and parking aprons? hint - people walk here

In Sun Peaks, despite driving there, and having roads all over the place, it is totally reasonable that you (despite the winter) would walk to the village for restaurants, shops, offices, work or just the pleasantness of it all - it is unlikely you would travel by car again on your trip unless you are really far from the village. The buildings feature shops on the ground floors, offices and workplaces in the buildings, hotel rooms and staff accommodations all mixed together. 


Even car-obsessed North Americans spend their leisure dollars, willingly, to abandon their cars and live a life leisurely by walking and other means of non-car mobility. Our top choices for vacation destinations nearly always are places that we rarely have to drive. Even when talking about big cities, and the reluctance of wanting to live there, its usually the traffic people complain about, not the amenities. In Kamloops people always say they would hate to live in Vancouver because of the traffic, yet go often to Vancouver to access its amenities despite the traffic.

If you have been lucky to be able to travel abroad to New England, Quebec, Europe or Asia you are likely to have experienced how people live their daily lives like this too. Its not just for vacation. Many European and Asian towns and cities of all sizes today are still inaccessible by private automobiles. For example, the mountainous, hilly and industrial City of Carrara, Italy pictured below can mostly not be accessed by car at all due to the steepness of the streets. That does not stop its 63,000 residents of all ages from actively running large marble quarries, shopping, eating or being entertained.


The lifestyle of Carrara residents is not diminished by the lack of monstrous parking aprons, 8 lane roadways, left turn lanes, parking signals and acres of lawn intended to 'minimize' the impression of all the asphalt. It is curious to me how often that people refer to urban settings as being less attractive due to the 'concrete jungle' - yet to me, the asphalt parking lots of suburban strip malls and cul-de-sacs represent a much larger amount of concrete per person. Much larger. Compare the following two street views of Manhattans epitome of "Concrete Jungle" and our '10% landscaped' small city. For context, Manhattan is 1.7m (plus being the largest tourist destination in the US) in 58 sq. KM. Kamloops is 100,000 in 300 sq. KM.



Lots of people do not want to live in Manhattan, lots of people do not want to live in Urban Areas. But comparing the first photo at the top of Hay-On-Wye at pop. 1,058 people and Manhattan - Urbanity is not about size. Its about a way of organizing the buildings, streets and uses. But in Kamloops, our regulations do not allow for Urbanity. Whether Manhattan, Carrara, Sun Peaks, or Hay-on-Wye, arranging buildings in the fashion shown, is illegal to do in Kamloops. The setbacks would not be allowed, the lot coverages not allowed, the floor area ratios, road widths, curb heights, lane radius, street trees, façade materials, business mixes are simply not allowed, based on arbitrary rules, not based on any safety concerns or factual truth about beauty or function. Even the buildings on the 200 Block of Victoria Street, would be illegal to (re)build in Kamloops with current zoning regulations.

Just to really drill down on how size does not matter - even the simplest villages of a few hundred people can be urban in the way I am describing it. They too can also have suburbs. Some examples would include some of the following:

Luzern, Switzerland - pop. 81,592

Zurich, Switzerland - pop. 402,762

 
Salzburg, Austria - pop. 152,637 

Monterosso al Mare, Italy - pop. 1,468

Ithaca, Upstate New York - pop. 30,569

Corning, Upstate New York - pop. 10,696


In Canada, downtown Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal are some of the only real Urban Areas we have. Kelowna and Victoria's Downtowns are now shaping up quite nicely. But for lack of exposure, I believe, we have such a problem when it comes to having discussions about Urban Development. We have community plans that have residents asking for "vibrancy" and "funky local businesses" and "walkable streets" and "housing affordabilty". We rarely get that though. As discussed throughout the preceding 6 chapters - trying to open a local business in a strip mall is basically impossible. Trying to create housing affordability in older neighbourhoods too is impossible - as detailed in Chapter 4.

Creating the conditions to afford quality sidewalks, bike lanes, play grounds and adequately funded and policed public parks too are impossible. But putting in place the necessary regulatory changes to make all these plans possible get people worried about East Hastings and "Concrete Canyons". 

People worry that density, highrises and commercial development only degrade an environment and create traffic - which they absolutely do when built in the suburban setting - rather than thinking about Sun Peaks, Disneyland, a Mexican Resort, or Venice for that matter. You will notice, Granville Island, a spectacular urban space, has nothing to do with high-rises. Its about how the space is arranged.

the epitome of West Coast 'funky businesses' - Granville Island has parking, but the businesses
and entertainment and environment come first, parking second. Make a palce people want to hang out in
first, and worry about parking second. Because tons of parking a great place does not make

Jane Jacobs, an (the?) icon of Urban thinking, spends the entirety of her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by considering the "Type of Problem a City Is". In 1961 she hit so many nails right on the head. So many 'progressive urbanists' to this day seem to think a 'green, safe, equitable city' is one of sky scrapers, government projects and forcing people out of their cars. Jane Jacobs does not, quite the opposite. She is not trying to force anyone to do anything, but instead allow Urban areas to thrive on Urban terms. There is no density minimum or maximum that Jane Jacobs lays out. There is no metric of X creates or destroys Y in Z amount. Jacobs ultimately defines neighborhood quality as a function of how well it can govern and protect itself over time, employing a combination of residential cooperation, political clout, and financial vitality. She focusses alot on 'managing strangers'. That is what a city is, a place full of strangers. And the streets, parks and buildings are the stage on which we conduct our lives. She calls it "the sidewalk ballet". Setting that stage is both the responsibility of us as citizens, our municipality as its regulator and property developers. How well the stage is set is what creates East Hastings vs. Whistler or Venice. It has little to do with cars, and mostly to do with the mix of uses, density to support uses, and broad user groups that keep areas active throughout the day.

To be clear, I think pedestrian only places in Kamloops would not succeed. They will only succeed once the place itself it so wildly successful and busy, that people will walk 10 blocks just to be a part of it. And by that point it will be self evident when and whether you should drive there, you don't need elaborate rules for it. We already know what places filled with people look like - with festivals like Brewloops, hockey games, WCT productions at Sagebrush, the beach at the Mexican Resort, or the village at Sun Peaks. But if we continue to regulate development in such a was as to prevent enough mixing of uses, density to support it - never will we have places filled with enough people to make them safe and successful. It will be reserved for special events and vacations only.


folks biking to a urban environment full of things to do

When you want to build something in Kamloops you get a tables like the following:




We somehow expect that by making statistics like "40% lot coverage" is going to make a neighbourhood "nice". Or that Floor Area Ratios of 3.5 will make a development 'sensitive to its context'. Putting arbitrary ratios onto properties unseen feels to be the opposite of sensitive. Can you imagine trying to make any of the buildings in those great urban settings fit into these criteria? Its nearly impossible as detailed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

Any area that pre-dates 1950 will have been built sensitively, around people, rather than cars. Thereby it was urban by its very nature. It will have connected streets. Every street connects to every other street. That is the opposite of arterials, collectors, local and cul-de-sac street hierarchies that the city applies its design 'standards' to. Again, imposing standards of arbitrary road width for example feels like the opposite of 'sensitive' design that our OCPs and neighbourhoods ask for. If a road has to be 6.8m wide to accommodate fast moving cars in both directions at all times without slowing down, in all cases, period, how do you expect to have interesting, sensitive urban streets like the one below? Notice this street is capable of having cars move through  it. Emergency vehicles are often brought up as a detractor, and without getting fully into it, are you suggesting to me that folks living in Manhattan, Old Montreal, all of Asia and Europe, not to mention the Mexican resort you vacation at, are unable to access emergency services? Of course not.

Colmar, France, on a hill, pop. 70,284

Building a sensitive, vibrant street like this one, with our Cities regulations simply cannot be done if moving and parking cars, especially at speed, followed by 'landscaping' on 10%+ of the property is your primary goto for all regulation.

How many people ask for developers at a public hearing to be 'more sensitive' to the neighbourhood character - and yet how many of those people realize that almost all property development today is designed by City Mandated Spreadsheets? Check out the following streets in St. Ives, UK. What design 'standard' could apply to this? Yet it functions excellently as a place where people congregate, move about, access their homes and businesses, facilitates deliveries by commercial vehicles, and even allows car traffic. The only difference is that the entire basis of the 'standard' is not to facilitate cars moving at 50km/h plus. You will see in the Cities Design Manual, there isn't even a category for streets where cars move below 50km/h, nor is there a category for slow moving urban streets that only travel one direction.



St. Ives, Cornwall, UK - pop. 11,266 - it has suburbs too


Pre-1950 neighbourhoods have sensitivity by nature been built at a time most people walked, or biked, for most trips. These neighbourhoods functioned, supporting corner stores and neighbourhood shops, you can still see many of these around. These neighbourhoods had the density needed to support vibrancy. Those 1850 to 1950s homes in Jon Tod, MacDonald Park and Downtown had parents, 3-5 kids and often grandparents living there only a generation ago. Now many are occupied by single people, or couples without kids - and in fact, due to regulations of today, would be illegal to repopulate at a modern comfort level a multigenerational family or the same number of people in a different living arrangement.

If our cities best street, Victoria, were to burn down tomorrow - we would be unable to rebuild it. It would be illegal. If MacDonald Park or the West End or East End burned down tomorrow, it would be illegal to rebuild. Not Building Code issues which control building safety - but completely arbitrary subjective zoning, landscaping and traffic design standards. Our OCP says we want to support infill, but we would not even allow them to rebuild as densely or diversely as they already are, let alone more dense and more diverse.

where a shop once was supported in a urban neighbourhood, when it was once allowed, 
in an area that once had much higher density, and would be illegal to rebuild, not by building code, by zoning

Urban is not Sub-Urban. But nearly all of our zoning and design standards are suburban. They work excellently at creating strip malls for national and international retailers, real estate investment trusts and stock market investments. They work excellently at creating single family cul-de-sacs and feeder schools which no kid could ever safely walk to. They create retirement resorts in which an entire non-public bus fleet needs to be employed so that a retiree can get a coffee anyplace other than the retirement homes cafeteria. 

We have 3 complete bus systems in Kamloops - one for school kids used only twice a day, another for seniors to get to anywhere that isn't the seniors home, and a third for the public. All because we lack Urban Areas where folks who might like to or be able to walk short distances to amenities. And we lack the connectedness between those places that might allow a senior some level of independence when they loose their drivers license, or for a kid to take themselves to band practice. Despite 3 bus systems in Kamloops, you still cannot essentially get anywhere conveniently other than by private, single occupant vehicles - even in our 'urban' areas.

When we say things like "there is no parking downtown, so I don't go there". That should be OK, that should not be a threat. Downtown should be able to have enough walkable density so that it succeeds whether people drive there or not. As a person who has lived both Downtown and on the North Shore nearly all my Kamloops life - I have only been up the hill a few times a year - if I said "I don't go up the hill, the transit is just terrible" the correct response would be - you have everything you need on the North Shore/Downtown, why do you need to go up the hill?

The same should be said of Downtown. If cheap and plentiful parking is what it is going to take to make Downtown or the North Shore succeed, you are going to have to knock down most of the buildings for parking, and in doing so, loose the only thing that makes Downtown succeed now. All you have to do is look at the hundreds of cities which did knock over their downtowns for parking and see how disastrous that has been. 

Urban areas will NEVER succeed at attracting people through driving infrastructure. It is too costly. It takes up too much room. Ultimately, urban areas will never succeed at trying to be the suburbs. Urban areas will only succeed by being their best urban selves.

Simply look at how dreary the 700 block of Victoria is, with ample parking, compared to the 200-300 blocks. And trust me, we did nearly as bad a job of knocking over fantastic downtown streets for empty parking lots as the next City.



(thanks to Kamloops History on FB for the pics)

So here is the thing. It goes the other way too. I do not think you will ever turn, nor do I think you ever should turn, Single Family Suburbs into Urban places. They do not have the connected sensitive road networks. They don't have the neighbourhood parks or the density required to support micro level mixed use and community supported stores. We should not be trying to turn Barnhartvale into a dense collection of townhouses with shops. That said, suburban areas like Barnhartvale, or Pineview, could be well served with a very small, dense, walkable, neighbourhood center. But that to me is not where we need to focus our attention.

The zoning bylaws and design standards that have been trying to turn our urban areas into suburban areas by imposing suburban design standards onto our urban areas has to stop. 35 years of suburban style regulation prevents the urban places from being urban. They have too many handicaps to compete with the suburbs at what the suburbs were designed to do in the first place - separate uses and drive cars. Urban areas will NEVER be able to accommodate suburban ideals, but our regulations currently try to require them to. 

The same disaster that can be a huge apartment complex in your suburb, is the same disaster that 10% landscaping, mandatory amenity spaces, parking minimums, setbacks and lot coverages do to urban areas.

Right now, if you are a family with any amount of choice in where you live - if you have the money to be able to choose where you live and make considerations for what is best for your family - living in an urban area is not a choice. It really isn't. The suburbs are the only place that provides large enough floor areas for family living, the only place that provides family safety, clean streets and a diversity of neighbourhoods, housing types and options. 

Choosing to live in an apartment or townhouse (if you can even find one) or small lot home Downtown or on the North Shore does not give your kids safety from traffic or strangers. Kids need to be able to walk to school or walk to activities on their own (like they could in Europe, Asia or the Resort). Currently, choosing to live in an urban area does not allow you to conduct your life mostly vehicle free as an adult either. Too many areas have no vibrancy, no corner stores, no grocery stores in a 10 minute walk, no secure bike storage (related to adequate enforcement of not stealing bikes), no dependable, frequent and around the clock transit. There is little in the way of nearby, accessible, entertainment for all ages. The things that make living in urban environments as in small European and Asian cities and towns is not present in all but a few blocks of a few streets in Kamloops. 

The only place in Kamloops with enough walkable amenities to support dense housing is Downtown - but the development requirements make building more housing downtown incredibly expensive, if not impossible, especially for family sized units. The only place with enough dense housing to support walkable amenities is Tranquille on the North Shore, but the development requirements are such that it is usually impossible to build, and thus the commercial strip remains with  dozens of vacant lots, half empty surface parking, some boarded up buildings and high-speed traffic design. Unless you have are a developer with deep pockets on a large site, often demolishing dozens of buildings at once, or are government subsidized, its just doesn't happen. Its not by accident that most urban projects are government subsidized affordable housing - its because private development in the same areas struggle to compete in the regulatory climate.

Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
Udaipur, Rajasthan, India - pop. 474,571

Mulhouse, Haut-Rhine, France - pop. 110,370

In the words of Andres Duany - Living in the suburbs is about the private amenities, the things in your home and out the back door. Your home theatre (so you don't have to go out to the public one), your home pool (so you don't have to go to the public one), your private park and playground (the safe back yard). Just look at the 26 private pools in just a couple blocks of Sahali. I just picked a suburban spot at random, I have no doubt there are parts of town with even higher ratios of private pools per capita.



Consider for a moment the sheer economic investment when you add up all the landscaping, security systems and pools these homes have put in. Living in urban areas is about what is out the front door. The public pools, the public theatre, the public park and playground. What you get when you combine small amounts of everyone's money is fantastic neighbourhood amenities like the former MacDonald Park pool, the 1920 Bathing Pavilion at Riverside Park with its wonderful café and park areas filled with groups of strangers enjoying each others company. In 1920 when Kamloops was more urban than it is now, it supported safe, fun parks filled with free-range kids who could waddle themselves around.


In good urban areas, which have density, connectedness and mixed-use, the tradeoff of not having an private park in your back yard, is having hugely popular public parks shared by everyone. It is not just rich or temperate countries either. Bulgaria, Serbia, India, Argentina, Norway and more have City parks to be jealous of. 

These parks are filled with people, year round, enjoying the company of strangers - while also offering quiet corners of respite. The parks themselves are diverse within themselves - reserved not only for lawn and trees, with perhaps some picninking thrown in. Munich has a year round standing wave to surf on (and people do even in -10C). Paris has a pond filled with wind powered model boats to be piloted by young children and adults alike. They feature book markets, food carts, fountains, sculpture, sport, art galleries. All these services bring safe and clean washrooms and facilities. In an urban environment the more diversity the better - just like in an old growth forest or wetland. Canada, especially Kamloops, is surrounded by some of the best nature in the world to get out of the bustle of the City - but we keep sprawling out on it getting rid of it, while leaving so much of the greenspace in our City empty of people most of the year.

drinking beers in the park below Paris' Sacre-Coeur

Watching the model boats in the pond at Paris' Luxembourg Gardens

Udaipur, India - there is flamingo pedal boats to roam around the fountain on a date

Oslo, Norway

Munich, Germany - in late December at -8C

Massages are just one of the amenities on offer this Wednesday in Washington Square Park, NYC

Along the water in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in sunny spring weather. 

35 street food carts on Saturdays bring life to this Brooklyn Park

painting in Andy Livingstone Park, Gastown, Vancouver - not so common these days


We know how to do this - the same way we do at the pool bar and beach at the Mexican Resort, or apres at Sun Peaks with the kids tobogganing off the patio fence while the parents relax on the patio sipping a beer and eating some nachos. Or how Italian families group around the piazza while the grandparents trade gossip and kids who are perfect strangers spontaneously erupt into games only they understand. 

I want to be clear about amenities in Apartment Buildings as well - things like pools are really expensive, they lead to expensive ongoing maintenance costs, increasing strata fees whether or not residents use them. And trust me, they rarely use them. As they are qausi-privately owned, but not privately maintained by a single person, and have all sorts of rules and use restrictions - adding amenities to apartment buildings is rarely a good thing. Most of the high-rises on Billionaires Row in NYC, where apartments are in the hundreds of millions, do not have communal pools. Rooftop patios are empty, pools unused, gyms vacant. 

A good reason why a person wants their own backyard pool is for entertaining, or being able to drink or smoke or wear whatever they want, or listen to loud music. 

In urban areas these things should be readily available for a fee, out the Front Door. For-profit pools for the party crowd operate down the street from other pools which operate for the fitness crowd. You likely might have even seen this in Vegas, and certainly in Mexico. For-profit gyms open with all kinds of instructional classes, trainers and equipment that can be used by any of the thousands of residents in walking distance.  Compare that to the little weight set and treadmill (that is usually broken anyways) accessible only by the buildings 80 residents - but adds $80 a month for maintenance, heating and custodial to all of the buildings strata fees. And most people don't use it. Incredibly, many people who do live in buildings which provide gyms or pools, still go and get gym and pool memberships at large facilities - a great example of how combining hundreds of small contributions from folks funds what they want, where they want it, when they want it best.

One of the things I like to have, despite living in an apartment, is a shop. Here in Kamloops, Makerspace already provides that for urban living folks. Check out this public access welding shop along the canal in downtown Zurich, complete with lessons, equipment and material sales:




In most cases - when apartment people don't have a back yard, a 12 sq.ft. balcony over a busy road is not a substitute, if anything its a storage space. Look up at apartment building balconies and see how many are empty, dusty and maybe have some boxes or bikes stored there. Adding a rooftop balcony that is shared amongst all the residents comes with too many rules to be a backyard substitute: you can't hang out there naked for example, rarely can you bring out the BBQ and carry on a party into the night - especially because there is almost never a washroom accessible nearby. Again, they just become a maintenance concern. When you want to party into the night and live in a good urban neighbourhood, you go out to the bar, where they even clean up after you. Notice how in temperate, and rich, Florence, there is not a balcony to be seen, even along the quiet river:




When my parents were downsizing, they had a ping pong table to get rid of. I approached our strata about the opportunity, as both rooftop patios in my building do not have any furniture or anything on them. Firmly the strata voted no. Who was going to maintain it? You would have to hire someone for that, and that would cost money, and we don't want to increase strata fees. And as it is common property, not your own, you would have no ongoing obligation to maintain it yourself if you moved, so of course it makes sense, you don't allow the ping pong table. The small benefit a few times a year, to a few people in the building does not outweigh the collective responsibility to maintain the table. Yet the City has regulations to ensure that amenity space gets built for urban infill projects, to make up for all that is perceived lost when you do not have your own back yard. That of course is suburban thinking applied to urban living. It adds costs, up front and ongoing. It wastes space that could be another apartment - or even a publicly accessible business that might even be a gym!

In a well functioning urban area, local gyms may add ping pong tables for the entertainment of people in the area. Pubs might add pool tables, darts or arcade games with the mandate and funding to care for them as they are part of their business. Folks open businesses like this board game cafe/pub/store in downtown Portland, OR:

Guardian Games, Portland

Well serviced public parks with bathrooms, safe and clean facilities like Emery Barnes Park in Yaletown or Lonsdale Quay are filled with apartment dwellers BBQing, kids running, safely under-supervised all over the playgrounds and lawns. In many urban places, different kinds of pools open up for different types of users - some pools are part of bars for young folks to frolick in their swimwear practicing their mating dances over drinks, something in the suburban setting that can only be done by driving your car to your friends pool in their yard. Other pools become part of gyms for the express purpose of fitness, and still others become parts of spas for the express purpose of relaxation or sociality like the famous saunas of Eastern Europe, Hot Tubs and Springs of Switzerland or Iceland. 

advert for a rooftop pool party at London, UKs 338 Garden

Szechenyi Baths in Budapest, Hungary


And returning to the resort comparison. We travel great great distances to pay money to access these kinds of places for vacation - like the Banff Springs or Mexican Pool Party resort - yet somehow cannot consider how they would perform in our own urban context. 

In Urban Areas, home is a place to crash, to live your private life. Entertainment and recreation is out your front door, generally not in the building. Even in Yaletown, where many buildings provided at great cost things like lawns and playgrounds on the roof (of course with terrible winds), it is the neighbourhood ones at street level that are chockablock with sprinting toddlers in all seasons regardless of weather, while the rooftops ones remain empty nearly the whole day, again, regardless of weather.

No one can make a real choice to live in an Urban location. We have regulated it out of existence. Liquor laws, zoning laws, car-centric road design laws....

And with it, we have robbed the public purse of any ability to make the urban neighbourhood a place that nearly anyone with a rational choice would choose to live. The few great Urban places in our country, like the Vancouver Neighbourhoods of the West End, Kitsilano or Lonsdale are so competed for by the people who have the money, that no one else can even pretend to afford to live there. 

The rest of the Lower Mainland is stuck in their cars on beyond-congested roadways just trying to access the clogged up stripmalls. I argue, when many people hate living in the Lower Mainland, its primarily because of the traffic. If you could afford to live on the corner of Dunham and Davies looking out at English Bay, with all your daily life 5 minutes walk away - your job, friends, schools, parks, entertainment - that traffic is meaningless. That is true in any great urban place, big or small.

In 1980 we were still building some Urbanity and some Suburban. At that point there was a strong preference for suburban living, for all sorts of reasons - but urban living hadn't been regulated out of existence yet. That is why developments of that era in Sahali, Valleyview and the North Shore of those days still featured all kinds of housing types from townhouses, apartments, duplexes and four plexes, with all kinds of lot coverages.

Unfortunately - with each new OCP, the 'desire' for more 'vibrant, walkable, family neighborhoods' seems to get stronger, while the regulations preventing that from happening get stronger and broader. We kept trying to achieve vibrancy through a regulatory system that isn't sensitive enough to Urban circumstances to do it.

The amount of 'Urban' zoned land when the 1990 OCP was released was well over 50% of the Cities lots were 'Urban' which was a very broad zone with very few restrictions. Today the mixed-use zones are now it is less than 4%. Pictured is the 1990 plan with broad strokes, followed by the 2018 plan with highly regulated and extremely prescriptive mixed use zones. Zones so small you can hardly see them at this scale. 




And those 'urban' zones get more expensive and harder to build on every year. When nearly all people in Kamloops live in a suburban context, and the few urban areas we have are filled with boarded up buildings, decommissioned public amenities, broken sidewalks (if they exist at all), poor street lighting, parks filled with needles (something you would never see in Pineview or Juniper), vacant lots and then a handful of very expensive micro-condos, how many people can really say they have made a choice to live in the burbs? The choice was made for them.

We need to allow our existing urban areas to succeed on urban terms. We need to allow Tranquille, Seymour, Lansdowne, Battle and Victoria and 4th Ave for example to look more like the Village Center at Sun Peaks and less like freeways. We need the mixed-uses. We need enough density to make those uses viable. We need those streets to be safe. Safe from speeding vehicles which kill numbers of pedestrians every year. We need them to be safe from needles and strangers - and for that we need well-funded foot patrols and enforceable laws and enough eyes on the street to keep it safe. Our RCMP need the funding to be able to process charges faster than 18 months, and in order to do that we need to stop spending so much money on sprawling road and infrastructure maintenance. We need to stop putting in suburban landscaping in individual developments that only serve to be maintenance concerns filled with litter. An apartment building does not need rock gardens, rooftop shrubs, micro lawns and ornamental grasses. It needs benches, supervision, street trees, sidewalk patios and wide sidewalks right to the buildings edge.

Instead of landscaping and amenities - spend that time, effort and money on urban public amenities, like skateparks, small plazas every few blocks, grant programs for small entertainment venues to get off the ground, fountains - things for all ages like arcades, small theatres, afterschool programs and the like. We need multi-mobility connections to these places from the areas around them. We don't need 14 ball diamonds 25km from town to bus too - we need ball diamonds in every dense, walkable neighbourhood. We need frequent bus service and numerous safe routes for cycling. They don't have to be bike lanes, just slow roads that are safe to bike on - and most important, are connected to each other and to the places people are coming from and going to - other areas of density and mixed-uses.

I don't want to force anyone from their car. I don't want to ban cars. I don't want to return to horse and buggies. I want to give people a choice, a real choice. I want to invest in our urban cores, on urban terms. I want to stop making illegal all that makes urban places great, while allowing all the anti-social activities that are sucking the life from them. In order to do that, we need Zoning Bylaws, Landscaping Requirements, Beautification and Maintenance plans, city maintenance and Traffic Design Criteria that put diversity, density, mixed use, walkability, vibrancy and people as the first priority, not high-speed car mobility. One set of minor traffic signals costs about as much as a single beat cop per year, or one parks staff to clean the street daily.

Arranging our environment in this urban way, as you will remember from Chapter 1, increases tax value per Sq. M. between 3 and 12 times that of the burbs ($3000+ on Victoria Street, less than $250 in almost all burbs). It pays back more into the City coffers than it costs to maintain, unlike Pineview and Juniper. It can lower property taxes while also investing in the cleanliness, safety and beautification Seymour and Tranquille for example could desperately use.

Great urban places need to be safe. They can actually achieve this on their own, through the 'two-shifts' mentioned before. Being equally filled with many types of people throughout the day and the night. For this they need workplaces, residences, entertainment and shops and the density of people to make them viable. They need to be clearly delineated - filled largely with buildings and secure areas - not large areas of open parking and landscape buffers. Publicly accessible areas need a strong sense of ownership, the way a shop maintains their bit of sidewalk in front of their shop. Good urbanism creates safety as a virtue of itself. 

When urban places function well, there is no need to 'forbid cars' and force everyone into horse and buggies. Most of the pictures I have shared are in places where vehicles regularly access. You don't need to make elaborate rules when the place has been designed well. Consider, would you ever want to drive a car down these Streets? And would you think that adding cars would make it better?




The things you give up in the burbs, your large back yard, your home theatre - they need to be accommodated by public spaces and local businesses in the urban context - with great parks, plazas and nearby entertainment venues. Each of Kamloops' backyard pools represent many tens of thousands of dollars of investment over the years. How many pool memberships does that cover? Folks on the North Shore, the least likely to be able to afford their own pools, or cars for that matter, also do not have access to a public one because they are all too far away. Meanwhile, the pools we do have struggle to pay their bills (and in most cases don't) as they don't generate the interest to keep them afloat as it were, and require government subsidy to keep them going. More on this in the next chapter.

Our Urban Areas are struggling enough already. The last 30-50 years of regulation certainly has not helped them. Urban and Suburban living are different things, and they need a different set of regulations and incentives. The final two chapters will be a summary of what those things need to be - followed by a visioning exercise of things that Kamloops could invest in, to make the urban places reasonably competitive with the suburbs, and how to fund them.