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This paper reviews the ideology of modernism in a North American context and discusses how its various attributes are embodied in the Surrey City Centre development in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. In doing so, it makes use of Calthorpe and Fulton's tri‐partite framework of specialization, mass production and standardization as being characteristic of the ethos of the age. After analysing the various interventions that design professionals and civic agencies have made in the Surrey City Centre area, it concludes that modernist ideology has a tendency to foster placeless settings lacking in vitality, security and comfort and appeal for pedestrians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vancouver Region is widely recognised as one North American jurisdiction where strong growth management plans and policies have been put in place in order to control urban sprawl. While many authors have lauded the region for its good planning intentions, there has been little in the way of assessment of actual performance. This paper attempts to identify some quantitative growth management goals that have been (officially and unofficially) espoused by planning authorities in the region, and to measure these against actual trends. The results are mixed: on the one hand, some key growth management goals adopted by the region are not ambitious compared with existing trends and even these goals are not being met. For instance, the supposedly compact scenario adopted by the region deviates hardly at all from existing growth trends, which regional planners had clearly identified as untenable and requiring drastic change. On the other hand, the region's goal of preserving extensive green areas has been achieved without being watered down during goal formulation or implementation. Whereas these findings may appear contradictory, they are not: conservation in the region has not compromised the potential for growth in the region—at least for the time being. The real test of regional growth management efforts will come in the near future when further expansion meets the 'green wall' on the periphery and NIMBY resistance against densification within existing urban areas. The study suggests that the current structure of regional planning, relying on a partnership between municipal and regional governments, has served the region fairly well in building support for the need for growth management and in elaborating growth management vision. However, there is serious doubt about the ability of this system to set ambitious growth management objectives and to see through the implementation of those objectives in the face of social forces attempting to preserve business-as-usual trends in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A framework for assessing cities as contributors to sustainable development (SD) is proposed. Differentiating between SD and ecological modernization (EM), we contend that even the weakest EM reforms prompt ecological restructuring (ER). Once unleashed, ER creates four problematics—ecological, economic, political and cultural—which governments at different scales must address by maintaining or challenging thestatus quoin relation to global structural imperatives; notably, requirements to promote economic growth and maintain legitimacy. That is, ER fosters uneven, non-linear processes of societal learning, which apply at different scales. Hence, where national governments lag behind, cities that develop ‘action plans’ may prompt SD. The framework is road tested by evaluating Vancouver'sGreenest City Action Plan. We find that Vancouver does indeed push ER towards SD, especially in the political and cultural domains, even as Canada and British Columbia appear less committed. However, due to the proximity of city government to citizens' lived experiences of unsustainable development, Vancouver, like other cities, confronts a distinct kind of democratizing pressure. A future research agenda on this issue would aim to uncover how planning for SD must both fosterandmanage this democratizing pressure, which arises as informal (spontaneous, ‘from below’) participation meets formal (procedural, ‘top-down’) process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning and local policies, informed recurrently by theories of transformative urban development, have represented influential (and at times decisive) agencies of change in Vancouver's metropolitan core. A commitment to principles of post-industrialism in the 1970s, realised through the conversion of False Creek South from an obsolescent industrial site to a medium-density, mixed-income residential landscape, effectively broke the mould of the mid-century urban core. The seminal Central Area Plan (approved 1991) enabled the comprehensive reordering of inner-city space, exemplified by a post-modern diversity, complexity and interdependency of territory and land use, and a strategic reversal of the employment-housing imbalance in the core. The city has broadly succeeded in asserting public interests as contingencies of change within the core, but these processes have created new social conflicts, tensions and displacements, as well as a glittering and paradigmatic 21st-century central city. In theoretical terms, the Vancouver experience marks a clear break from the classic model of the post-industrial city, the latter typified by a monocultural, office-based economy, extreme spatial asymmetries of investment and development and modernist form and imagery. At the same time, emergent production clusters, residential mega-projects and spaces of consumption and spectacle in the central area present marked contrasts to the spatial disorder and chaotic patterns of 'incipient' post-modernism, underscoring an exigent need for innovative and integrative retheorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]