It’s a vision 40 years into the future. But that’s all it is. A vision. It’s a different vision than the one conceived 40 years ago. Whether it becomes real or turns into some sort of Back to the Future fictional script won’t be determined for decades.
The Metrotown Downtown Plan (MDP) was recently approved by Burnaby city council to replace its 1977 plan for the area. The city’s reset button calls for the creation of something the municipality has never had in its 125-year existence: a downtown.
Burnaby has four town centres – Brentwood, Lougheed, HighGate/Edmonds and Metrotown – anchored by malls. What the city doesn’t have is an actual downtown, something many smaller cities surrounding it like New Westminster, Port Moody and North Vancouver do have.
Lots of attention has been paid to the plan’s plans for the neighbourhoods surrounding the mall because of the implications for rental stock in the city. But the MDP also envisions the land where the Metropolis at Metrotown mall currently sits being sliced and diced by streets cutting through it, a park plunked in the middle of it and an entertainment/convention centre built.
It’s hoped the streets will become vibrant with the hustle and bustle of what a downtown is supposed to have such as lots of retail, commercial office towers, hotels, theatres, galleries, restaurants and bars.
“Basically Metrotown is the closest thing Burnaby has to a downtown because it has ‘the highest concentration and intensity of economic activity in the city,’ and it’s where a ‘significant share’ of the city’s future growth and development is expected to be,” says the plan’s report, which notes Burnaby is projected to grow its population by 125,000 to 345,000 by 2041. “To make it an exciting downtown with major, vibrant and active streets generating pedestrian activity day and night need to be created. It needs plazas, public squares, cultural, entertainment and social venues.”
The plan proposes the streets have pedestrian, cycling and vehicle connections and links to transit that would replace the current auto-oriented network that has Kingsway as its spine.
Easier said than done.
“Those notions don’t seem bad ones, but getting there is the challenge,” said Paddy Smith, an urban studies and political science professor at Simon Fraser University. “They’ve got some challenges, and not the least is retrofitting. They’re going to have to bulldoze an awful lot of concrete to create this new vision … Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try it.”
Whether city hall can is a different matter. Although they have a new direction for Metrotown, it’s not up to city council members to make it happen.
“It’s a vision, we don’t do the creating,” admitted Coun. Colleen Jordan, chair of the city’s planning committee.
Although planners can steer developers in that direction, the land owners also have to buy what the city’s selling. It’s their land. It’s their money.
Metropolis at Metrotown is owned by Ivanhoé Cambridge. When contacted by the NOW,the company was vague on whether or not it has the same vision as city planners do.
“Ivanhoé Cambridge looks forward to working closely with the City of Burnaby on the development of a long-term vision for the mall as part of a vibrant thriving downtown for Burnaby,” said Charles Fleck, acting general manager of Metropolis at Metrotown, in an email. “It is business as usual for Metropolis at Metrotown; no significant changes will be happening anytime soon.
“As a long-term member of the Burnaby community, we see many opportunities for the business environment to continue to thrive and prosper as an integral part of Burnaby’s downtown.”
The response gives Jordan some hope, especially since Ivanhoé Cambridge announced big development plans for its Oakridge property in Vancouver, although it’s run into a huge snag after an aquifer was discovered.
“Turning an ugly, three-storey parking lot into liveable, walkable community where people shop, work and be close to transit,” said Jordan. “That’s the long-term vision. Whether or not the owners of Metrotown (Ivanhoé Cambridge) say they want to go in that direction, they also own Oakridge which is going in that direction, so maybe one thing at a time. But they didn’t come forward and say ‘we hate this plan and we want to keep Metrotown the same forever.’”
Making it happen, though, could take forever, and the area’s landscape, so to speak, can change over time. Jordan said when the first plan was done, Burnaby’s visionaries in 1977 did not foresee a rapid transit line, even though the corridor was there.
“I remember when SkyTrain came in, it was ‘oh, there’s going to be massive redevelopment around SkyTrain and stuff.’ Well, it’s taken 30 years,” Jordan said. “It’s taken a very, very long time for that to come to fruition. So even though some of those things were protected back then, it didn’t necessarily come forward in the time frame people were expecting.”
Smith wonders if Burnaby doesn’t have Surrey envy. In the last decade, that city has built a new city hall and main library to go along with SFU’s Surrey campus in an effort to turn Whalley into a downtown. It’s an initiative that’s about two decades old, but is shy of reaching the criteria for a desired downtown described in the MDP.
“They have cleaned up a little corner of it, (but) you don’t need to go very far out there, and you’re in where you were in the 1980s,” said Smith of the Surrey’s “downtown.”
That’s why he wonders if Burnaby is too late to the downtown party. Smith took note of the plan quoting urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who espoused building cities for people, not cars.
“It’s far more complicated and expensive to retrofit than it is to do new construction, so if they want to go the Jane Jacobs model, which they seem to be enamoured with at the moment, they would have been doing this in the ’70s and early ’80s, and put in place something that might have worked better,” said Smith.
Only Burnaby’s Michael J. Fox and a DeLorean outfitted with a flux capacitor could pull something like that off.
Some other highlights of the downtown part of the city’s plan:
• Redevelop the Sears, Old Orchard and Plaza 5000 mall sites to be consistent with the downtown;
• Kingsborough Street would be extended to bisect the Metropolis at Metrotown site east and west. It would have a commercial focus with active retail storefronts, cafés, wide sidewalks and street furniture;
• Proposal for a “significant open space” dedicated for a downtown park;
• Vibrant streetscapes that entice people to linger, along with a variety of public open spaces acting as outdoor “living rooms;”
•Give Kingsway a more urban character and form with street furniture, wider sidewalks, rain gardens, trees, pedestrian and cycling amenities.
