One of my favourite things about living in 91原创 is that no matter where you live, you can step out your front door, and you're always within two miles of open country.
About 70 to 75 per cent of 91原创 Township remains in the Agricultural Land Reserve. Yet the rest of 91原创, the City and the Township's neighbourhoods, are on their way to being fully urbanized. Large swathes of 91原创 now have higher population density than much of East Vancouver. The latest population estimates by Statistics Canada show almost 200,000 people living in 91原创.
Big cities revel in their parks, whether it's Vancouver's Stanley Park, Toronto's network of forested ravines, or New York's Central Park.
But in what used to be the rural outer suburbs of Metro Vancouver, we've created a different kind of preserve of green space. Thanks to the implementation of the Agricultural Land Reserve in the 1970s, when these communities had tiny populations and were mostly rural, dense housing now abuts poultry farms, dairy operations, and big equestrian estates.
This has led to the creation of a unique kind of urban footprint 鈥� an archipelago of cities.
The old Metro Vancouver core is almost entirely urban/suburban, from Vancouver east through to the Tri Cities.
But south of the Fraser River, and east of the Pitt River, it's a different story. From Delta to Chilliwack, cities have well-defined urban islands separated by farmland. Over the last two decades most of those communities have dealt with increasing population in part by growing up, both literally and metaphorically.
When I visit relatives in Southern California, one thing that strikes me is the absence of thereness. There's just this constant sprawl, sometimes congealing into a knot of office parks and shopping centres, but never really gaining definition as an urban centre. You can drive for an hour in any direction, and nothing really changes.
I'm not going to argue that what's been built around the Lower Mainland is an architectural marvel 鈥� there's a lot of bland glass condo towers, a lot of inoffensively beige townhouses 鈥� but you can't drive or ride or take the SkyTrain that far before you notice major changes. Yes, there are vast stretches of 1980s-style suburbia, but even those are being changed by infill development, with new provincial housing density rules promising to further upend the status quo.
In the early 2000s, there was tremendous pushback to higher density development in eastern Metro Vancouver. Yes, it has changed our communities. But I would argue that many people already appreciate and embrace this urban form.
We should strive to keep going to enrich these civic islands, while preserving the sea of green space in which they sit. We should focus on creating relatively dense, livable urban cores, with walkable residential/business downtowns with plenty of transit and bike lanes. We can string the urban islands together not just with roads, but with transit and cycling options.
Many of our newest neighbourhoods now have higher density than East Vancouver, but with far better access to nearby parklands and rural areas for jogging, walking, and cycling than Vancouverites could dream of.
