Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin
New West is as much a "suburb" as Jersey City or Hoboken or Oakland, if we want to get into that game.
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Vancouver's urban plan isn't that common in Canada (probably just because we have few large coastal cities) but it is around North America. It's normal for metro areas built around large bodies of water to have some kind of suburb or satellite city similar to New West. New West exists because the Fraser River and Burrard Inlet are disconnected.
I've always been surprised that Montreal doesn't have this, in St-Lambert which was the connection point for the Victoria bridge going back over 150 years. I wouldn't expect Toronto to, and it doesn't really; it just has some old towns and villages that were absorbed. Calgary has an extremely centralized city plan.
I like New West and it is doing pretty well but it clearly suffers as an also-ran in metro Vancouver. It is mostly a suburban bedroom community built around the SkyTrain station that instead of a mall has a main street along Columbia. The retail there tends to be local stuff rather than regional in nature. It doesn't really have street level activity to match the skyline.
The most similar place to New West I have been to in Canada is Dartmouth. They both have a very similar feel; they are both formerly semi-independent industrial towns that transitioned into suburbs.