Boddy again. This time he sets his sights on Hamburg.
DWELLING: ARCHITECTURE
Lessons from Hamburg
Vancouver is rated near the top of the pack for best places to live, but we can still learn from other cities
TREVOR BODDY
July 6, 2007
Globe and Mail
HAMBURG, Germany --
This week, Trevor Boddy begins a month-long tour of European and Japanese cities to explore new ideas shaping urban planning and architecture.
Ranked at the top of the pile on livability indexes from The Economist magazine and international executive relocation firms, Vancouver has lots of reasons to feel good about itself. We live in "The best place on earth," or so we are told by those high rotation commercials paid for by our provincial government. When the sun shines on the mountains, it is easy to believe all this hype.
But naive self-congratulation can be a deadly sentiment when applied to city-building, and British Columbia's ex-politicians, in particular, specialize in naive self-congratulation. Well - goes their line - if those pop-in experts like us so much, let's just go on making a downtown into a resort for the rich and aged because, hey, everybody likes a resort. What we have been doing for the Downtown Eastside is just fine after all, because those all-seeing evaluators surely must have toured down there. Better architecture - why bother, when we're already the best?
Taking a few weeks to look at new urban development in Japanese and European cities has been an eye-opener for me. My eyes are now open to the fact that Vancouver is not - by any measure - the best of all possible worlds.
No place was more responsible for shaking my vancouver boosterism than the northern German port city of Hamburg. With a city-proper population of 1.2-million and a metro area number of 4-million, the "Free and Hanseatic City" is about twice our size, though like many large European cities strung-together from medieval villages, it does not seem so.
Vancouver planners and politicians are endlessly boastful about our new developments around False Creek, and not without reason. But a tour of Hamburg's massive redevelopment of its own portside brown-field sites is a humbling experience.
Our former EXPO 86 site was assembled by the province, then sold at a loss to Concord Pacific. These lands have been developed almost exclusively for housing - False Creek is being ringed by places to live and play, not work.
Hamburgers see a green future in maintaining a balance of live and work, and are building on this belief: 60 per cent of new portside spaces are housing, 40 per cent offices. Like Vancouver, they encourage a variety of housing types, from low end rental to super-deluxe, Phillipe Starck-designed eye-grabbers.
The most ambitious of Hamburg's water's-edge new neighbourhoods is called HafenCity. Port City it is, building out onto surplus docks and rail yards from the late 19th century brick warehouse district called Speicherstadt, in the same way Concord Pacific builds out from our less architecturally impressive Yaletown. HafenCity is now about one third the way to realizing its total build-out of 1.5-million square meters (a staggering 15-million square feet), which will include workspaces for 40,000 people (half the total of all workers in our downtown core), plus 5,500 mainly-rental apartments for up to 12,000 new residents.
At around 100 hectares, HafenCity and Concord Pacific's neighbourhoods are almost exactly the same size. At an average building density of 2.5 times site area in new construction, the two projects are also comparable. But wait, the Germans have no building taller than 10 storeys, the maximum height of the corbelled and arched red brick Speicherstadt warehouses on the city side. How could this be - not a skinny condo tower, not a single townhouse in the whole HafenCity development?
This punctures the Vancouver balloon that reads "high rise equals high density city," because people-per-hectare counts in our Concord Pacific and Downtown South high rise zones are no higher than some of Montreal's four-storey-max districts, and significantly less than Barcelona or Paris, in large part because Vancouver is so extravagantly generous in providing park and elementary school sites.
HafenCity is developed by a city-controlled redevelopment agency, and every stage of its planning and construction - from overall site concept, developer purchase proposals for each urban block, right down to the architecture of each building - has been produced by design competitions.
These are carefully managed by HafenCity staff so that if the results of any contest is less than excellent, the process can be opened up again, (Oh, that we had this option for South East False Creek's 2010 Athlete's Village!) The most visible difference between Vancouver and Hamburg is in the quality of architecture. One of the first of HafenCity's areas to be completed is called Sandtorkai, and each of its eight housing blocks has a refreshingly different architectural expression, but all of them are good neighbours to each other, as well as the old buildings and city centre across a slip of water.
Each building has a different architect, and they include young firms, as well as local bigwigs and imported famous name designers like London's David Chipperfield and Zurich's Herzon and de Meuron. By contrast, Vancouver has a tiny number of low-fee architectural firms designing nearly all of our condo towers - and they look it.
But HafenCity's architects design within an urban design framework that sets the general form and shape of each building at Sandtorkai, every one of them, for example, extending out over Hamburg's equivalent of the seawall and beyond that to hover dramatically over the water. Vancouver Parks Board and Planning Department, did you hear that? Buildings sheltering portions of the sea wall, bold architecture rising above the harbour, rather than hiding behind shrubberies.
Other than James Cheng's Marinaside project, after a dozen years touring visitors around Concord Pacific I have a hard time remembering who designed what there, so bland and interchangeable is the architecture. I won't soon forget HafenCity, proof that developer's profit, public interest, and high quality dwelling spaces are better achieved through design and forethought, rather than manic building binges.
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