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[Holden West]

Interesting blog post about a visit by Andres Duany to Vancouver. Excerpt:

World-famous planner trashes Vancouver single-family-home architecture and more.

Duany believes development and cities should be divided into discrete "transects" or gradations in about six levels, from rural to suburban to urban to urban core, with trees, roads, houses, fences, business licencing, building materials, and heights appropriate to each. Along the way, he took a few swings directly at Vancouver.

"This is suburban," he started off at one point, showing his power point. "This can be done very well or very badly and may I say that the Vancouver area does this very badly. Your urbanism is superb, your high-density urbanism, your downtown, this peninsula that we're in is among the best of the late 20th-century cities. But what I see in terms of your older and, even worse, your newer suburban single-family houses, no one pays the least attention to how you make a decent suburbia. It's almost like it's beneath contempt, it won't be there very long. You need to pay attention to this because a lot of people live in single-family houses and will continue to do so.

And by the way, your many magnificent architects here in Vancouver, really good architects ... of the houses that I saw today, about one in 400 were decent architecture. Not one in a hundred. And I literally was counting. And the architects won't touch them. [Only] if there's big commissions and big budgets, yeah, if everything's just right, yeah, I'll do a house. That's not what you have to do. You have to go there and engage. Understand the people, understand the middle class, understand the developers and their constraints, understand their technology.and address the single-family houses. It's disgraceful the way the architects of this region have simply let that go. It's one of the worst ratios of good to bad houses that I've ever seen."

He seems not to be fond of the infamous Vancouver Special although he hates the contemporary stuff more. Meanwhile, here's a cool conversion of a Vancouver Special. This is the way to renovate those old houses, instead of slapping beige vinyl siding on them.

[G-Man]

So true that the burbs in Vancouver are awful but I am confused... I thought he was about functionality not form? If there were good services nearby would they have been better?