Streetcar lines being built back in 1889. In 1955, the streetcars would run for the last time. Item # Trans P77.

As a new era in rail travel began, this city also saw the last streetcar run in 1955. It was also a year that saw a scandal rock the police force.

By Chuck Davis, The History of Vancouver
Photos courtesy of Vancouver Archives

Annacis Island

Annacis Island, the first industrial park in Canada, was officially opened July 22, 1955. The 1,200-acre island had been owned since 1951 by Grosvenor International, owned in turn by the Duke of Westminster. More than 1,300 government, civic and business leaders were on hand. The duke had died (July 19, 1953, aged 74) before Annacis got going, but Grosvenor Estates—run by Lt. Col. Gerald and Lt. Col. Robert Grosvenor, beneficiaries of the duke’s family trust—proceeded with the plans. The Vancouver Sun, for July 21, page 8, reported that one factory was under construction, “with the possibility of a number of other firms also moving in.”

Today, the island is home to a variety of industrial concerns and a major sewage treatment facility. Prior to industrial development, the island had been used for farming and fishing. It’s hard to tell it’s an island these days: the land is covered by buildings, warehouses, roads and bridges.

The Mulligan Affair

In March of 1955 Province reporter Ray Munro, frustrated at the paper’s refusal to print his allegations about Vancouver’s police chief Walter Mulligan, quit that paper and became the “Vancouver editor” of Toronto-based scandal sheet Flash Weekly. Flash hit Vancouver streets June 15 with sensational charges by Munro about illegal doings by the city’s police chief, Walter Mulligan. Anticipating heavy demand, Flash printed 10,000 extra copies. They were gone within hours.

On June 24 Detective Sergeant Len Cuthbert, implicated in the Mulligan scandal, shot himself. He survived, and would later testify against Mulligan. Not much later, Police Superintendent Harry Whelan shot himself. Whelan, who didn’t survive, was to have testified at the Mulligan inquiry.

Len Cuthbert, still recovering from his self-inflicted gunshot wound, would shock the inquiry with a nervous recitation of bootleggers’ payoffs made and split with Mulligan. Equally devastating was the testimony of Detective Sergeant Bob Leatherdale, an honest cop who not only refused to go along with the payoff scheme, but reported it to the city prosecutor, a judge and McGeer’s successor as mayor, Charles Thompson—all of whom, according to Munro, sat on the report.

On October 24 Mulligan asked to be relieved of his duties. In December he and his wife left for the USA, while the commission of inquiry into his activities was still going on. He got a job as a limousine-bus dispatcher at Los Angeles airport. The last day of the Mulligan inquiry would be January 27, 1956. The findings will be reported on in the 1956 chronology. And look to The History of Metropolitan Vancouver site for more details on this fascinating tale.

Incidentally, one of the reporters at the Mulligan enquiry was a hard-nosed Glaswegian named Jack Webster. His hard-hitting daily CJOR reports on the Mulligan enquiry—written in his rapid shorthand because recording devices were not allowed—made his name.

BC Electric Building

The BC Electric Building went up on Burrard Street at Nelson, Vancouver’s first high-rise office building south of Georgia. “The dynamic collaboration between BC Electric chair Dal Grauer,” architectural historian Harold Kalman has written, “and forward-thinking architect Ned Pratt (ably assisted by Ron Thom and others in his office) produced a tapered, lozenge-shaped tower, whose plan placed every desk no farther than 15 feet from a window and natural light (a poor advertisement for the power utility!). The floors are cantilevered from the central concrete service core like branches from a tree, with only slender perimeter columns offering additional support. The blue, green, and black mosaic tiles (by B.C. Binning) are an integral part of the design.” What would later become the BC Hydro Building, is now a condo complex called Electra.

City of Langley

The City of Langley was incorporated March 15, 1955 out of what had been the Langley Prairie area of the Township. “The City of Langley,” Bob Groeneveld writes in The Greater Vancouver Book, “was born of dissent. Township reeve [mayor] George Brooks’s adamant ‘Not a nickel for streetlights for Langley Prairie!’ in the early 1950s became the watchword for discontented businessmen who—some of them since the early 1930s—had been fighting to secede from the Township. The dissidents were upset that the political clout of the Langley Prairie community, quickly becoming the commercial and business centre of Langley, did not match its economic importance (Langley Prairie accounted for 20 per cent of Langley’s tax base). A secessionist campaign was led by a committee of prominent residents and businessmen, who succeeded in drawing an 85 per cent vote of Langley Prairie’s approximately 900 taxpayers to their side on September 24, 1954. Brooks’s words, emphasizing the disparity between tax dollars collected and spent in Langley Prairie, had provided the final wedge to officially split four square miles, with a total population of 2,025, off Langley Township to create Langley City on March 15th, 1955.”

Last Streetcar

“Amidst flashbulbs and the tears of fans” the last streetcar ran in Vancouver (it was on the Hastings route) on April 24, 1955, ending 65 years of street railway service. Now the trolley bus was king. One of the passengers on that final run was Henry Ewert, an English teacher, who would also ride the interurbans on their final day in 1958. Ewert has published several excellent books on public transit in this area. Especially appealing is 2003’s Vancouver’s Glory Years: Public Transit 1890-1915, wonderfully and profusely illustrated, and written with Heather Conn.

The CPR’s Canadian

On the same day the streetcars ceased to run, a new era in rail travel began. The Canadian Pacific Railway introduced The Canadian, an “ultra-modern, lightweight, highly attractive stainless-steel streamlined train.” The train offered the world’s longest dome ride: 2,881.2 miles. Postwar Canada believed train travel had a healthy future. Canadian Pacific met the demand by introducing this fancy new service. (The last car of each train featured original murals by painters of the Group of Seven.)

The Canadian was faster than the existing Dominion service: Running time from Vancouver to Montreal was just over 71 hours. The Dominion, which made many more stops, took about 108. Engineer R.J. McQuarrie pulled his 14-car train out of the CPR’s Cordova Street station at 8:00 p.m. April 24. There were just over 300 passengers aboard, and a crew of 22. At 1:00 p.m. Montreal time on the same day the westbound Canadian left for Vancouver.

The Canadian was responsible for a spike in the number of train travellers, but, sadly, it was short-lived. Today, VIA Rail runs the Canadian just three times a week (and on CN rails). And a trip that cost $77.85 in April of 1955 (one-way coach Vancouver to Montreal) will set you back about 10 times as much today.

LG

CKLG AM 1070 signed on February 3 with 1000 watts in North Vancouver. The ‘LG’ stood for Lions Gate. The station was owned by the Gibson Brothers, the logging family. Up against booming 50-kilowatt KNX Los Angeles on the same frequency, CKLG’s signal didn’t go much past south Vancouver after dark.

Container ships

The White Pass & Yukon Route, whose narrow-gauge railway connected Skagway, Alaska with Whitehorse in Yukon, became the first company in the world to build a specialized cellular container ship and custom-designed rail cars to handle containers. The concept had been developed in the railway’s Vancouver office. The Clifford J. Rogers, the world’s first container ship, left Vancouver this year with her first shipment, bound for the Yukon.

Says a web site that looks at the history of the WP&YR: “The first containers designed and built by the White Pass wouldn’t meet today’s standards. In fact the White Pass test container—the first one built—had ‘bugs.’ The doors became wedged against each other, and at the end of its first test trip it had to be opened with a cutting torch.”

Also in 1955

On January 10 an agreement ratified by the notaries society and the law society—they had had disputes in the past over who could handle what—stipulated that need for a notarial appointment would arise when a vacancy occurred through resignation, retirement or death. The agreement capped the number of notaries at 330, the number practicing on January 31, 1955. The notaries’ seals now were anchored to designated districts. (Notaries in Greater Vancouver hold more than half the 322 notarial appointments permitted by statute in 81 notarial districts in British Columbia.)

On March 7 Margaret Jean Gee became the first woman of Chinese descent to be called to the British Columbia bar.

On June 3 Canadian Pacific Airlines inaugurated the first service between Vancouver and Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, over the North Pole. The 4,825-mile (7,765 k/m) journey took 18 hours.

Judy Garland, 33, performed in Vancouver July 19.

In July 1955 a recording by Bill Haley and the Comets, titled Rock Around the Clock, landed on CJOR disc jockey Red Robinson’s desk. You know the rest.

On August 26 the Vancouver Tourist Association became the Greater Vancouver Tourist Association. Vancouver Sun Director R. Rowe Holland told the Tourist Association he was “astounded” to find that information centre attendants at Stanley Park knew “nothing whatever” about the background of historic sites in the Greater Vancouver area. The Sun story also noted that member Jim Hughes stressed the need for Vancouver to have a full-time convention bureau. And the same story noted that the “question most frequently asked by visitors on tours of the city is: ‘Where are the Mounties?’”

Retired lumberman Leon J. Koerner set up the Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation on September 21 with funding of nearly $1 million. The Foundation finances educational, cultural and charitable projects.

The Raven, UBC’s literary magazine, first appeared in September 1955.

A plaque was installed in September near the southeast corner of Cambie and Smithe in Vancouver to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Imperial Oil. That site was chosen because it was the location of Canada’s first gas station, opened in or around 1907 by Imperial Oil. The plaque isn’t there now. We don’t know where it is.

On October 3 Frank Mackenzie Ross was sworn in as B.C.’s lieutenant governor, succeeding Clarence Wallace.

Kingsford-Smith Elementary School opened November 4, 1955 in Vancouver, named for Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, the Australian aviator who was the first to fly the Pacific. The school got its name at the suggestion of city archivist Major J.S. Matthews, who recalled that Kingsford-Smith briefly lived here as a child with his family. The aviator had been lost at sea in 1935.

On November 26, 1955 the first Grey Cup game was played in Vancouver. The two competing teams were Doug Walker’s Montreal Alouettes and Frank ‘Pop’ Ivy’s Edmonton Eskimos. Edmonton won 34-19.

On St. Andrew’s Day in 1955 (November 30), 21 Scottish Canadians groups finally opened the United Scottish Cultural Centre at Fir and 12th Avenue in Vancouver. (In July, 1986, the centre would move into a new home at 8886 Hudson in Marpole.)

On December 7 Vancouver police constable Gordon Sinclair was shot to death. He’d been shot in the back while getting out of his police car under the Granville Street Bridge. The shooter, Joseph Gordon, a career criminal, was charged with Sinclair’s murder and would be hanged April 2, 1957 at Oakalla. An accomplice, James Carey, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Carey would be released in 1967, become a model citizen, marry, adopt three kids and give talks on Crime Does Not Pay.

Lions Gate Bridge was sold this year to the provincial government for $6 million, about half its appraised value.

St. Andrew’s Hall was chartered by the Province of British Columbia as a theological college. Buildings would be completed in 1957 on land close to the heart of the UBC campus that the university leased to the college for 999 years.

The Trinity Baptist Church was built at West 49th and Granville.

The Workmen’s Compensation Board (now WorkSafe) opened a new $1.5 million Rehabilitation Centre next to its head office in Vancouver.

Lansdowne race track, which was sold to the B.C. Turf and Country Club in 1945, and which closed in 1949, opened again. It would permanently close in 1960.

The laying of gas pipes began in Surrey as B.C. Electric promised natural gas distribution for the Fraser Valley at Vancouver prices. At Port Mann B.C. Electric built the “largest gas turbine in the world” to generate electricity from natural gas.

Cloverdale changed to dial telephones this year.

Fort Langley was established as a National Historic Park this year, and reconstruction began. The storehouse was the only surviving building and was renovated to become the trading store. It is possibly the oldest intact structure in B.C.

Andy Paul, Squamish native leader, was honored by Pope Pius XII for his contribution to the Catholic Church and to the native people of Canada.

The CPR announced a plan to create the Oakridge community. “In postwar Vancouver,” Michael Kluckner has written, “a new style of suburbia became fashionable—wider streets, open landscaping, and low-lying, wood-sided bungalows and split-levels. In the heyday of this style, the CPR planned to subdivide the 276 acres bounded by Oak, Cambie, 41st and 57th. The Oakridge community featured 80-foot-wide single-family housing lots, many on curving streets, and a small apartment area, next to which was proposed a large shopping mall with Woodward’s Department Store as the anchor tenant.” (That mall would become Oakridge, opened in 1959.)

The brothers of the Benedictine Order, who had resided since 1939 in Fairacres—built in 1910 by Grace and Henry Ceperley—left and moved to their present home at Westminster Abbey, Mission. (Fairacres has been the home since 1967 of the Burnaby Art Gallery.)

The Derwent Way Bridge (low-level, road/rail from New Westminster, Annacis Channel, Queensborough, Lulu Island) was built. The low-level bridge carried two highway lanes and a separate rail track.

The Italian weekly newspaper L’Eco d’Italia was founded.

UBC’s Alma Mater Society launched the Brock Hall Art Collection. This collection (some of the works of which had been stolen or vandalized) may now be found in the Student Union Building Art Gallery.

Writes Tom Hawthorn: “In 1955, the Rev. E.C. Pappert flipped through a copy of the [UBC student newspaper] Ubyssey before pronouncing it ‘the vilest rag you can imagine.’ Of course, the student staff of the offending journal merrily adopted the clergyman’s slur as a motto. To this day, it is used as a recruitment come-on.”

The Knights of Pythias Order began to financially assist organizations treating and fighting cerebral palsy in the lower mainland. They are contributors to the Pacific Riding for Developing Abilities organization.

Radio CKMO changed its call letters to C-FUN.

CBUT (the CBC’s two-year-old television station) presented its first televised drama, The Vise, a one-act tragedy (1910) by Pirandello. It starred Derek Ralston, Peter Mannering, Valerie Cooter and Rae Brown, who would later be one of the cast of the long-running CBC series The Beachcombers.

KCTS—an educational commercial-free station based in Seattle—began transmitting 20 hours of programming a week on Channel 9. (In 1966 KCTS would join 75 other stations, forming National Educational Television, later renamed the Public Broadcasting Service: PBS.)

The Princess Louise (II), built in 1921 for the CPR’s northern service by Wallace Shipyard, was sold to become a restaurant in Long Beach, California, where she sank in 1990.

Vancouver-based West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. began operations with the purchase by three brothers—Henry, William and Samuel Ketcham—of a small planer mill in Quesnel. Today, the company owns 19 sawmills, three plywood plants, two veneer plants, four pulp mills, two MDF plants and has approximately 7,500 employees. It logs mainly in Alberta and BC, but also has US logging operations in Louisiana and Arkansas. The company planted its 300 millionth tree in 2000.

Quilchena Golf Course was obliterated for construction of Prince of Wales High School and housing.

Stan Leonard, 40, BC’s greatest golfer, belatedly joined the PGA tour full time. Born February 2, 1915, by the late 1920s Leonard was caddying at Shaughnessy Heights for 50 cents. (This was before the 14-club limit when at least 20 clubs was not uncommon.) By 1932, at age 17, Leonard was B.C. Amateur champion. He would win a total of 44 tournaments during his career.

Vienna-born forest products executive John Prentice, who had a deep passion for chess, became president of the Chess Federation of Canada. He would hold the post to 1971, but continue his involvement with the game into the 1980s. Prentice’s financial support and organizational ability led him to be called Canada’s Mr. Chess.

With the inclusion this year of Richmond, the Fraser Valley Regional Library district covered an area of 4,000 square miles, extending from Richmond to Hope, from Port Coquitlam to Agassiz, and from the international border to the mountains north of the Fraser River.

Vancouver’s G.F. Strong was named president of the American College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Bill Rea, who had started Radio CKNW in 1944, and moved to California for health reasons in 1954, sold the station to accountant Frank Griffiths.

Judge Sherwood Lett became Chief Justice of BC. He would hold the post until his death in 1964.

Stonemason Jimmy Cunningham, aged about 77, “retired.” He had been working on the construction of the Stanley Park seawall since 1917, eventually became supervisor of the work. After his retirement he continued to come down to the wall to keep an eye on things. He died September 29, 1963. His ashes are secreted in an unmarked location within the wall.

Druggist George Cunningham was elected as a Vancouver alderman. He had the most votes of any candidate. He served to 1957.

Samuel Patrick Cromie, 37, became vice president/assistant publisher of Sun Publishing.

Medicine Hat-born B.C. Binning, 46, in BC since 1913, co-founded UBC’s fine arts department. He would head the department to 1968.

Abraham Rogatnick arrived in Vancouver and joined with Baltimore-born Alvin Balkind, 34, who had arrived in 1954, to found the New Design Gallery. It became a centre for the avant-garde.

Calgary-born Hy Aisenstat and his wife Barbara, with the help of a $3,000 loan, opened a restaurant called Hy’s Steak House in Calgary. He would move to Vancouver in 1960 and launch a small restaurant empire.

***

Chuck Davis is a Vancouver writer who has written, co-written, or edited 15 books. Most of them are on local history, and he describes his next book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, as the capstone of his career.

By John Calimente, re:place Magazine

Streetcars and interurbans were ubiquitous in North America prior to World War II. At their peak, Canadian cities were stitched together by about 3,600 km of track. In the U.S., 71,000 km of track connected their towns and cities together. That’s the equivalent of track stretching 10 times the distance from Vancouver to St. John’s. According to Bombardier’s Steve Hall, there were over 60,000 streetcars running in North America, and every city with over 5,000 people had a streetcar system. Vancouver’s streetcars ran for 65 years, from 1890 until 1955, after which they were replaced by trolley buses.

Our city has been fortunate to keep its quiet and non-polluting trolley buses - it is now the only Canadian city still running them. Diesel buses may have eventually replaced streetcars in most other cities in North America, but they have never captured the imagination of the general public. A great post on The Infrastructurist lists their 36 reasons streetcars are better than buses.

What I like about most about modern streetcars is the smoothness of the ride. One is not constantly jostled back and forth and side to side moving in and out of traffic and stopping for other vehicles like on a bus. Vancouver’s Olympic Line, the demonstration line running between Granville Island and the Olympic Village, is proof of this. It almost feels like one is gliding across the ground - see this video for an example. This superior ride is one reason for the popularity of commuter rail; it is a calm environment in which one can do work or simply relax.

Bombardier’s Steve Hall grew up around streetcars. His father was a streetcar operator for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), driving the old Peter Witt cars which featured coal stoves on board. Hall worked for the TTC as well, eventually moving on to the Urban Transit Development Corporation (UTDC), a crown corporation in Ontario that developed the SkyTrain technology used in the Lower Mainland. Hall moved to Vancouver to head up operations and maintenance for the construction of SkyTrain, and stayed on to manage Bombardier’s Western Canada office after the company bought up UTDC in 1991.

Hall is bullish on the prospects for more streetcar lines here. “North America is emerging now, and that’s part of the reason for the demonstration line we’re running in Vancouver. We’re tracking 40 streetcar projects in North American cities that are either in the planning or start-up phase. So we see this as a huge phase coming in the business.” Cities such as Phoenix and Minneapolis are among the many cities that have added light rail systems in the past few years, but streetcars are different in that they share rights-of-way with cars.

Portland, Oregon kicked off the streetcar revival on the West Coast with the opening of the Portland Streetcar in 2001. This was followed by the Tacoma Link Line in Tacoma, Washington in 2003 and the South Lake Union streetcar in Seattle in 2007. Other streetcar systems in the planning stages will benefit from a December announcement by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that made $130 million available for urban streetcar projects.

In Canada, Vancouver has been running its Olympic Line demonstration line since January 21st of this year. Montreal is considering bringing back the streetcar on a route between the old city and the central business district, and Toronto recently concluded a huge $1.2 billion order with Bombardier for 204 new low-floor cars. “We’re very excited about that order” says Hall. “It will be in production in Thunder Bay for many years, and that opens up all kinds of potential with cars in production in North America.”

And the timing couldn’t be better. Recent technological innovations are making streetcars an even easier fit for North American cities. Bombardier is now producing the first 100% low floor streetcars in Europe, with the Vancouver currently the only place to ride one in North America. “This is the very first time that there’s been a conventional axel wheel set on a low-floor streetcar”, says Hall. “It didn’t really take off until we were able to do this without a special bogie design.”

Another innovation coming soon is catenary-free operation, with power coming not from an overhead power supply, but by induction of power from the roadside. Called PRIMOVE, as Hall explains “There’s no actual contact between the streetcar and the power source - it’s a derivation of the SkyTrain motor technology. Since there’s no contact, there’s no wear or maintenance on the street side either. And there’s no power out there on the street so there’s no risk. ” PRIMOVE should prove especially popular where cities do not want overhead catenary blocking views, such as the old European town centres.

In Europe “ridership is booming”, says Hall. “You can tell by the number of projects going on and the volume of cars being ordered. There have been 30 light rail or streetcar projects completed or started in Europe in the last 10 years, and Bombardier has been selling large orders of cars to cities like Berlin.” Streetcars have been more appealing for European cities due to their traditionally dense urban cores. “The urban structure has driven it”, says Hall, “high density living is just a part of who they are.”

Until very recently, North American cities were becoming ever more dispersed, which created low density areas unsuited for running streetcars. “It’s the way we live, the way we work, and the dependence on the automobile,” says Hall. But that is changing as well. “Now we’re saying that maybe that wasn’t the ideal for the world we’re going to be living in. So we’re in the process of making that transition to higher density neighbourhoods. We’re fortunate that we live in Vancouver, which is a prime example of movement back into that kind of living.”

The trend in North America so far has been for city governments to lead the way in developing streetcar systems. Hall notes that “Transit authorities are responsible for a very wide area, so they have to make decisions based on where they can make the most impact. Cities are looking at it from a different perspective - the development perspective. And how do they want to shape the downtown core? And it turns out that streetcar systems are a very effective tool to do that. They have a significant impact on development.”

The federal government is helping as well with increased funding for public transit. “What we’re seeing in Canada is a level of federal government investment in transit that we haven’t seen in the last 30 years”, says Hall. “Especially since about 2005, it’s been a complete change. I think even now there’s proportionally greater investment in Canada than there is in the U.S.”

As to whether streetcars are the best technology for all cities, Hall puts that debate to rest. “I don’t think the technology fights are helpful. I don’t think that’s where the debate should be. Rather than technology, people need to be asking themselves ‘How do you want to live? What do you want your city to be?’ Get the vision - get people united on that. The technology decisions will work themselves out.”

**

John Calimente is the president of Rail Integrated Developments and a member of the Transit Museum Society. He is a fan of great public transit + transit integrated communities + urban life lived without a car.

By the Townshift Organizers and the City of Surrey

Opening the festivities surrounding the recently held Townshift International Ideas Design Competition, two free public events will be taking place on the evening of Thursday February 4th. The night will begin with the opening of the Exhibition of Finalist followed by a lecture and discussion about urbanizing the suburbs.  Here are the details:

Exhibition of Finalists
6 PM, Thursday, February 4
SFU Surrey, Dale B. Regehr Grand Hall
Surrey Mayor Diane Watts opens a free public exhibition of two dozen finalist designs for the five-site “TownShift: Suburb Into City” International Ideas Design Competition. Exhibition open daily during business hours through February 28.

‘Urbanizing the Suburbs’
7 PM, Thursday, February 4
SFU Surrey, Westminster Savings Credit Union
Lecture Theatre Surrey Central City architect Bing Thom on “City Centres for Surrey and Richmond”
Globe and Mail architecture critic Lisa Rochon on “Urbanizing Suburban Toronto”
Followed by a discussion moderated by TownShift Co-Organizer Trevor Boddy
Admission is free, but seating is limited: reservations by calling Carolyn Garoff at 604-591-4128 are strongly recommended.

***

For more information on Townshift, visit their website.

Authors: Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon (McGraw-Hill Professional, 1 edition, 2009)
Reviewed by: Lisa Brideau

Sprawly suburbs and land uses like shopping and housing diligently separated by strict single-use zoning – this is what got me into planning.  This is the stuff that bothered me so much I quit my previous career, went back to school and started a new career in urban planning.

Which is to say - it really bothered me.  A lot.  I knew it could not be right that I had to live in a residential sea of nothingness, work in a business park fortified with acres of surface parking, and drive absolutely everywhere.  I knew it didn’t have to be this way because I grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia - a.k.a. “The Dark Side” - a place where I could walk to school, the corner store, the lake, the mall, my after-school job and every other place I wanted to go.  I grew up walking and bussing and biking, and refused to believe that as an adult I couldn’t do that anymore.

As I was struggling to put into words the deep-seated wrongness I felt about the structure of the town I was living in at the time (Middleton, WI), I stumbled across the book Suburban Nation, which helped me to understand my dissatisfaction and launched me down a new career path in urban planning.

The Authors of Suburban Nation have been busy guys in the intervening years, struggling to help the planning and development professions remember how to build functional, sustainable neighbourhoods and towns: something we did just fine before we got distracted by cars. Their latest effort is “The Smart Growth Manual”, a bold attempt to be a real go-to resource for people assessing Smart Growth development and/or those trying to implement it.

In the words of the authors, the book’s goal “was not to catalog all aspects of good development practice, but rather to emphasize those that need attention”.

The book is divided into 4 sections arranged according to scale: The Region, The Neighbourhood, The Street, and The Building. Each section is further divided into subcategories with each page containing one principle with a paragraph of text and a photo – making the book highly digestible and accessible.  For example, The Street contains a subcategory “Public Streetscape” that proposes the following principle (9.1): “Provide proper sidewalks along all urban thoroughfares”. The explanatory paragraph following the principle provides useful information such as the ideal sidewalk widths for various situations.

The target audience for this book is not planning and design nerds (like myself) who want all the nitty gritty details – this book is the cliff notes version of Smart Growth, good for anyone involved in the planning and design of cities or neighbourhoods who doesn’t have time to get a degree in planning.

While I might have some minor quibbles with some of the details of a few principles, the kernel of smart growth/good planning is captured by these principles and they are presented simply and clearly.  The book, however, could have been improved by suggesting references for each principle, for those that do want to explore an idea in more detail.

Although I worry a little about giving people a list of simplified principles to work from without encouraging a deeper understanding of the topic, the damage done from decades of not having simple principles to guide us is apparent in cities all over North America and we certainly don’t need to encourage more.

It speaks to the sad state of our neighbourhoods that we need a book full of principles like “build sidewalks on your streets”, but as we’ve all experienced, there are a lot of places that have forgotten - or opted to ignore - these basic elements of urban design, to the detriment of our communities.   The Smart Growth Manual is a great tool to help us start building places that people can care about once again.

***

For more information on the Smart Growth Manual, visit the McGraw-Hill Professional website.

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Lisa Brideau is a graduate of the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC and currently works for the City of Vancouver.  She has an interest in urban design and planning that borders on obsessive.