Active Design

The Shipyards, North Vancouver's mixed-use waterfront neighborhood (my photo).

 
I just returned to Eugene following an extended visit to Vancouver, B.C. While the purpose of my stay there was primarily to be with my family following the death of my father, it was also a much-needed personal break and mental reset.
 
I actually spent most of my time in North Vancouver, which is a compact city located directly across Burrard Inlet from Vancouver. Though I was born and raised in Vancouver, I seldom frequented the “North Shore” during my youth. Seeing it now through an architect’s eyes was a revelation. Despite its modest population of just over 58,000 residents, the City of North Vancouver is highly urbanized, with a significant industrial base (including shipping, chemical production, and film studios) and a highly educated and demographically diverse population.
 
According to the most recent census figures, North Vancouver’s population density is 12,720 residents per square mile, close to Vancouver’s heralded density of 14,892 people per square mile. By way of comparison, Eugene’s population density is 3,911 per square mile, while Portland’s current figure is 4,890.
 
For urban designers, North Vancouver offers lessons relevant and applicable to communities across the continent, including my adopted home of Eugene, Oregon. Certainly, one such lesson is North Vancouver’s beneficial commitment to the development of a dense built environment that supports the physical well-being of its residents.

North Vancouver as seen across Burrard Inlet from Vancouver (photo by Michelle Maria, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

 
Active Design is an approach to the development of buildings that uses architecture and urban design to make daily physical activity more inviting and to promote social interaction, particularly in new multi-family projects. The City of North Vancouver upholds Active Design as a key policy area in its official community plan. Its land use objectives include encouraging active, healthy lifestyles through planning and active design principles that support physical activity and contribute to enhanced walkability and active streets, sidewalks, and public spaces. The city changed its zoning bylaws expressly to incentivize Active Design in new developments.
 
North Vancouver is organized around a logical street network oriented to outstanding views, preserving natural features that bound and contain the city and its neighborhoods. The street network includes the Green Necklace, a 4.66 mile urban greenway that forms a scenic loop around the city center, linking historic parks and buildings, public spaces and commercial areas by means of an off-street, multi-use path.
 

The North Shore Spirit Trail (purple) and the Green Necklace).

Most errands do not require a car in North Vancouver. My brother and sister-in-law, who reside on the 18th floor of the CentreView condominium tower in the Central Lonsdale neighborhood (a “walker’s paradise” with a Walk Score of 90), have everything they need on a daily basis mere steps from the building’s front door. Countless small shops, restaurants, and personal services establishments line the surrounding streets. A Whole Foods supermarket, a Home Hardware store, and their dentist’s office are literally downstairs, while Lions Gate Hospital (North Vancouver’s principal emergency medical facility) is one block away. Increased density shortens distances between destinations and fosters a mixture of convenient uses within a manageable radius.
 
Because of its high walkability, an embarrassment of urban and natural riches, steep topography, and extensive web of bike and pedestrian trails, most able-bodied North Vancouverites are in great shape. Indeed, according to Statistics Canada, the population of North Vancouver boasts the highest level of fitness of any city in Canada. I took numerous walks during my visit, averaging between 12,000 and 16,000 steps per day (which included invigorating strolls along the North Shore Spirit Trail and hiking the Lynn Loop Trail), roughly twice my daily average here in Eugene. My brother and sister-in-law, both retirees, do even more. It is a challenge not to get your steps in during one’s daily routine while living in the Central Lonsdale neighborhood.
 

Examples of North Vancouver's mixed-use urbanism. Note the street-level retail shops, housing or offices on upper floors, and the gradient of the streets (my photos).

The City of North Vancouver recognized the importance of creating opportunities for physical activity in a dense urban setting, and of the synergies of fitness with sustainable and universal design. The city noted that historic planning and building design standards indirectly resulted in environments that failed to promote physical activity and social interaction. North Vancouver’s Active Design project engaged architects and building code consultants to resolve design and code issues to reduce regulatory barriers that discourage healthy habits. The City of North Vancouver now uses its Active Design Guidelines in the review of all rezoning applications for new developments with greater than 10 residential units and/or more than 1,000 square meters of commercial, industrial, or institutional floor area.
 
Some of the enacted policies include stipulations incentivizing use of primary and secondary stairs rather than elevators or escalators, excluding external corridors from gross floor area calculations, and likewise excluding recreational and amenity areas provided for common use from floor area calculations. Developers see monetary benefits, but additionally are rewarded for creating buildings buyers and renters find desirable.
 
The City of New York pioneered the Active Design planning approach with the 2010 publication of its Active Design Guidelines. The New York program documented many of the strategies the City of North Vancouver incorporated into its own health-promoting design and operation practices. New York’s then-mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the Center for Active Design in 2012, which today manages the Fitwel Certification System.
 
What is Eugene doing to likewise encourage healthy lifestyles? The City of Eugene’s Community Design Handbook does include aspirational statements advocating creation of a well-connected network of parks and public spaces, prioritization of open spaces as central organizing elements, and the development of complete, walkable neighborhoods. The handbook advocates locating dense housing near existing services and amenities, cultivating under-represented “missing middle” housing types, creating opportunities for businesses and services in neighborhood centers, encouraging a mix of compatible and complementary uses at the neighborhood, block, and building scales, and providing active uses on the ground level of buildings. The handbook additionally promotes restoration of traditional, pedestrian-scaled block patterns, creation of pedestrian and bike connections, prioritization of pedestrian safety, and designing buildings with visual transparency to interact with public streets and paths.
 
Beyond the design principles listed in the Community Design Handbook, I am not immediately aware of any set of City of Eugene building and planning principles that expressly address Active Design. Through its various current projects, the city is actively working toward fulfilling the Handbook’s principles, so in a sense they are doing so; however, to the best of my knowledge, an enforceable and consistently applied codification of those principles does not yet exist.
 

Strollers enjoying Waterfront Park along North Vancouver's esplanade (my photo).

Environmental design is an essential tool for combating pressing public health problems, including obesity and chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, for which the leading risk factors include physical inactivity. Changes to urban and building design can influence how people engage with their neighbors and increase the availability of physical fitness at work, school, home, and during leisure time. Creating an active city by developing and maintaining a mix of land uses in all neighborhoods, improving access to transit and transit facilities, designing accessible, pedestrian-friendly streets, and providing opportunities for daily physical activity through Active Design can significantly improve the health and well-being of our population.