There are a lot of things Burnaby has. An outstanding parks system. Check. SkyTrain stations galore. Check. A city hall with a billion dollar reserve. Check. A downtown. Nope.
Burnaby is desperately seeking a downtown. It hasn’t had one since Burnaby was born 125 years ago.
City council and its planning department minions want to change that.
Good luck.
They’ve come up with a vision to create one in the next 40 years at Metrotown, something that’s been lost in all the demoviction fear created by the new plan for the area.
It would be fantastic if Burnaby can pull it off, but it won’t be easy.
Downtowns usually emerge organically. They are ripe with history that evolves naturally. The Lower Mainland is full of them. Besides the biggie in Vancouver there are downtowns in New Westminster, Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, Langley, White Rock, North Vancouver and Abbotsford, all with varying degrees of success. They were homegrown, sprouting with the community. Some of them are cute, some of them lively, and some of them have seen better days. (New West, for example, is better than it was, but not as good as it used to be. It has recovered very nicely from the drug days of the ’90s but is still a long way from its halcyon Golden Mile days of yore.)
They weren’t force fed, though. But that’s what Burnaby intends to do.
Burnaby’s history is of a place for those who work in Vancouver to sleep. It started with small pockets but has become a super-sized suburb on steroids.
It has a great divide. It doesn’t have a river running through it, but it does have a railway that cuts it in half. Fifty-plus years ago a freeway made it even more geographically divisive.
During the 1900s, no area really emerged as a downtown. Came the ’50s and ’60s, the city grew subdivisions like rabbits on fertility pills. Malls like Middlegate, Brentwood and Lougheed sprouted to serve suburbanites. South Burnaby didn’t have a mall, but it did have the scourge of suburban retail called Kingsway. It was anchored by Simpsons-Sears, a building which is still there as an outdoor anomaly to the rest of the current megamall’s facades.
But now the city’s visionaries, commissioned by city council, have a plan for a downtown. It involves chopping up the Metropolis at Metrotown mall to resemble a cutting board used by someone selling sets of knives at the PNE, and the building of office towers, streets, stores and more as if was an advanced LEGO kit.
Burnaby isn’t alone in its downtown desire. For the last two decades, Surrey has been trying to develop a downtown at the end of the Expo Line in the Whalley area. Surrey has built a new library and city hall there. SFU put a campus there, too. But it’s in Whalley. And despite the dressing up, it’s still Whalley.
Burnaby can’t make it happen without help. That help, however, may have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table.
The city can dream about gleaming office towers teaming with commercial business along with streets filled with shoppers, pedestrians, cyclists, lively cafés, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, and fabulous facilities like hotels, theatres and a convention centre.
But to make those dreams come true, the city needs cooperation from land owners and developers. They’re the ones with the money and wherewithal to do accomplish what Burnaby wants. That means there will be some hard bargaining ahead, and that means sometimes the city won’t be able to get its way.
Creating a downtown is a tall task. SFU prof Paddy Smith said it’s something the city should have been looking to do 40 years ago with its original Metrotown plan. And even then it may have been too late to pull it off. It’s more like something that should have started a century and a quarter ago.
The vision is a pretty picture, though, and here’s hoping such a cynical outlook is wrong and a downtown will eventually emerge as a city asset. But don’t bank on it.
