Rethinking the suburban dream

Public spaces like the plaza at Lynn Valley Village help to connect a community.

Photograph by: Mike Wakefield, NEWS photo

Recently, while lounging in Lynn Valley’s Library Square watching my daughters tempt fate with ever increasing leaps off the plaza stairs, I recalled how just a few years ago this magnificent public square was a forlorn no-man’s land of black asphalt lapping against a Seven-Eleven gas station with a decaying single-storey strip mall forming its backdrop. It hit me: “We’re doing something right here!”

For decades now suburban development has defined the public realm as a place to move through and avoid rather than a place to seek out and inhabit. Library Square is different. The development has eliminated the degraded public space that occupied the heart of Lynn Valley and has given back a dynamic, porous, people-oriented space that draws us in simply because it feels right.

The blight of suburbia is not as obvious here on the North Shore as it is in outlying communities but take a short stroll through Library Square and gaze over the sea of asphalt enveloping Lynn Valley Mall and realize it’s a problem we’re still coming to grips with.

The suburban dream drew its origins from a desire to escape the Industrial city for a cleaner life in the country. It was the classic case of ‘having one’s cake and eating it too’ as good work was in town but the dream was in the country. The dream became entrenched and suburbia pushed further and further outwards becoming a vast tract of semi-urban development that now carpets our local farmland and depends completely on the automobile for its existence.

The very word suburbia is a confusing one. It’s clearly not rural, as the very name defines, and it’s not urban either. The so-called country homes that created the suburban dream are mere caricatures of the original inspiration. What has developed is a civic environment defined by the means of getting too and from it rather than by geographical and cultural forces that would better shape an urban fabric.

But the suburban debacle is in its golden years. The cheap oil era is over and everything will change in coming decades. We’re going to live smaller and more efficiently, we’re going to live closer to work and we’re going to live closer to one another. Hopefully our communities will put less design emphasis on the automobile and more on the human beings that inhabit it. It’s a rethinking of the current urban planning model but it’s certainly not a new one. Take a stroll through the streets of Rome (or countless cities that predate the automobile) and you quickly realize that a deep understanding of successful civic design has been here all along. We just need to know where to look.

We’re on the cusp of major change in coming years. My hope is that a world based less on cheap fuel will produce an urban model more focused on locality and community and with it a public realm that’s worth caring about.