Vancouver is HOT Says Urban Designers

Viewed from the United States, Vancouver is super hot, it's almost overheating. American cities have failed to stem the flight to the suburbs and the disinvestment in their downtowns, so American planners come here and they go ga-ga.

They think, ‘How can we do this? How can we get people to live in hi-rises and pay top dollar like that? How can we get people to live over stores on places like West Fourth Avenue and goodness me, Main Street!' And they go away and they scratch their heads in places like Fort Worth/Dallas.

I think, however, that the Vancouver heat thermometer drops off very rapidly once you leave this continent. Vancouverites delude themselves into thinking we're more important in the global scheme of things than we really are.

From the perspective of Europe or Australia or Africa or Asia, Vancouver is a nice small city with cheap sushi and good sunsets, but certainly not nearly the urban intensity and complexity of places like Barcelona or Sydney, let alone great metropolises like London, Paris, Berlin, New York. For those cities, I'm not sure Vancouver has a lot to teach.