The Urban Project as Architecture’s Pathway to a More Sustainable British Columbia

Editors: Billie Faircloth, Maibritt Pedersen Zari, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Martin Tamke

James Huemoeller publishes “The Urban Project as Architecture’s Pathway to a More Sustainable British Columbia” in Design for Climate Adaptation: Proceedings of the UIA World Congress of Architects Copenhagen 2023.

This paper explores a pathway for architectural practice to integrate ecologically focused urbanism within the existing British Columbia regulatory environment. Planners and designers laud the greater Vancouver area as a model for the planning principles responsible for Vancouverism. While there are some successful projects, for much of the region, which has a more traditional suburban form, Vancouverism is less influential. This is because the success of Vancouverism is less a result of planning tools or the careful control of form, and more to do with the centring of the project around the natural assets of the city. Rather than focus exclusively on urban form with form-based codes growing in popularity in the region, communities that want to build on the region’s earlier successful models should foreground a coherent vision that connects new urban projects more directly to their respective landscapes. Architects are well positioned to help in that effort but have to date limited our sustainability effort to the confines of the site. A focus on innovative technologies such as mass timber, or the many credentialing programmes, while beneficial, fails to acknowledge that buildings themselves are only a small part of a more sustainable city. Architects, therefore, need to find ways to engage the broader conditions that make architecture possible. This paper offers one trajectory that uses the “Urban Project” to work within the confines of the object, but still allows projects to offer a broader idea for sustainably reshaping the Lower Mainland.

Read the the full paper here.