Street-facing Dwelling Units and Livability: The Impacts of Emerging Building Types in Vancouver's New High-density Residential Neighbourhoods

Abstract

The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, is building new high-density residential neighbourhoods around its downtown. Working within the context of large-scale corporate development projects, public sector planners are proactively shaping development to be dense but also conform to notions of livability that derive from traditional urbanism, such as ‘eyes on the street’ and pedestrian scale. Design guidelines have resulted in new building types that integrate ground-floor townhouses into very large buildings. This study analysed how the new embedded townhouse forms are contributing to life on the street and neighbourhood livability, using environmental measurements, behaviour observations and surveys. The findings conclude that the embedded townhouses do contribute to livability, although other aspects of the building types and neighbourhoods may pose concerns.

Notes

1. Floor area ratio is ratio of building square footage to square footage of land.

2. These traffic counts are based on field observations.