The Long Road Back to the Downtown Vancouver of the 1940s
While Vancouver’s lack of Inner City Freeways is often cited as one of the “nine decisions that saved paradise”, it did not necessarily stop sprawl, but severely impeded. More importantly, it set the stage for the re-urbanization of Vancouver’s downtown core in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even so, despite its recent history of residential condominium construction, when viewed through the lens of history and as a proportion of overall City population, Downtown Vancouver is only now recovering to levels that were last seen in 1941.
Based on a historical census survey of Downtown census tracts and the rest of the City population from 1941 to 2006, growth outside the Downtown core has consistently been more the rule than the exception. From a high of 16 percent of the total City population living in the Downtown Peninsula (including the West End) in 1941, this proportion plummeted to 9 percent by 1961, but stabilized at 10 percent for most of the middle 20th Century. Only since 1991 and the rediscovery of Downtown living, has this proportion slowly inched back to its World War Two levels.
The significance of Downtown Vancouver’s Urban U-Turn should not be understated. In the short space of 20 years (1986 to 2006), the population of Downtown Vancouver has more than doubled from 42,960 to 87,973. At the same time, this growth builds on a preexisting DNA of dense urban living engrained in Vancouver as the Downtown population has never dipped below 40,000 people since 1966.
As density grows outside the downtown core, it will be curious to see if the proportion of the City population living in Downtown Vancouver will stabilize or even perhaps decrease. Now, instead of sprawl decimating the Downtown core, the development of neighborhood centres and nodes could transform Vancouver from a one centre city to a multi-centre metropolis.
Special Thanks to Paul Raynor at the City of Vancouver’s Housing Centre for the statistics.