Density and Cities
Leonard Rodrigues
I have just arrived back home to Vancouver after visiting family in Brazil. The city we spent our time in was Rio de Janeiro.
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I have just arrived back home to Vancouver after visiting family in Brazil. The city we spent our time in was Rio de Janeiro. Aside from exercising some of my Portuguese, I found myself reawakening an interest that has been with me for a very long time. Although trained as an architect, that interest was not the city’s architecture. My fascination was – I should say is - with the complexity and dynamics of the city itself. The fascination reawakened the moment I landed at Santos Dumont airport, and is with me still. It has been so strong that it has now coloured my perceptions of Vancouver the moment I stepped off the plane.

Few would challenge the statement that Vancouver has a very beautiful setting. It is a setting between the sea and the mountains with a distinctively mild west coast marine climate. Vancouver’s temperatures vary from below 0℃ to 5℃ in the winter to the high 18℃ to 30℃ in the summer. The major feature however is the rainfall. It is a west coast marine environment with significant amount of rain through the year. An average of 127 days of rain yielding 117 mm on average for the year. Rio by contrast is sitting in a tropical savannah with average temperatures between 21 And 27 ℃. Its rainfall averages 94 days of rain amounting to the same number as Vancouver: 117 mm of rain.

Rio’s setting has a far more complex geography than Vancouver’s. Although Rio sits between mountains and the ocean as well, they are almost intertwined with one another. It is a complex sinuous mix of ocean, land and mountains. Thinking of the cities comparatively left me somewhat confused. I had seen Vancouver as almost unbeatable in its setting, but I think it has met its match in Rio.

The most striking feature of Rio is the life in its streets. There are few places without intense activity. With a metropolitan area population approaching 14 million, this is a large city. It is also a dense city. It is – almost everywhere – a “15-minute city”. Although that term has been maligned recently, it simply means that everything you need – a place to work, play, shop, and live - is all within a 15-minute walk. Uses are not as segregated in Rio as they are in North America. In North America, we are much more used to seeing land uses segregated horizontally with shopping districts, industrial areas, central business districts, single family housing precincts, multi-family housing precincts, and office parks. These uses are occupying areas of similar type – the classic land use zoning model. Rio is much more horizontally integrated. You will find shops and cafes of all kinds at street level often with offices and housing above. Built areas are dense, multi storey, and cover the available land almost completely. The buildings are more commonly on the street as opposed to being set back from it. There are occasional towers, and they happen in most areas, but they seem to be exceptions and not the rule. Arriving in Vancouver, the contrast was shocking – particularly in using land for single family housing. It struck me that in an area where land is limited, the greatest folly of all is dedicating it to single family housing. It seems utterly unsuited to urban dwellings. With a growing population, it is not hard to see why single-family housing in Vancouver is so expensive ($1.4 million in the East End, and $3.5 million in the West End).

Were Vancouver developed more along the lines of Rio de Janeiro, the existence of purely residential single family, duplex, and row house options would be replaced primarily with midrise multi-family and mixed-use development. The density would be DRAMATICALLY increased and provide much needed housing in the city. Were the Metropolitan Region to adopt a similar strategy, we would see a city capable of accommodating much higher populations than currently occupy the space.

However, this will require a cultural shift in HOW a city is experienced. People in Rio essentially live in the streets, cafes, parks, restaurants, markets, shops, and kiosks that pepper the city. People in Vancouver essentially live in their dwelling unit and visit the amenities of the city. This is a fundamental cultural divide. On the one hand the city is lived in and an extension of the dwelling itself, and on the other, it is visited and experienced separate from the dwelling.

The Favela

The favela is a version of Rio’s density, but it has arisen in response to a lack of affordable housing and the pressing needs of a marginalized population seeking better opportunities in the city. We had the opportunity to visit one such favela: Rocinha. It is the largest favela in Latin America with a population of approximately 250,000. The land area is a mere 1.437 square kilometers! The density is therefore the astonishing number of 174,973 people per square kilometer. We were toured through by a resident who acts as a guide for the small tourist business that seems to be emerging.

The origin of favelas are shanty towns that grew up around population centres. Rocinha is such a place, but with infrastructure that has been added over time – including sanitation, water, electricity, and internet. The intensity of this place is something hard to describe. The main access is a winding roadway that ascends the steep hill side. There are shops, banks, cafes, grocery stores, and bars that also ascend the hill. There are buses and what are called “combies” that shuttle people up and down. Those work together with many more motorcycles that specifically shuttle people and goods up and down. They are continuously busy negotiating the steep winding hill with such skill any motorcycle rider in this country would be envious.

Despite crowding, the life in the favela is very community centred. However, favelas can be dangerous places. They are often home to one criminal gang or another. Our guide mentioned that we could take pictures anywhere and no one will be stealing your phone, but do not take pictures in this one location because the people in that area are gang members and really react negatively to people taking pictures. We did not argue with him.

The building construction is all masonry – usually brick, or block and concrete. It is all unplanned in any professional sense; implemented without permits, and does not conform to any building codes we are familiar with. Yet there they are – housing 250,000 people. In a perfect world, the favela should not exist. Yet their origin is the result of many people looking for a better life, and having limited options. These are no longer slums, but vibrant communities of people of limited means.

What is “right” about the favela is its density. Were they to have better building construction and application of reasonable building codes, the density would be reduced to some degree, but the rightness of the density would remain.

Why do I call this “right”? My view is based on the efficiency of more tightly packed city buildings and infrastructure. The costs of the infrastructure in more tightly packed buildings are very much lower than they are when buildings are separate and detached. One study found that the increase in costs was directly proportional to the distance between buildings. Urban sprawl is the wrong model and we have known that for decades. Yet we continue to absorb land and build what I consider the worst form of housing for a city – the single-family residence. I will go further and argue that building more single-family housing does not address the current housing crisis but exacerbates it.

The benefit of this density is not only in the costs that are reduced. The density contributes to a much more vibrant environment with the possibility of reducing our dependance on the car as that environment matures. I would postulate that the larger the resident population in a more condensed area, the higher the chance of businesses scaled to people in that environment to emerge (there is a good research project!). As a result, people are less likely to require a drive to a mall to buy what they need. The “15-minute city” becomes a reality.

The single-family house on a plot of land goes back to the move of the wealthy out of the cities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The process described by Sam Bass Warner in his book “Streetcar Suburbs” describes this process of the well-to-do moving away from the core of the city They built residences on country “estates” away from the pollution and grime of the cities that supported their wealth. You can see that model in the very first suburbs designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead in several cities.

The post WWII years brough an explosion of suburban development that was built on the very model of earlier estates. The car - being much more affordable - becomes the principal mode of transportation, and home ownership exploded with mortgages extended to 20 and 30 years from the traditional 5 years at that time. It is at this stage that we see the creation of what would become known as “urban sprawl”. The streetcar gave way to cars, highways, and a huge network of roads – all feeding low density housing.

The suburbs became homogeneous, segregated, and the poorer populations were relegated to the central city. To some degree, this remains the norm even today, although we are seeing densification occurring more and more, the model remains strongly underpinned by land use zoning regulations and transportation infrastructure.

Did We Get It Wrong?

Yes, we did. We did not understand that climate change, urban sprawl, extremely high housing costs, and failing infrastructure were on the horizon. We kept building cities that maximized sprawl making the car the main mode of transportation and the main source of polluted air and greenhouse gas production. We kept building cities with the principal model being the single-family house that would yield higher and higher costs for infrastructure, roads, and civic services driving up the price of housing with the lowest yield in people housed. The example I always think of is Vancouver. Approximately 52% of the limited land base in Vancouver is single family housing, yet the pressure on housing is astounding and has driven the price of housing to astonishing levels of unaffordability.

It is true that the price of housing is affected by several factors, but given the geographic constraints of Vancouver’s setting, 52% will continue to drive the costs higher and higher. There have been efforts to densify such as laneway housing, but they nibble at the edge of the problem: too low a density, and a bidding up of land values due to the increase in density. We need to build cities more like Rio de Janeiro and less like Vancouver if we are to meet the challenges of population growth in our cities. However, doing so will require a different sense of land values and its relationship to density as well as a different culture of urban living.

Land Values and Changing the Model

I learned some time ago as a city planner working on a plan for the downtown of a major Canadian city that some of our incentive models were just not cognizant of the assumption of increasing land cost for increasing density. We had developed a bonus system that could literally double the buildable density on a parcel of land. We found that almost immediately, land traded not on what was in the zoning bylaw’s base equation, but under the assumption that the developer will realize the full additional density that was meant to be judiciously allotted in return for public amenities within the project. That in turn resulted in enormous pressure from the development industry to provide maximum density with minimal public amenities built in. It was not what was intended by having an incentive system. We must uncouple the value of land from the assumed realizable density if we are ever going to solve this problem. It needs to be a multifaceted approach of dramatically increased allowable density, but not dramatically increasing land cost as a result coupled with a transformation in the culture of what it is to live in a city.

As a result of the above, we changed the model. In fact, we changed the entire approach. Instead of depending upon private interests providing public amenities based on incentives development site by development site, we examined the interface between public and private land. We did a classic “figure ground” diagram and discovered that the city owns a very high percentage of land. In the instance I remember, it was 50% of all available land belonging to the city and controlled directly by its administration, planning, and engineering departments. The approach became a public land-based planning programme wherein the quality of the urban experience was first encountered in the streets, parks, and public buildings. The quality of these spaces needed to set the standard for what happens around these spaces. The traditional development controls were changed to performance criteria with the specific intent of not having adjacent development undermining the investment in the public space.

Is The Affordable Housing Problem Solvable?

I firmly believe we have inadvertently built ourselves into a corner on affordability. Our segregated land uses have made the car a indispensable necessity. This, by itself, leads to increased costs not only associated with ownership, but with the very infrastructure and urban pattern it creates. The infrastructure that supports the car exacerbates the tendency to increase costs because the construction and maintenance of that infrastructure is enormous while the yield in the number of housing units available for that investment is rather thin. Further, basing any solution on a majority of single-family detached housing - even with laneway housing or other mechanisms to increase lot density – as Vancouver planners suggest will not significantly relieve the issue.

Our housing model in this country is predominantly dispersed. As costs have risen over time, we have seen lot sizes reduced and houses built very close together to maximize the profits for the developer. Even as we reduce the distance between houses to zero, we will only marginally increase the density. The pattern persists: we still need to leave that unit – usually using the car – to get to goods and services. These are, almost without exception, located in shopping centres with as much parking available adjacent to them as can be crammed onto the available land. Changing this in favour of higher densities more ubiquitously dispersed with integrated availability of goods and services would be nothing less than a revolutionary reset of our current urban structure.

It is perhaps not dissimilar to Thomas Kuhn’s thesis that for a scientific paradigm to change required replacing “normal science” with “revolutionary science”. The revolution comes about episodically when anomalies accumulate and no longer support an existing view of science. This leads to a reevaluation of old data and a new paradigm emerges.

In cities, we are at Kuhn’s mounting anomalies. The paradigm must shift to allow us to actually solve the problem. Our capitalist system and commoditization of housing coupled with a dispersed model of infrastructure and building has led us to this point. We will continue to nibble at the edges of the problem without a sustainable solution. The paradigm will be slow to change, but I see it having several qualities:

· Single family housing will not be the predominant building form.

· Density needs to be ubiquitously distributed and not simply placed along transit routes (although this helps – it again isolates density)

· Abandoning retail distribution at large centres in favour of smaller scale ubiquitous distribution and street orientation.

· Abandon the car as the primary mode of movement in favour of alternatives that reverse the reshaping of the city for the car.

· Embracing the idea of having all services within a 15 minutes’ walk and replicating this model across large areas of the city.

· Retaining land owned by public agencies and using that land to build housing when possible.

· Enable housing cooperatives, and other forms of not-for-profit development and ownership.

· Discourage and regulate speculation in land.

· All levels of government need to be involved.

A sustainable and affordable housing supply in this country will require a huge change in our expectations and culture. I believe the adjustment is worth making. The world has many examples of dense urban environments that have vibrant life in their streets. There is no reason we cannot have the same.