Vancouver calling

It’s not much to look at now — a few rusty aluminum warehouses, overgrown gravel lots and slouching wood pilings that helped keep the British Navy afloat and fighting during World War II. The days of building Liberty ships along Vancouver, B.C.’s, Southeast False Creek waterfront ended 60 years ago. But a new burst of change is coming soon to this 80-acre site opposite the city’s downtown.

The results could influence architects and urban planners for decades.

Next spring, construction crews will begin laying the streets and sidewalks for the 2010 Winter Olympics athletes’ village. A handful of the warehouses will be converted into energy- and water-efficient commercial buildings. They will stand beside 564 condominiums built to meet the Canada Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Gold standard. When the athletes leave, the buildings will be divided into a mix of affordable and market-rate units for sale to the public. A school, grocery stores, parks, community and child-care centers will follow. A neighborhood will be reborn.

“This is the greatest legacy that the Olympics is going to bring to the city,” says Rob Bennett, who left his post as director of the City of Portland’s green building program to become a pre-Olympics project manager with Vancouver’s Sustainability Group. “It’s a great coming together of policy, expectations and sustainability.”

Like the Olympic village future and the working waterfront past, Vancouver is a city of contrasts. It is distinctly North American; Starbucks coffee shops sit on two sides of a four-way intersection downtown. Yet Vancouver is uncommonly cosmopolitan and international.

A melting pot of Pacific Rim cultures, ideas and ambition, the metropolis is undeniably geared to the future. What started out 138 years ago as a tiny saloon for trappers and loggers is now the continent’s third-most densely built city, behind New York and San Francisco. About 15 percent of Vancouver’s more than 550,000 denizens live downtown in glass and steel towers erected during a ’90s construction boom.