Urban Waterfront Promenades
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Urban Waterfront Promenades

Elizabeth Macdonald

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eBook - ePub

Urban Waterfront Promenades

Elizabeth Macdonald

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About This Book

Some cities have long-treasured waterfront promenades, many cities have recently built ones, and others have plans to create them as opportunities arise. Beyond connecting people with urban water bodies, waterfront promenades offer many social and ecological benefits. They are places for social gathering, for physical activity, for relief from the stresses of urban life, and where the unique transition from water to land eco-systems can be nurtured and celebrated. The best are inclusive places, welcoming and accessible to diverse users. This book explores urban waterfront promenades worldwide. It presents 38 promenade case studies—as varied as Vancouver's extensive network that has been built over the last century, the classic promenades in Rio de Janeiro, the promenades in Stockholm's recently built Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district, and the Ma On Shan promenade in the Hong Kong New Territories—analyzing their physical form, social use, the circumstances under which they were built, the public policies that brought them into being, and the threats from sea level rise and the responses that have been made.

Based on wide research, Urban Waterfront Promenades examines the possibilities for these public spaces and offers design and planning approaches useful for professionals, community decision-makers, and scholars. Extensive plans, cross sections, and photographs permit visual comparison.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781317581352

Part 1 | An Assembly of Waterfront Promenades

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Chapter 1

Vancouver’s Waterfront Promenade Network

Waterfront Promenade Network, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Scale: 1:400,000
Vancouver is widely known for the beauty of its natural setting and for its waterfront parks. Situated along English Bay and the southern shore of the Burrard Inlet, the central city has a stunning waterfront backdrop made the more dramatic by tall mountains rising steeply from the north shore. The downtown’s compactly grouped towers glitter against the mountains, Stanley Park seemingly floats in the bay, and everywhere the city meets the water’s edge with greenery. Within the greenery lies one of the world’s best and longest connected system of pedestrian and bicycle promenades.
Vancouver’s 44-square-mile land mass is surrounded by water on three sides and much of the water’s edge is public. The bucolic mouth of the Burrard Inlet and English Bay lies to the northwest, the partly de-industrialized Coal Harbour lies to the northeast, the largely industrialized Fraser River lies to the south, and the broad Salish Sea—the arm of the Pacific Ocean that lies between Vancouver Island and the mainland—lies to the west. The craggy peninsula on which the downtown and Stanley Park are located is carved out from the rest by the narrow False Creek inlet, once completely industrialized but now largely residential. In all, Vancouver has over 29 miles of shoreline, plus six more miles that lie along the unincorporated University of British Columbia (UBC) endowment lands at the western tip of the city. Waterfront walkways and bikeways, some rustic and others highly designed, line almost 60 percent of the city’s part of the shoreline. They, and the park spaces and beaches in which they’re situated or run along, are the city’s main public open spaces. They are used daily by many people, residents and visitors alike, for promenading and other social activities, no matter what the weather.
Vancouver has been building waterfront promenades for more than 90 years, beginning with those in Stanley Park, and now has one of the longest connected networks anywhere in the world. They came about because early in its history the city embraced a vision to create them and has consistently held that vision and implemented it ever since. The promenades are today a major part of the urban design vocabulary of the city and a reflection of the city’s sense of self. They speak to what can be achieved when a city steadily claims its waterfront for public uses and public life.
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Scale: 1:40,000

Public Policy Related to Waterfront Promenades

Vancouver is Canada’s premier west coast city—really the only one, other than much smaller Victoria on Vancouver Island, which is the provincial capital—and has always had big ambitions for itself and charted its own progressive course. It is a small big city, with a population of about 575,000 people, but it is the main city of a vast, largely suburbanized metropolitan region that spreads east along the Fraser River Valley for hundreds of miles and south to the American border. It has its own charter, rather than being a creature of the province as are most Canadian cities, which gives it a good deal of political autonomy.1 In a bold move running counter to virtually all other North American cities as well as its own metropolitan neighbors, Vancouver never built any freeways. They were stopped in the 1960s before they were ever begun by a coalition of progressive citizens, bold politicians, and visionary planners.2 Over the last three decades, driven by concerns for sustainability and livability, this coalition has helped enact public policies that support public transit and encourage high density residential development in and around the downtown and near major transit stops. A Vancouver neighborhood model has emerged, led by the public sector, which emphasizes the building of complete, walkable neighborhoods and is accomplished through comprehensive design guidelines and a sophisticated community planning process.3 Perhaps best known for the unique “point tower over podium townhouse base” building form that resulted, which provides density but also human-scaled street-facing frontage, the model also includes neighborhood community centers, schools, childcare facilities, public libraries, integrated social housing, traffic-calmed streets, and greenery. Open space is an important part of the package and the city requires that new shoreline neighborhoods have public waterfront parks and be lined with continuous waterfront walking and biking paths of generous design that link up with each other and with the seawall paths around Stanley Park and English Bay that have existed for some time. The goal is to create a connected system of public paths along the whole waterfront, building on a legacy from earlier times.
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Scale: 1:40,000
The vision of creating a public waterfront dates from the city’s first comprehensive plan of 1929, and the design ideas contained in the plan planted the seeds for the pedestrian-oriented waterfront seen today. The well-known American city planner Harland Bartholomew prepared the plan at the behest of a citizens’ group. While it was never formally adopted as policy it was looked to for guidance for many years and is still remembered fondly by many. The Bartholomew plan strongly emphasized preserving the waterfront for public uses, which at the time meant for the port and harbor operations that supported the city’s economy but equally for recreation. “The recreational waterfront of Vancouver is as closely linked with the progress and development of the city as the harbour and commercial water frontage.”4 While the plan envisioned maintaining the Coal Harbour waterfront for port uses and the False Creek waterfront and part of the Fraser River waterfront for industrial uses, the rest of the city’s shoreline was to be devoted to public bathing beaches, walks, parks, and pleasure drives.5
The plan recommended focusing first on the beach-lined English Bay waterfront, both the north side that fronted the city’s West End apartment district, and the south side that stretched along Point Grey’s affluent suburbs. Bartholomew’s survey of existing conditions found that just 30 percent of this 5.4-mile beach frontage was public, and that it was in danger of being privatized through housing development. The city was urged to act immediately to secure the whole English Bay shoreline and foreshore for public recreation. Included in the plan was a schematic design for a waterfront park along the east side of English Bay showing wide lawns, picturesque tree planting, waterfront promenades, overlooks, bathhouses, and a swimming pool, plus parking areas and an adjacent pleasure drive.6 Also included was a schematic design for parks along the Point Grey Beaches with similar lawns and promenades, a series of refreshment stands and restrooms, buffered parking lots for over one thousand cars, and a flanking boulevard.7
Another proposal was an “around the city” waterfront pleasure drive. While the drive was for automobilists, pedestrian access to the waterfront was given highest priority. Roadways were to be held back some distance from the shore while pedestrian paths would edge it. This was a pattern that had already been established by the Parks Board in its development of Stanley Park, which Bartholomew pointed out, congratulating the city:
The Parks Board has done extremely well in building a drive and promenade around Stanley Park. The Board has not made the common mistake of giving the automobile riders first position along the sea wall. There is a disposition in park circles to make too many concessions to the motorist. The fact is overlooked that few elements of natural scenery are seen to advantage from a moving vehicle. The pedestrian deserves primary consideration, for he is willing to exert himself to see the landscape under advantageous conditions.8
Vancouver took Bartholomew’s advice and over the next 50 years succeeded in creating parks along the English Bay beachfronts with walking paths at the water’s edge, and also completed a continuous seawall walk around Stanley Park. In the 1970s, the city also built waterfront walking and bicycling paths alo...

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