UBC Development: Rising Up on Campus
This evening’s showdown of diverging visions for the campus will change the direction of UBC’s development and lead directly to B.C.’s first international architectural competition in 14 years (the last one, in 1991, resulted in Moshe Safdie’s Library Square).
On a splendid early evening in April of 2003 the avenues and plazas of the UBC campus are in voluptuous natural glory but almost entirely devoid of people. The sun saturates Point Grey’s academic zones after a brief shower, sharpening the lushness of tree-canopied Main Mall, accents of fading rhododendrons and budding roses trailing along its sides. The only space packed with people is the SUB Ballroom, the student union building’s largest space, usually a venue for alternative rock bands. In fact, finding a way to animate UBC’s often dormant campus streets with new residents is the reason for tonight’s public hearing. This evening’s showdown of diverging visions for the campus will change the direction of UBC’s development and lead directly to B.C.’s first international architectural competition in 14 years (the last one, in 1991, resulted in Moshe Safdie’s Library Square). As this UBC audience will discover, Vancouver’s housing boom is transforming even the most chary of public institutions into aggressive developers, changing the use of urban land in ways that were inconceivable just a decade ago. A city is a dialogue in bricks and mortar, and UBC might just make a transformation from a bucolic if paternalistic campus to something approaching urbanity before this meeting ends.
It’s a diverse crowd. At the back of the room, consulting architects and campus planners fiddle with their presentation panels for what is called “An Illustrative Plan For University Boulevard.” Elsewhere, a dreadlocked clump of anti-globalization protestors talk animatedly; urban planning graduate students nervously rehearse their own counter-proposals; and well-dressed new residents of the extensive housing developments starting to ring the campus wait to find out what’s happening to their neighbourhood. Scattered among these groups are 100 students and faculty members, all of them intensely curious about UBC’s future.
Up for discussion is a redevelopment plan for the core campus. A half-dozen architects’ plans and renderings illustrate proposed residential buildings (privately owned units) rising 16 to 26 storeys. Thin condo towers, escapees from Yaletown, are shoehorned beside academic buildings along East Mall, on the site of a beloved outdoor swimming pool and even next to the SUB building itself. Also on the plans are a host of new shops for what is described as the most ‘under-retailed’ community in B.C. All of this is a radical change for UBC’s very heart and this disparate crowd seems united in skepticism as the meeting gets underway, in large part because they feel they have not been adequately consulted.
Dennis Pavlich, UBC’s VP of legal and external affairs, makes a pitch for the redevelopment plan. While campus planning staff, supplemented by urban design consultants from local firm Civitas and others, have pulled together this high-density revision of UBC’s heart, it is Pavlich who has stayed front and centre as its public spokesman. He speaks of a safer, more diverse campus, one which has more of the qualities of the soaring downtown a few kilometres away. Pavlich and the UBC staffers have made their pitch and the meeting opens up for public commentary.
The urban planning students lead with a cautious but effective demolition of the university’s arguments that high-rise towers are the only strategy to enliven these UBC zones. They agree that these areas are forlorn, sometimes even dangerous places, on evenings and weekends. Using all the policy and technical skills they have learned to date, the planners-to-be argue that lower, denser buildings could accommodate the same number of new residents. And they conclude by questioning the shift to accommodate private condo owners over the pressing housing needs of students themselves.
Fuzzy in knit hats and Cowichan sweaters, the anti-globalization gang follows with more blunt and impassioned arguments about the corporatization of the university and its most sacred teaching spaces. Almost the only voice speaking in favour of UBC’s official plans is Vancouver architect and green design expert Peter Busby, the man behind the 48-storey Wall Centre hotel and condo tower – but students grouse that he is probably just looking for a design commission.
The most electric moment of the evening arrives when the first of several emeritus professors rises to speak. They had previously joked to each other about dubbing themselves “The Group of Six,” but now there is a cold fury in the words from these retired dons of chemistry, oceanography, pharmacy, classics and neurology as they declaim what they see as the corruption of the most important academic spaces of the institution to which they dedicated their lives. What galls them more than anything else is that private condo residents would be able look down upon faculty members’ former laboratories, lecture halls and classrooms, a disturbing visual symbol of changing institutional priorities. In their view, the precious membrane separating town and gown had been violated.
There are few sights more certain to put terror into the hearts of senior university administrators than emeritus professors banging their canes on the floor in anger. Universities are more conservative institutions than they seem, and superannuated faculty cast long shadows over influential alumni. By the end of the evening the expression on Pavlich’s face told the tale: UBC would have to find another way to plan and rebuild University Boulevard.
It might surprise you to know that UBC has quietly become one of the largest land developers in the Lower Mainland. Private firms finance and build the new housing there, but on sites that are remnants of UBC’s original Point Grey land endowment. According to Pavlich, “460 hectares remain to sustain and support the university’s future growth.” These are part of his purview as the senior university official overseeing private development on campus.
Next to the Concord Pacific lands on False Creek, the UBC campus is now B.C.’s second-largest development site. The second half of Martha Piper’s term as UBC president has seen the biggest building boom in the campus’s history. We are not talking classrooms and chemistry labs here either, as more than half of all recent campus construction has been private housing filling every campus crook, cranny and parking lot, under the aegis of a development plan called ‘University Town.’ This is not to be confused with Simon Fraser University’s similar private push, ‘UniverCity.’ One figure about University Town says everything about why the province’s largest institution of higher learning has so enthusiastically embraced private development on its surplus land; within two decades, these projects will generate an endowment of up to a half-billion dollars to fund teaching, research and the construction of academic buildings.
The seeds of the current turn to university-as-land-developer were sown earlier, before Pavlich and Piper. To fully understand what is hoped for with both the University Boulevard redevelopment and the University Town plans that frame it, some historical background is important. The éminence grise behind the recent turn to private construction is a low-profile real estate developer and former member of UBC’s Board of Governors.
Appointed when David Strangway was president, Harold Kalke fought with passion – and perhaps more importantly, with financial arguments – to unearth the benefits of UBC building condos, even in the most central spaces of the campus. Kalke was arguably Vancouver’s first ‘green’ developer, attracting the private foundation offices of media prophet and UBC professor David Suzuki to Kalke’s smart, granola-crunching Kitsilano development on West 4th Avenue – the complex that also houses Capers and Duthie Books.
UBC jumped into the development business big time in the early 1990s, but that was for a rainforest-edge site on the southeast border of the campus along West 16th Avenue. Called Hampton Place, this development alone has generated $81 million in revenue for the university. In the early 1990s, when our provincial funding of universities was at one of the lowest per-capita rates in the country, this new income stream proved irresistible.
Strangway’s focus back then was in lining up personal benefactors for campus initiatives. Many of these donors had ties to Hong Kong, such as the Chan (eponymous theatre) and Liu (international research centre) families, and were alumni of Shanghai’s former St. John’s University, closed by the communists in 1949. Thanks to the generosity of old boys and girls – including Concord Pacific’s key urban designer Stanley Kwok – St. John’s has been resurrected as a UBC college in a James Cheng-designed building at the western edge of the campus.
Save over 50% off the newsstand price with a subscription to BCBusiness Magazine
