The Brentwood Project

Policy directives included in these reports that have an obvious impact on site and community design have been converted into design performance criteria and are listed below in three categories: land and water, the built environment, and energy use. These criteria all support the goal of more sustainable neighbourhoods and communities; however, they are often contradictory when applied. For example, increasing housing density may negatively affect ground and surface water quality. These performance criteria should provide designers with a basic framework for design. Participants are encouraged to interpret and expand on these policies via the production of a specific design for the site. Each team’s design for the site must reflect a clear vision for the district within the larger plan for the future of Burnaby.

Land and Water
The goal of British Columbian and Canadian public policy is to protect the ecological integrity of our land and rivers, both for their intrinsic value and for their value to present and future citizens. The charrette organizers assume that urban development that protects the ecological integrity of the land and water must start “from the ground up.” The ecological health of the region is dependent on the ecological health of the sites that make up the region. For example, degraded stormwater (non-point source pollution) shipped “off sites” into streams and tributaries, is the major threat to the health of Georgia Basin salmon streams. The charrette site constitutes a significant portion of the Brunette River watershed. The relatively slow moving Still Creek is the primary threat to this system. Water quality and habitat capability of the Brunette system have been seriously degraded. For these and other reasons, the site can be considered very sensitive to development. Our challenge is to invent an infrastructure of bioremediation that includes streets and public spaces and that serves a number of ecological functions. These functions include: remediating the down-stream consequences of increased urbanization, adding amenity and recreational value to the public realm; and saving money when compared to conventional infrastructure. The following points should be considered carefully within all design proposals.

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1. Infrastructure
Propose new types of public infrastructure capable of bio-remediating urban pollution as close as possible to its source. Integrate stormwater best management practices into the fabric of the urban infrastructure. Maximize any recreational and/or aesthetic possibilities that emerge as a result. Maximize the impacts of infrastructure expenditures by building in recreation, multi-modal transportation, ecological enhancement, and bioremediation functions into the system. Do so in ways that cost less than conventional single function infrastructure. Integrate water quality BMP designs for this purpose.¹

2. Environmental Protection
Protect and enhance all environmentally sensitive and/or degraded areas (i.e., wetlands, watercourses, ravines, and watersheds, groundwater recharge areas, critical wildlife habitat areas, and areas with fragile or unstable soils) while maintaining and/or enhancing the ecological performance of native habitats, hydrology, and landforms.²

3. Open Space Linkage
Preserve, create, and link urban and rural open space, including parks and recreation areas. Maintain and enhance public access to streams, where environmentally sustainable.³

4. Open Space Quality
Identify and enhance spatial recreation opportunities within the site, (i.e., streams, topographic features, natural areas etc.) ⁴

5. Sanitary Systems
Consider the integration of district sewage treatment and sewage treatment marshes.⁵

1. Housing Equity
Provide a balance of housing types that meet the needs of a range of ages and lifestyles and are affordable to groups and individuals within a wide range of incomes. At least 20 percent (a minimum of 720 units if 10,000 persons inhabit the site) of the housing shall be for persons with family incomes in the bottom third. Income statistics for Burnaby residents are listed in
the appendix.⁷

2. Special Needs Housing
Provide adequate special needs housing for seniors, disabled, family crisis victims, etc. as per Burnaby demographic information.⁸

3. Safety
Employ proven methods of enhancing community safety and sociability.⁹

4. Jobs
Provide work space in commercial, office, or light industrial facilities for the working population at a rate of one job for every dwelling unit. We are assuming 350 workspaces will be required for each 1,000 residents.¹⁰

5. Housing Types
Expand the palette of ground oriented housing types. Housing should enhance, not take away from, life on the street. Suggest strategies for parcelization that would promote diversity and enhance street vitality. Examine ways of handling car arrival that will not detract from street life.¹¹

Public Transit
The goal of British Columbian and Canadian public policy is to provide inexpensive, convenient, fast, and frequent public transit for as many of its citizens as possible. In this way dependence on the private automobile can be stabilized and then reduced. Environmental goals cannot be achieved if the rate of auto dependence is not reversed. Public expenditures for auto-related infrastructure would soon be out of control. The Brentwood Town Centre will be served by a light rail line that will connect the Broadway Corridor in Vancouver to the City of Coquitlam. The Brentwood Town Centre lies roughly at the halfway point of this proposed line. There are many North American cities where light rail transit enhances the livability of the districts through which it passes. However, fitting light rail transit into the Brentwood Town Centre in a way that enhances community life is a challenge. The Lougheed Highway right-of-way must somehow include the rail line while still handling four lanes of inter-urban traffic. The intersection of Lougheed and Willingdon is already highly congested and likely to get worse before regional transit improvements have any impact. The existing right-of-way is already an imposing barrier for pedestrians and cyclists. Design teams should give special attention to these important issues and consider the following in their designs.

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1. Access to Transit
All residents of the new Brentwood district will live within an easy walk to transit. Examine ways of connecting pedestrians and bikes to transit nodes that further enhance access and convenience of transit for residents. Examine ways of connecting residential districts that lie outside the site to major transit nodes. ¹²

2. Multi-modal Movement to Transit Nodes
Provide safe, comfortable, barrier-free and direct pedestrian access to the transit route. Provide a multi-modal circulation system that gives walking and biking priority over automobile travel. ¹³

Integrating land uses and accommodating pedestrians and bicycles saves energy. Designers should show how pedestrians and bicycles are accommodated and how destinations are located within walking distance of services, transit, and jobs.

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1. Solar Heat
Reduce building energy re quirements by providing optimal solar orientation, solar access, passive solar heating, and day-lighting. ¹⁴

2. Energy Infrastructure
Aim for the efficient use of utility infrastructure by considering utility system design as part of the community design. Consider the possibility of natural on-site sewage treatment. ¹⁵

3. Alternative Energy
Provide as appropriate (or maintain flexibility to provide in the future) energy service from alternative technologies such as community scale generating systems, district heating and co-generation. ¹⁶

4. Design with Climate
Enhance community microclimate through design response to wind, sum, vegetation, and precipitation. ¹⁷

This design brief should be the basis for your proposals. The charrette organizers have made every effort to ensure that the brief will promote comparability between the different teams without limiting your design discretion and expression.

The plan you propose will take up to thirty years to carry out. During that time, land ownership and land tenure will naturally turn over to the land uses delineated in the Brentwood Town Centre Development Plan. You should assume that most existing site infrastructure (i.e. streets [except Lougheed Highway] bridges, sewer lines, etc.) would need reconstruction during this period, and could be realigned or reconfigured in conformance with your proposals if there were a compelling reason to do so.

Each team should determine the choice and relative proportion of dwelling types. The Brentwood Town Centre Development Plan calls for 9,300 dwelling units in the district, roughly half of these units in high rise structures, the other half in ground-oriented units. Design teams must find ways to accommodate this density on the site. At the same time, public preference for free hold dwellings and dwellings with private yards (even very small ones) is very strong. Ways can and should be found to accommodate this natural housing preference.

The site sits astride and directly uphill from a highly sensitive aquatic environment. Protecting this environment is of utmost importance. Based on the information provided, charrette participants should decide how best to protect and perhaps enhance the ecological function of the site and the adjacent Still Creek system.

The commercial space requirements listed below are 200 percent higher per thousand residents than the average number of square feet commercial space per thousand throughout the region. These number suggest that most of the residents in the communities you propose will make their major purchases in the community and that the community will continue to attract the majority of its customers from the surrounding areas.

Light industrial and office space requirements support the City of Burnaby’s desire to provide one job for every worker (18 - 65 years old) within Burnaby. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the site is an element in the larger urban landscape – a cell in a larger cultural and biophysical organism. The policies that inform the program for this site will guide urban development throughout the Province. Teams should seek ways to express their idea of this larger context in their design proposal.

For the purposes of our charrette, the site has been broken into two areas. The first area is the 400 acres covered in the Brentwood Town Centre Development Plan. We have included an additional 190 acres to the south of the Brentwood Town Centre district. These lands occupy the zone between the BNR rail right-of-way on the north, and the centre line of Still Creek to the south. Industrial uses cover the majority of these additional acres. The remaining land is conservation land or unbuildable. The major ecological and engineering constraint associated with all lands south of the rail line is peat soil. Deep deposits of peat, saturated with groundwater, make these acres both difficult to build on (pilings required for all structures) and easily damaged. Charrette participants are to consider these lands in their proposals.

Note that the City of Burnaby Planning Department does not anticipate, nor is it proposing changes to the zoning of these areas. However, the Brentwood Plan includes a schematic plan for connecting the town centre with Still Creek and thence to the Burnaby Lake green zone.
The specific program below only covers those acres considered in the Brentwood Town Centre Development Plan. Teams are free to treat the additional 190 acres in one of the four following ways:

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1. Presume no changes south of the rail lines except to link the recreational and ecological systems of the Brentwood Town Centre to Still Creek.

2. Presume that some of the program requirements of this program could be “spread out” south of the tracks (either integrating with or displacing existing land uses).

3. Add intensity and density to these lands without reducing the intensity and density of the Brentwood Town Centre District (by locating dwelling units in this area that allow the total number of dwelling units to exceed the 9,300 figure cited below for example).

4. Propose that some or all of this area gradually revert back to green as part of an enlarged Burnaby Lake green zone.

Land Use Allocations

Commercial/Mixed Use	51 acres
Residential	194 acres
Industrial	10 acres
Service Commercial	8 acres
Public Open Space (includes school grounds)	37 acres
Cemeteries (existing)	20 acres
Road Rights-of-Way	80 acres

Total Site Area:	400 acres 160 hectares

*Residents*
Proposed Community Population	16,500
Proposed Total Dwelling Units	9,300
Residential Parking Standard	1.25 spaces per dwelling unit. 0.25 spaces per elderly or special needs unit.¹Parking can be on street or in surface lots.
*Public Transit*
	One light rail stop on Lougheed Highway is anticipated. The exact location of this stop is not definite and should be suggested. Frequent bus connections to this transit node from the north and south on Willingdon Street are available. Consideration should be given to the urban design of this important transit interchange.²
*Commercial*
Commercial Space ³	1,500,000 sq. ft. (161,290 sq. m.) 90,000 sq. ft. (9,677 sq. m.)/ thousand
Commercial Parking Standard	750 sq. ft. or 70 sq. m. (3 spaces) per 1,000 sq. ft. retail. On street, off street, and enclosed parking.⁴
*Light Industrial/Office*
Light Industrial/Corporate Office Space	25,000 sq. ft. (2,3300 sq. m.) per 1,000 population.⁵
Service Office Space	16,000 sq. ft. (1,500 sq. m.) per 1,000 population.⁶
Light Industrial/Corporate Office/Service Office Parking Standard	400 sq. ft. or 37 sq. m. (1.5 spaces) per 1,000 sq. ft. (or 90 sq. m.) office/light industrial ⁷
*Public Buildings*
Elementary Schools	Two Schools at 35,000 sq. ft. for 500 students, or one school at 70,000 sq. ft. for 1,000 students; and access to 8 acres (3.25 hectares) of outdoor recreation space.
Childcare Facilities and Preschools	2,560 sq. ft. (240 sq., m.) interior space, 4,800 sq. ft. (445 sq. m.) exterior play space per 1,000 dwelling units.
Community Centre and Library	One at 36,000 sq. ft. (3,340 sq. m.) on street or off street parking for 32 cars.
Fire Hall	One at 11,000 sq. ft. (1,020 sq. m.).
Town Hall/Public Offices	20,000 sq. ft. (1,860 sq. m.) for city and provincial satellite health, records, social, job training and other public functions. On street or off street parking for 25 cars.
Churches/Multi-Faith Centre with Assembly Hall	One per 4,000 population at 10,000 sq. ft. (930 sq. m.). On with Assembly Hall street or off street parking for 60 cars. Parking can be shared with non-competing use.⁸

Notes

¹This number is one half the standard suburban residential parking requirement. One half standard is assumed to be appropriate for our purposes, given the “walking distance to services and transit” assumption underlying this charrette.

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² We anticipate that this rail line will be constructed at grade and be similar to the Portland, Oregon system. As proposed, this rail line will be built within the existing Lougheed Highway right of way. Changes to this alignment may be proposed; however, it is nearly certain that this decision will not be reversed.

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³ This figure represents over 200% of the 42,000 sq. ft. (3,900 sq. m.) per 1,000 persons commercial floor space ratio that exists in our region at this time. Since the Brentwood District serves an area much larger than the 400 acre site, this is appropriate.