The Lougheed Town Centre mall with 1970s apartment towers
Who would choose a mall parking lot as a place to take a walk?
By the common definition, Lougheed Town Centre is a second-tier mall at the eastern edge of the city of Burnaby, with a Walmart and a London Drugs. Alternatively, it’s a nearby rapid transit station and a different set of parking lots. Continue reading
Lafarge Lake, at the edge of the new Coquitlam downtown
The walkable urban village at Coquitlam City Centre has emerged recently, with a new area of residential towers, neighbourhood offices and cafes, bridging Douglas College and an area of older housing to the vehicle-dominated Coquitlam Centre megamall.
The Regional City Centre precinct is projected to reach a population of something around 50,000 by 2041, forming a commercial and cultural hub for the northeast part of Metro Vancouver. Continue reading
The Coquitlam urban core, from a 2013 municipal presentation. City Hall is the low-rise complex upper left. At least three new towers have joined this set within a 16-month period.
The streets behind the Coquitlam Centre mall feel like a pop-up city, construction dust still filtering down from unfinished towers.
This is the core of a designated Coquitlam City Centre planning area, slated to double in population to more than 50,000 in the next two decades. The municipal government’s 2002 area plan sees the densified city centre as the future “arts, entertainment and cultural focal point for the Northeast Sector of the Metro Vancouver Region.” The northeast sector, by most definitions, stretches from Port Moody to Maple Ridge, and will house (hypothetically) half a million people by 2040. Continue reading
Looking across Como Creek to the proposed site of the Coquitlam waterfront village. The hillside in the left background is New Westminster.
As it stretches along the south side of Highway 1, much of Coquitlam’s United Boulevard is zoned “Highway Retail Industrial.”
This loose designation has enabled the development of a sprawling big-box retail precinct. A City handout counts 18 large-scale furniture stores along United Boulevard, blending into the warehouse and fabricating shop uses that extend down to the Fraser River. [This document was taken out of circulation; as of 2016, the City website referred to a “multitude” of stores.] Continue reading
Fraseropolis 