Abbotsford is the largest city in the Fraser Valley Regional District. It’s the product of a series of mergers, the latest being with the District of Matsqui in 1995.
The old Village of Abbotsford, like Cloverdale and Aldergrove, also described in this series, 
was a stop on the vanished Interurban commuter rail line. It’s been renamed Downtown Abbotsford, and the city government has taken steps to dress it up and attract customers… Continue reading
This is the oldest big-city neighbourhood in British Columbia; construction of the tight pattern of residential towers began in 1957. People said it was the most densely-populated patch of ground in the Commonwealth outside of Hong Kong. More than 40,000 people live here now; more than half of these get by without a motor vehicle.
40,000 makes for a big urban village — maybe it’s two villages, or three, but the entire area feels like a single walkable piece to me, once you move away from Burrard or Georgia, which form the eastern and northern boundaries of the West End. Continue reading
In most of our cities, it’s too late to cry about the shift of commercial activity from high streets to asphalt plazas; the deed is done. If the high street is going to survive, it must function primarily as the core of an urban village, and gather new residents around it, especially seniors, within a walkable area.
Mission City is an example: a townsite in the District of Mission, a Fraser Valley municipality with a population of about 37,000. Mission grew up as a mill town, and is still home to the Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau (“The Recognized Authority Since 1915”). The premiere shopping venue is The Junction, a plaza constructed in the 1990s. There’s a new neighbourhood shopping centre up by the high school, and another one in development on Highway 7. Continue reading
Port Moody’s NewPort Village is evidence of a substantial market for high-density living in the suburbs of B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
Bosa, the project developer, opened NewPort’s first mixed-use buildings about 1997, squeezing them against the butt end of an existing shopping centre. The owners of the Heritage Mountain plaza clearly refused to play ball with Bosa; but NewPort’s Whistler-style streetscape, complete with cute upmarket shops, proved popular with consumers and home buyers from the start. Within a few years the village was ringed with apartment towers. Continue reading
Fraseropolis 