Just off the high street: a chocolaterie on 21st Avenue

The urban village, the subject of frequent posts on this site, is a walkable area that combines a diversity of services and housing choices with adequate transit.

Setting the boundaries of any urban village is partly a guessing game. By one convention, the average body will walk up to 1,000 metres to get access to village services. But which services? What’s in, and what’s out? In the City of Vancouver, with the most complex development patterns in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, villages often overlap. This is certainly true of the neighbourhoods up and down Main Street: one of my favourite streets, but the result is difficult to photograph and to describe. Continue reading →