Shifting Towards Sustainable Suburbs

“TownShift: Suburb into City” is open an international ideas competition seeking innovative ideas for five of Surrey's established Town Centres: Guildford, Fleetwood, Cloverdale, Newton and Semiahmoo. The aim of the competition is to “Shift” thinking and opportunities for each of these “Town” hubs towards more intense, public-minded and productive urban futures. Approved by the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, this competition is proposed in order to generate innovative new thinking about suburbs transforming towards sustainability in an era of increasingly expensive energy. TownShift has been conceived to open up debate and communicate design ideas amongst the general public and city-building professions, and we hope its results will shape this rapidly-evolving city for decades to come. Indeed, the civic slogan proudly displayed on Surrey's new urban brand is “The Future Lives Here.”

Surrey: From Postmodern Suburb to Vital Contemporary City

British Columbia's second most populous city, Surrey is located to the east of the largest, Vancouver, south of the Fraser River, and north of the United States border. With birth rates and immigration levels above Vancouver's in many recent years' data, demographers predict Surrey is only a few decades away from becoming BC's largest city. Indicative of future realities, Surrey's school system now has more students than any other in the province (in other words, more young people than Vancouver.) In cultural terms (and too often, alas, in architectural terms) Surrey is a postmodern suburb, not the leafy refuge for the white middle class of the 1950s, but an ethnically dynamic and rapidly changing mini-metropolis, intimately wired into the global matrix. For example, amongst Canadian municipalities, only Toronto has more residents of South Asian origin, and universities are amongst its fastest-growing employers. Indeed, by a long shot, education is Surrey's largest ‘industry.’

Bucolic Sprawl: The Greenest and Biggest City

In terms of net area within its boundaries, Surrey is larger than Vancouver, and has one of Canada's largest urban land masses. Surrey emerged about a half century ago as an urban archipelago amalgamating a half dozen pre-existing towns–beaded together by highways, but separated by farmland. Until the rapidly increased energy prices and more enlightened city planning in recent years, Surrey's land was cheap and its sprawl was virtually unchecked. In the 1970's, BC's provincial government passed one of North America's most enlightened pieces of land use legislation–the Agricultural Land Reserve Act–ensuring that some of Canada's most productive soils and fields remained protected from conversion into urban uses. The ALR, as it has come to be known, is the central geographic fact of Surrey, a huge swath of low-lying and productive agricultural land in the central and southern stretches of the municipality. To go from Newton to Fleetwood, or from Guildford to Semiahmoo means shifting from typical suburbia, down into valleys past market gardens, dairy farms or blueberry and cranberry operations, and then back up slope into more or less recent variations on themes of suburban sprawl. Adding up the areas of Surrey's ALR, its extensive park and nature reserve system, plus school and college grounds, more than fifty percent of Surrey's land area is “green,” one of the highest such ratios of any city its size on the continent.

Why The Competition Focus on Five of the Town Centres?

Long established City of Surrey urban planning policies identify five “Town Centres” as the focus for increased density and quality of development: Cloverdale, Guildford, Fleetwood, Newton and Semiahmoo. In geographic terms, these Town Centres occupy gently-sloped hilltops, but are separated from each other by the ALR and mile after mile of almost indistinguishable postwar development. Making the Town Centres the locus of higher density mixed use development is an increasingly important popular sentiment in Surrey, shared by citizens, developers and politicians. As designers, your schemes will demonstrate the possible futures for the Town Centres, along the way generating visual guidance and urban ideas for suburbs-becoming-cities everywhere. This competition aims to enforce notions of place-making and announced urban identity appropriate to each of the hubs, with TownShift consisting of five separate design competitions run at once–each with their own scope and terms of reference, adapted to the particular potential of each. TownShift is not a city-planning exercise but a string of design probes, simultaneously exploring five different conditions. For the single modest entry fee you may enter one, two, or all five sites, depending on your energy and ambition.

Whalley-Becomes-City-Centre: Surrey Central City

Surrey's City Centre is not included as part of the competition scope, as by definition, it is more than just another Town Centre, but the locus for the entire city. Once one of the Town Centres by the name of Whalley, its rapid transformation over the past decade builds the case for increasing density, diversity and public amenities at the other five. While the Lower Mainland's automated rail rapid transit, SkyTrain, arrived here in 1985, Surrey's transit-related transformation began in earnest only a decade ago with one visionary scheme. Commissioned by a Provincial Crown Corporation—the Insurance Corporation of BC—Surrey Central City was constructed over a 1970s shopping mall (it kept operating through all stages of construction), with a headquarters office tower flanked by a university for 5,000 students (now SFU Surrey), civic plazas, all of them linked immediately to transit and surrounding retail and apartment buildings. High density, high rise housing is now under construction on several sides of Surrey Centre City, further distinguishing it from typical suburban growth nodes. Within a half decade Surrey's new city hall will be completed here, along with some new cultural buildings.

Surrey Central City's Architecture of Innovation

Designed by Vancouver architect Bing Thom, Surrey Central City was named the world's best urban development by the global real estate congress MIDEM in Cannes in 2005. Surrey Central City is also a trailblazer in sustainable design, with industry-leading design by engineers Fast + Epp for huge turned columns of composite bonded wood, and the use of waste wood (‘peeler cores,’ the once-discarded centres of logs turned for plywood veneers) to fashion a stunning space frame for SFU's Surrey Campus. This dramatic and inspiring public space will be TownShift's venue for the exhibition of finalist entries through February of 2010, during the Winter Olympic Games.

How and Why “The Future Lives Here” in Surrey

Last year Surrey City Council approved a new logo and slogan for its urban re-branding, replacing an old-fashioned crest. Where once there were royal symbols and earnest beavers, there is now an abstraction of Bing Thom's Surrey Central City roofline. As nothing else, this choice represents the potential of architecture and civic place-making to serve as needed symbols for a contemporary suburb. There is no better demonstration of the appropriateness of “The Future Lives Here” as Surrey's civic handle than the City's generous investment and intellectual commitment to the TownShift Ideas Competition.

Consequently, one of the most important goals of “TownShift: Suburb Into City” is to generate debate amongst citizens and in the media—both local + general, as well as international + design professions-oriented. We are convinced that the competition entries on show through February of 2010 at SFU's Central City campus and in the book to follow will be catalysts for our contemporary visual economy of images and ideas. TownShift's impact may well be amplified because its public exhibition will occur while 13,000 journalists from all over the world are in Metro Vancouver looking for stories during the Winter Olympic Games, a large number of them having no accreditation to athletic sites.

Solve Surrey, Solve the Suburb

TownShift's sites are in Surrey, but the issues are global, and competition entrants are encouraged to bring their own previous design ideas and local practices to their propositions. Whether the Western Suburbs of Sydney, the Eastern slopes of California's Bay Area, the vital polyglot northern reaches of Toronto, or new development ringing Moscow, Delhi and Johannesburg, TownShift's design questions are common to many other suburbs-becoming-cities:

How can we add housing density near a historic district that builds retail vitality and enlivens public spaces? Cloverdale

How can the designs of architects or artists demark and celebrate otherwise nameless suburbs, whose boundaries are not known even by their own residents? Fleetwood

How do we temper busy arterial streets; what do we do with the dreary corners of regional shopping mall parking lots; how do we shape gateways to new cities? Guildford

What do you do with the unsafe and unloved spaces around the bus exchange or recreation centre; how can transit shape the renewal of suburban hubs; how do we shape the mixed-use heart and public spaces appropriate to a postmodern suburb? Newton

Can high rise residential towers—located very close to bungalows and low-to-the-ground apartments—be designed in scale and counterpoise, helping to animate arterial streets and pay for a new civic plaza? Semiahmoo

Building on Previous Metro Vancouver Design Competitions:
“PoTo Tower” in 2007 and “FormShift” in April, 2009

TownShift builds on the success of two previous ideas competitions recently held in greater Vancouver: PoTo Tower – a creative interpretation of the tower/podium building typology common in downtown Vancouver and FormShift – looking at innovative policies and principles to guide greener and denser development. Both competitions attracted participation from across Canada and around the world. The focus of PoTo was the tower and podium favoured by planners for Vancouver's downtown peninsula, while FormShift looked at densification and sustainable design for two prototypical sites in the inner ring of the city. With its focus on suburbia, TownShift continues building on the increased awareness, participation and dialogue started by these sister competitions. It should be noted that TownShift's organizing committee includes several architects who organized these successful and high profile competitions.

BASIC CREDO: General Competition Principles for ALL FIVE Sites

These are the over-arching design concepts that will apply to ALL FIVE of TownShift's competition sites. These are value-laden statements of direction, a listing of those principles which competition organizers and sponsors wish to advance. The design of all entries should advance the following in their designs for Surrey:

ARRIVAL: GATEWAYS, ICONS AND MARKERS
We want all competition entries to include visual signals of arriving, elements announcing a change of place open to new possibilities, all scaled appropriately to the region, city and street. We want you to creatively conceive architecture and civic realm elements that serve as means of way-finding-imagining a sense of ‘there’ to be there.

PLACE: SHARED AND UNIQUE
Unique and unprecedented spaces may be defined by buildings, plantings, urban infrastructure, significant public art, or the display or even implication of information itself. After arriving, specific qualities of community and rootedness should be present, a sense that this is a place like no other.

ONWARD: NETWORKS AND INTEGRATION
We wish for integration into the social patterns of the city and transportation systems at all scales. We hope for designs that ensure the relationship of civic parts to urban whole; in culture, in social systems, and in the economies of energy and materials.

BASIC DOXA: General Competition Ethos for ALL FIVE Sites

These are the ethical and sustainability guidelines which underlie our efforts and are requested of all entrants. These are background values, but no less important than the credo above:

SUSTAINABILITY
Schemes will marshal resources, materials and energy carefully, building towards a Surrey as one of Canada's greenest communities—all entrants are referred to the city's Sustainability Charter , so please ensure you read this.

CULTURAL, HISTORICAL, and SOCIAL CONTINUITY
Schemes will respect the historical character, urban morphology, and heritage resources of the city, building in a manner that respects the social patterns that existed before. Having said this, we will be delighted to see schemes that shape unprecedented buildings, artworks and public spaces, while making them accessible to citizens of all backgrounds, incomes and abilities.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The urban interventions proposed need to be achievable, practical and as sustainable in the economic realm as in the green, social and cultural zones considered above. Wealth needs to be created, stored, shared, and re-initiated with every development.

TownShift Entry Qualifications

Competition submissions to TownShift are open to all designers, urban development professionals, artists, city planners, engineers, sidewalk superintendents, and interested citizens from Surrey, Canada and anywhere else in the world. TownShift has no requirements whatsoever for educational or professional qualifications. Evidently, some familiarity with design, urbanism or construction practices is an asset, but not obligatory, and new ideas in city-building can come from any source. Inter-disciplinary and multi-member competition teams are encouraged, as are entries from students of all types and ages. This is an Architectural Institute of British Columbia sanctioned ‘open’ competition.

Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) Approved ‘Ideas’ Competition

TownShift is a design competition approved by the Architectural Institute of BC (AIBC). As the association with the legislated responsibility of oversight for the profession, the AIBC — through the professional advisor — oversees all aspects of the competition to ensure compliance with professional regulations and requirements. The competition rules govern the obligations and rights of the City of Surrey, the AIBC and the entrants to ensure fairness. Architects, as registered professionals, must maintain their accountability and responsible to the public for the safety of the built environment. Architects are not permitted to participate in a competition that has not been approved by the regulatory authority.

Jury

The jury's responsibilities are to assess the designs and select winners and honorable mentions in accordance with the competition rules. Reflecting the multi-facetted character of the competition, the jury is composed of recognized architects — both national and international — a landscape architect, a prominent developer, and a senior staff member of the City of Surrey. Such diverse backgrounds, training and focus of the jury members brings credibility and added benefit to the competition process for identifying those ideas and principles that will guide the City of Surrey. The jury will produce a brief written report citing reasons for their choices, and general commentary on the quality and ambition of all entrants.

Key Dates

Registration Opens November 6, 2009
Registration Closes January 4, 2010
Submissions Due January 6, 2010

Questions Due Before December 10, 2009
Answers Posted December 14, 2009

Exhibition Opens February 4, 2010
Awards Presented February 24, 2010