By Lane Anderson (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: May 9, 2012
Have you put much thought into where you want to eventually live? Maybe you’ve never considered leaving the Fraser Valley because it has always been your home. Maybe you’re open to any dot on the map regardless of the borders you may have to cross.
If you’ve thought about it you’ve likely come up with some community aspects that are fairly important to you in deciding where to “settle down.” This is something my wife and I discuss often, and we’ve settled on some fairly important criteria for our future home. We want a yard, a close and friendly community atmosphere, nearby parks and schools, decent transit, the ability to walk or bike to work and essential shopping, a respectable arts and culture scene, proximity to the ocean, and a lot less rain.
It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable list until you start investigating a few possible towns and cities and realize that such an ideal little community rarely exists; if it does, it is horrendously expensive.
I don’t think these criteria are unusual for the average person. There are certainly variations on the specifics but, for the most part, I think that a large portion of our population would love to live in a community like the one I’ve described. But for it to be possible, the civil engineers, infrastructure planners, residential developers, and commercial developers would have to work harmoniously. This is a difficult arrangement because of their divergent individual interests.
Enter LandProp – a part of the Inter IKEA Group.
Ikea (because that’s who is really behind this) has purchased 26 acres of London to create an entire community they have named Strand East. They say they’re “not just building another ‘development’,” and that it’s “about creating a neighbourhood.” The site is the derelict docklands adjacent to the London 2012 Olympic Park, and is set to open as a new community in 2013.
Strand East will be a community of 6000 people with residential living integrated with community centres, offices and workspaces, parks, retail, restaurants, and entertainment. There will be excellent bus access as well as a revival of water taxis on the surrounding waterways. The community will have a system of walking and cycling paths and an enormous underground parking garage to keep the streets car-free. Power will be supplied by a hydroelectric plant and waste will by handled by a system of underground suction tunnels.
Strand East will be composed of 1200 homes designed for a broad range of budgets and preferences. The idea is to attract a mixed demographic – from working singles to families to retirees. The 620,000 square feet allotted for offices and workspaces will have an emphasis toward creative and digital companies. All of the retail will be non-chain businesses (refreshingly, but ironically), and Ikea insists they will not have a store there. Also, a quarter of the land is devoted to open space, such as parks, courtyards and piazzas, to nurture a sense of community.
One more thing; Ikea will remain the sole, private owner of the entire community.
All tenants will rent the homes and business spaces. The purpose behind this is to stop people from outside of the community buying and reselling at an inflated price – Ikea wants to maintain reasonable prices. It also prevents owners renting out the homes and living elsewhere; the fear being that the community would degrade with uninvolved landlords. But in this mega-landlord model that Ikea wants to apply, the corporation retains the right to accept or deny—in a way, censor—every applicant to the community, giving them immense control over the composition, aesthetics, and even activities of Strand East.
Is this another dangerous step toward a brand-controlled world? There certainly seems to be a frightening element of autocracy. Or, is this model of central control a good method for bringing intelligent, holistic design practices to new neighbourhoods?
So many of our existing communities are comprised of offices and workspaces in one location, residential spaces in another location, and shopping somewhere in between. With this current model we are bound to our cars or, at best, to public transit to work, play and shop. Why can’t our houses, our places of work, our grocery stores, our schools and parks, and our hospitals all be integrated into one harmonious community where everything can be reached by walking and cycling instead of hopping in the car, bus, or train? When people use their cars instead of using the sidewalk, it makes any hope of a tight-knit community very difficult. Some neighbourhoods have even done away with sidewalks completely.
I think for this redesign to be possible there needs to be one central planner that oversees all aspects of a community as it is built, rather than allowing residential developers, commercial developers and city planners to work independently and without cooperation.
This is what Ikea is doing. But are we ready to live in communities designed and controlled by corporations?
I have heard discussion recently about where to draw the line for corporate sponsorship and involvement in certain development projects. In Vancouver we have Rogers Arena and the Telus World of Science. SFU renamed their faculty of business administration the Beedie School of Business after a $22 million donation by industrial real estate developers. UBC’s new Earth Systems Science Building will be called the Goldcorp Teaching and Learning Wing after the mining company donated $5 million to the project. Even these examples don’t sit easily with me, but how would we feel about rushing into ER at Johnson & Johnson Hospital, or the next generation of teens attending Red Bull Secondary School? Are we comfortable with this level of corporate involvement?
I am interested to see what direction developers take over the next decades, and this project by Ikea is one especially intriguing avenue that we might see more of – which could be either positive or negative.
