Rethinking the city block to create a pedestrian oasis

On a warm summer evening, families and groups of friends stroll among shops and restaurants. A toddler rides a tricycle around a plaza. Broad walkways link the city’s civic center and transit hub to four residential towers, a two-story restaurant pavilion, a resident-only community center, and neighborhoods to the north.

This area might once have been an alleyway for vehicles to access the towers’ dumpsters, parking garage, and loading docks. Instead, it’s being transformed into a car-free linear park with restaurants, retail, and community spaces, thanks to the willingness of city officials, developers, and designers to break free from the status quo and tackle the challenges of trying something new.

This is the vision for PARKWAY, a vibrant mixed-use community by Bosa Properties. The first rental tower is now renting, and two more of the four towers, which are mixed condo and rental, are currently under construction in the emerging metro core of Surrey, British Columbia. Vancouver’s rapidly growing neighbor to the east welcomes around 1,000 new residents every month, and its population is expected to exceed Vancouver’s by 2030. Surrey’s motto, “The future lives here,” reflects the fact that about a third of its population is under 19 years old.

The city has taken bold steps to encourage and accommodate this growth. “Surrey is basically building a city center from scratch,” says Nathaniel Funk, vice president of development at Bosa Properties. After the regional light rail system, SkyTrain, opened three stations in a Surrey neighborhood called Whalley in the 1990s, the area’s population grew so quickly that officials decided to create a civic center there. Public investment in a new city hall, library, and recreation center has given rise to retail, entertainment, and residential developments.

“It really is an area that’s remaking itself weekly,” says Ann McLean, Surrey’s city architect. To counteract decades of car-centric sprawl, the city’s master plan encourages high-density, pedestrian- and transit-oriented development. “Building healthy communities starts with getting people out of their cars so they can feel comfortable walking and cycling and talking to their neighbors,” she says. “Lots of cities have sidewalks, but not all sidewalks feel safe. Making our streets and our plazas and our pedestrian connections feel welcoming and engaging is a big priority for us, because it contributes to residents’ physical and mental well-being.”

This vision is well aligned with Bosa Properties’ reputation for integrating projects with the public realm. To help accomplish that goal at PARKWAY, the developer proposed eliminating the central roadway that ran through the block. “We brought a pitch to the city to do away with the lane and try to make it less about cars,” Funk says. “That really was the unlock to making a more meaningful contribution to the community with this pedestrian-oriented superblock.” The plan limits vehicular traffic to the outer perimeter and puts “back of house” services like parking, recycling, and trash pickup underground.

City officials were amenable to the proposal, particularly since its intent was in sync with Surrey’s emphasis on creating a more walkable, high-density city center. But such a project had never been proposed there before, and it posed challenges.

The city’s main hurdles have involved managing the safety and aesthetics of the parking garage entrances. Although removing the alleyway creates a free-flowing pedestrian realm, the parking garage entrances will now directly face high-traffic roads, and vehicles on major throughways will cross sidewalks as they turn into and out of them. This spurred discussions about ensuring that cars, pedestrians, and cyclists would have clear views at crossings. “I think it’s important to look at policy as a flexible framework,” McLean says. “We have key goals that we want to achieve, and we try to be flexible with how we achieve them. We’re open to new ideas. We want to have a dialogue, an honest and frank conversation with designers and developers to see if there might be better ways of doing things and to take the chance to explore them.”

For the developer, the complexity lies in structuring long-term agreements to ensure underground services are shared fairly across future phases. “The hardest thing for us has been the legal agreements,” Funk says, adding that about a dozen owners will eventually be splitting the costs of the underground spaces, and that these agreements are still being negotiated. “We spent considerable time working closely with the city’s legal team to figure out the shared ownership agreements,” he says. “Who pays for mechanical costs and energy costs? How do you share the costs of recycling and other services? All those things have to be thought through as we’re trying to support this vision of giving back the urban realm to pedestrians.”

In the end, Funk thinks PARKWAY’s vibrance will be worth the effort. Future residents seem to agree: the development features condo and rental options, and its first phase sold out in a single weekend. “Surrey has a vision of being the center of the metropolitan area, both geographically and from a population density perspective,” he says. “I think a big part of supporting that is providing buildings and designs that offer something truly meaningful at the ground plane.”