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In public workshops in late August, City of Vancouver planners showed off their latest thinking for the Southeast False Creek neighbourhood. The plans merit a close look, as this is the last residential zone to be developed along our most prominent waterfront. Because this mixed-income residential zone will dance across global television screens for several weeks in early 2010 as the Olympic athlete's village, the urban design stakes here are even higher than usual.

Higher, stronger, faster—this is one spot where Vancouver must show off the Olympic spirit of its very best city-building skills.

Are the latest SEFC plans—to indulge a necessary Torontism—world class yet? Previous SEFC arrangements of streets, parks and apartment blocks have been granted no better than bronze medals from me and other urban design judges.

By the planning and architectural standards of athlete's villages for other Olympic Games, the Vancouver designs would not make it past the first heat, being conservative, predictable and without flare or vigour.

Compared to previous Winter Olympics, and the Summer extravaganzas planned for Beijing 2008 and London 2012, no photo finish is needed to knock Vancouver's muddled efforts out of the running.

But to be fair, Vancouver has provided one of the most attractive sites for an athlete's village ever. Remembering the Nowhere's-ville pyramidal apartment tower that was Montreal 1976's athlete's village, I have to pin another bare bronze onto the chest of the City of Vancouver's planning team.

To be even more fair, earlier SEFC proposals were caught in the conflicting wishes of our previous COPE-controlled city council. They demanded that SEFC be allocated into one third social housing, one third an un-defined version of "affordable housing," and one third market housing, which in Vancouver means luxury condos. But they then refused to come up with a funding mechanism to make all this earnest social engineering happen.

Our current NPA-dominated city council has sold the first SEFC package off at the highest prices ever for downtown Vancouver land, and seem to have sidelined any urban vision for the area other than various shades of Green—the energy-conserving building standards known as LEED silver throughout, a few LEED gold structures as trim, and exactly one flashy LEED platinum structure to complete the urban bling factor. Between COPE's social engineering and NPA's profiteering, a vision for SEFC has been lost.

While there are some interesting design noises coming from city councillors Anton, Capri and Ball, they have yet to score successes in city-building, and in this absence, councillor Ladner's developer-friendly boosterism is prevailing.

Now the details of the SEFC neighbourhood plans.

Adjoining 'provincial' streets like Ontario and Manitoba continue their street grid pattern directly to water's edge — no fancy new block forms here. There are a handful of restaurants and other more intense urban uses along the water's edge, but this is no malecon or esplanade resplendent in lively sea-side architecture, muting the more intense and appropriate such ideas proposed earlier by outside consultants Hotson Bakker architects.

Generally, the buildings get smaller as they approach the water, which minimize shadows on the ultra-generous 26 acres of parkland here. The best thing about the current scheme is its elimination of that tired cliché of downtown Vancouver urbanism — skinny high rise towers on townhouse bases.

A mortal, perhaps fatal flaw in the SEFC thinking is the decidedly suburban ethos behind it, and indeed all of the re-making of downtown Vancouver under former central area planning chief Larry Beasley. Beasley's policies pushed downtown Vancouver to tidiness and predictability for solely middle and upper class residents — a kind of re-packaging of Coquitlam at higher densities.

The SEFC plans have a higgle-jiggle variety of buildings — initiated under a Beasley-era ethos of conformity-through-heterogeneity — that is profoundly suburban (think all-different yet all-the-same bungalows, then all-different, all-the-same condo towers.) The rendered drawings produced by City's SEFC team may exaggerate their scheme's potential accommodation of a variety of building forms (one structure is even allowed to cant 20 degrees off the street line), but the result is a lack of clarity and focus in built form.

SEFC's massing, or arrangement of residential building volumes, is mid-Atlantic in character. On one hand, the tumble of different apartment building heights and shapes denotes the heterogeneous ramble of buildings found in medium-density portions of North American cities.

On the other hand, SEFC planners have used continuous buildings to line the edges of each block, what European's call "perimeter blocks" — those continuous six to eight storey street frontages that give Paris or Copenhagen their character. Squint your eyes a bit and the SEFC streetscapes seem an amalgam of Burnaby with Barcelona, Markham with Milan.

Even more questionable is giving precious waterfront land here to an elementary school and schoolyard, a huge allocation of scarce land resources. Once upon a time in the 1950s and 1960s, Canadian suburbia was designed around the idea of walk-from-home elementary schools, usually given a place of honour at the centre of neighbourhood layouts.

Evident to anyone touring new subdivisions these days, this expensive practice of very many, very small schools is no longer sustainable in suburbia, and given parental desires for specialist programs like immersion French or Mandarin, just as questionable in the centre city. Who can argue against a SEFC community school? Well, I will, for one. Eminently expandable False Creek Elementary is only four blocks west. Twelve blocks straight up Columbia Street is Simon Fraser Elementary, also blessed with room for an extra wing or tier. As I have had children at both schools, I have heard closure rumours for both existing schools come and go, and know they can be used more efficiently.

Then there are the hugely under-used playing fields just five blocks away at Columbia and 7th. Why not look at the idea of a new school on stilts raised up at one corner there, as is done all through Asia?

There is one very good reason I am keen to get the school out of SEFC. I believe there is a far more urgent public good: more affordable housing. The hard calculus of Vancouver land prices means if this prime waterfront site for the school and play-fields (other parks bedeck the SEFC site) were sold for market housing, the resulting $30million or so thus-generated would provide a funding stream for affordable housing.

tWhen nearby options abound, I would make the tradeoff for no on-site school and way more affordable housing any day. But hemmed in by conventional thinking, our planners and civic politicos cannot. Maybe bronze is too kind.