LONDON — Imagine 30 units of social housing plopped down amidst the art galleries, exclusive shoe shops and high-end restaurants of South Granville. Incongruous?
How about these ideas: subsidized rental apartments literally on top of Robson Street's flashy strip of Asian tourist-attracting designer boutiques; seniors, students and artists living close enough to its Hollywood C-list-attracting Cal-Italian restaurants to wake up to the smell of garlic.
British architect Paul Davis has just built juxtapositions as radical as these for one of the toniest zones in all London.
Like South Granville or Robson Street, Sloane Square rents out as one of the priciest residential and retail districts in the British capital. The haunt of pre-princess Diana Spencer, Londoners say "Sloanes" as we say "yuppies."
A glass retail pavilion sits at the centre of a piazza in the multi-block, $250-million Duke of York Square, near London’s famed King’s Road. Opposite the upscale shops are new, brick-clad subsidized housing apartments. Their dignified architecture integrates the small flats with the expensive condos found in other parts of the project. (TREVOR BODDY FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
Coming off Sloane Square is the King's Road, the locus of funky street culture in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Since then, global fortunes have moved in, and street styles have become less outrageous and much more costly.
Walking with Paul Davis across Sloane Square, then along the toned-down but still enjoyable fashion parade that is the King's Road, the architect says, "I have done about 80 per cent of my buildings within a few blocks of here."
"It the beginning, it was rock and roll," he says of his architectural career, as we walk toward his largest urban project, the $250-million Duke of York Square, just opened after a decade in planning, design and construction. Mr. Davis has designed houses nearby for Bryan Ferry and two other members of Roxy Music.
More recently, Mr. Davis started to miss the social diversity and vitality that first drew him to the area and set out to do something about it.
Duke of York Square is an outdoor mall featuring some of the world's top fashion boutiques, a new home for the cutting-edge visual art of the Saatchi Collection, an instantly-successful new public space and, oh yes, those 30 units of social housing smack dab in the middle, funded entirely by the developer but run by the local council.
One portion of the multi-block Duke of York Square involves the restoration of several of the King's Road's Victorian shop-houses, with these backing onto sympathetically brick-clad new housing set around the mid-site piazza, with a glass pavilion at centre. This is a prismatic gem in a brass-brick setting, a retail hall that is a conscious riff on Covent Garden's Floral Hall.
The social housing flats might have been pushed into the converted Victorian buildings along the noisy King's Road, but Mr. Davis liked the idea of modest apartments at dead centre of the four-hectare site, overlooking piazza and glass pavilion. While they are smaller than the market condos in the rest of the project that sell for $1-million and up (way up), their architecture is dignified and so integrated into the rest of the project I could not tell which were which.
Some in the community grouse that Mr. Davis talked the developer, Cadogan Estates, into the 60 units in so prominent a spot in the first phase as a way of preventing politicians from requiring much higher totals later on. Mr. Davis does not deny this reading, but asserts, "The area had gotten duller and less diverse, so we did what we could to bring it back."
His search for diversity even extends to using architecture to enforce a broader range and freshened choice among ground-level retailers.
One of his buildings purposely uses smaller construction bay widths and shop floor areas than are preferred by chains and high-end retailers. According to Mr. Davis, all retailers at Duke of York Square now realize they benefit from the inclusion of this incubator of new shops.
In Vancouver, our existing models for social housing provision have broken down, be it the 20 per cent of site areas set aside for affordable housing that then never get government funding, or the hyper-concentration in the Downtown Eastside of what little social housing does actually get built.
We now hear talk of the government reneging on its commitment to the Little Mountain social housing site (west of Main Street, south of 33rd Avenue) by redeveloping it as market housing, and market housing alone.
The social housing units promised for this project may instead be shipped to another part of the city, almost certainly further east.
Vancouver needs to stick by its long-established policies promoting variety in housing tenures and types, and reject this Faustian tradeoff of less diversity for more units elsewhere.
One of Vancouver's historic strengths is its social and racial integration. Eastside arterial strips need to be developed with much denser concentrations of market housing and new offices, but we also need creative ways to integrate the needy, the aged, and the creative into our equivalents of Sloane Square.
Some of Paul Davis and Partners' ideas on display in the Duke of York Square formula might work for Robson, South Granville, Dunbar or West 41st.
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