Planner gave Metrotown its name, although it was a bit of an accident.
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You may not have heard of Gerhard Sixta. But his planning work in Burnaby and Surrey helped lay the foundation of the Lower Mainland we know today.
In 1969, The Vancouver Sun reported Sixta had a plan to “create towns integrated into the fabric of the present urban centres.
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“It is based on four policies,” said Sixta, “metro towns, circulation, an industrial belt, and green space.”
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He developed the concept further in a 1971 book, Urban Structure, that was released through the Burnaby planning department. Burnaby would wind up adopting some of Sixta’s ideas, and even named a town centre Metrotown.
“He’s a quiet giant when you talk about regional planning in British Columbia,” said Andy Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University.
“When he was head of (long-range) planning in Burnaby, he published this book called Urban Structure. Before (today’s) regional growth strategy, it had all these different iterations of how the region could look like.”
Sixta died Oct. 24 at the age of 88 after a brief battle with cancer. An athletic guy, he was still skiing earlier this year.
He was born in Vienna, Austria on Jan. 17, 1935, where he received a degree in architecture after the Second World War. He moved to the U.S. to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on a Fulbright Scholarship and obtained a post-graduate degree in urban design.
He moved to Montreal to work on structures being built for Expo 67, then joined the Burnaby planning department.
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His initial “metro town” concept didn’t go down well with the public in the early 1970s.
“He proposed a metro town at the west shore of Deer Lake,” explains David Pereira, who met Sixta while researching his masters degree in urban studies at SFU.
“The residents went ballistic at the time. But it was an incredibly forward-thinking concept. (It included the idea) that you could get around to different parts of the community by walking rather than driving.
“He really was de-emphasizing the importance of the automobile. He also had transit integration with an accumulation of urbanity. … He was basically stacking zoning on top of each other.”
In other words, he designed dense neighbourhoods, which is what we see today. He left Burnaby to become director of planning in Surrey in 1977, where Pereira said Sixta authored its first community plan.
Later, he became the chief administrative officer of Tofino, where Pereira said, “he was able to steer Tofino in the direction of a resort municipality.” He also taught architecture at UBC.
But his greatest legacy was the town centre concept that Burnaby residents initially rejected. Planners took his idea and used it in an industrial/commercial neighbourhood on Kingsway that became Metrotown. But the name was a bit of an accident.
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“Metro town was meant to be a planning term,” said Pereira. “There was a contest to name this area (that Burnaby) wanted to put a lot of densification in when the industrial hub was turning over.
“But they didn’t have the money at the time to go through the name change. It was already in a metro Vancouver document, so they kept the name Metrotown.”
jmackie@postmedia.com
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