CITY 3
COMMUNITY 13
Housing milestone reached
Girls get into gaming
ARTS 20
5
That’s entertainment...for seniors
THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019
LOCAL NEWS – LOCAL MATTERS.
SEE PAGE 15
There’s more at Burnabynow.com
BUSY BEE: Hailey Levans navigates the ‘laser circuit’ at the Halloween Howler event Saturday in Cameron Recreation Centre. See more photos on page 21.
PHOTO JENNIFER GAUTHIER
Burnaby eyes Metrotown as downtown core Kelvin Gawley
kgawley@burnabynow.com
The City of Burnaby is forging ahead with a plan to create a downtown core from scratch.The process will eventually see many new highrises, plazas, parks and streets built to replace the Metropolis at Metrotown shopping centre – but Canada’s third-busiest mall isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. On Monday, Burnaby council gave staff approval to start working on a mas-
ter plan for the 46-acre lot, currently home to some 1.7 million square feet of retail space. Planning staff will now begin working with developer Ivanhoe Cambridge on a plan that could take 80 years or longer to fully implement. The master plan will provide more detail to the city’s existing 2017 Metrotown Downtown Plan, which laid out a vision for a densely populated urban core with commercial, residential, institutional and public amenities in close proximity.
The plan calls for the existing mall site to be bisected by several new streets lined with new buildings of various heights with streetfacing podiums that would essentially turn the mall “inside out,” according to Burnaby’s director of planning and building Ed Kozak. As for what, exactly, the area will look like years down the road, Kozak said he had few details he could share but said, “There will be many buildings and they will be tall.”
The site subjected to the new master plan includes a portion of the former Sears site next to the mall. Concord has already submitted plans to build six residential towers on the adjacent site ranging from 35 to 65 storeys. The plan follows a recent trend in urban planning that does away with traditional “fortress-like” malls, he said. “There’s this move away from the exclusively internalized mall model to one that’s more outwardly ori-
ented and one that has a relationship to the streets that are around it,” Kozak said. The master plan will put pedestrian-oriented public spaces first and “the buildings get the leftover spaces,” he said. And the city’s head planner said the plazas and parks will be truly public despite being on private property. “People can enjoy the site and the many amenities that will come to it without having to spend a dollar,” Kozak said.
Once complete, he said, Burnaby will have a vibrant urban core, a central gathering place and a symbolic centre. But that day is long off. Over the next 10 years, relatively little will change, says Graeme Silvera, Ivanhoe’s vice-president of development and retail. Residents will see a new road built parallel to Kingsway, with some of the retail within the malls re-oriented to face it, he said. Continued on page 3