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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1510895
building for every day of the year. This new perspective is percolating into Vancouver. As our housing situation—which can only be objectively de- scribed as insane—continues to get uglier by the day and after a lot of griping by developers who've had to lop off units to achieve some marginal solar- access benefit, the city's new council is trying to bring in a different approach. Mayor Ken Sim announced in an early speech that "Van- couver doesn't have a shadow crisis. Vancouver doesn't have a view cone crisis. Vancouver has a housing crisis." During the summer and fall, the new ABC Vancouver council made plans to ask staff to look at the city's shadow policies, with an aim to add both more consistency and more flexibility. "The shadow policy has restrained the ability to produce housing," says one of the councillors who's spend- ing some time on the issue, Mike Klassen. "Our ask will be to simplify. There hasn't been any clear policy and there's the appearance of a lot of different regulations." I'll be watching with inter- est to see how staff work with that direction from council, because if there's something I've learned about shadow policies in my various research forays, it's that they're not eas- ily simplified. Shadows have very different impacts depending on where a building is on the slope of a hill, whether it's on an east-west or north-south street, what the height of buildings around it is and what the tree cover is like in the area. It gets even more complicated as city planners and engineers start to consider whether the shadow from a tall building might interfere with the operation of a nearby solar roof, along with all the con- cerns about vegetable gardens, parks, icy sidewalks, worries about living in a place that feels like Mordor and the rest. Ryan Danks is an engineer with Ontario-based RWDI, an international consultancy that specializes in "climate-perfor- mance engineering," or how the things we build interact with nature. That means how wind moves around buildings, noise levels, where water runs to, how to make birds stop fly- ing into glass, air quality, shad- ows and more. He's got a motto when it comes to that dreaded S word: "Not all shadows are created equal." And the fear they seem to inspire appears to be more emotional than data-driven, in some cases. For Danks, what's more important than a focus on where a shadow falls at 2 p.m. on March 21 is whether there is what he calls "sky access"— access to light overall. And it's also more important to look at the 24-hour duration (or not) of shadows, not just a point-in- time snap. "We're moving toward a more holistic, more nuanced approach and a focus more on human comfort," says Danks. As well: "Understanding equi- table access to sunlight—that's a missing element in a lot of cit- ies. We do need to build, but we don't want to create a situation where only those who can af- ford it have access to the sun." One of the things that Danks and his company look at is what the real impacts are. It turns out that a music festival in a park does a lot more damage to vegetation than passing shad- ows. They do a full scoping of how much sun someone next to a tall building will get in a year before and after the building goes up. And they stay focused on what's really important. "It's not the light from the sun that drives plant growth. It's the light from the sky." So "sky ac- cess"—the ability to look up and not feel like you're only seeing a sliver of light in a building canyon—is key for that. Another observation: low- rise buildings can end up cre- ating longer, denser shadows than towers. The tall, thin tow- ers that Vancouver has become famous for look as though they cast deadly rays of blackness across helpless neighbour- hoods below. But those shad- ows move very quickly. The same is not true for a lower-rise (say, six storeys) building that covers half a block. "If it's a monolithic block, it has a shorter shadow but that lasts longer," says Danks. "With towers, there's a longer shad- ow, but the sun sweeps across any point faster." On the other hand, shorter buildings don't intrude into the sky. The change in thinking on shadows is good news for the CEO of Vancouver-based devel- opment company Intracorp, which has spent years tussling with the city on shadow poli- cies. Intracorp's president for B.C., Evan Allegretto, battled for months to keep the height of a building near Thurlow and Davie the same when he wanted to convert it from condos to rentals. City staff were trying to enforce a new West End policy on shadows if he opted to make a change, something that would have meant removing apartments. (He eventually won.) Lately, he is pulling his hair out over the city's requirement to provide a shadow study for an apartment building on Arbutus—even though the shadow would go over a tree-packed ravine. He says things are improv- ing at city hall, because staff is getting the message from council and the public that prioritizing shadow avoidance over housing is not winning any popularity contests. In the meantime, Vancou- ver's planners are still working away at achieving balance among all the different goals for a city—light, housing, climate resilience, equity. Yes, there are different policies in differ- ent parts of the city, says Kevin Spaans, the acting assistant di- rector of development planning and urban design. "Topography changes the impact of the sun," he explains. "One part of the city can have a different climate than another." Planners are also thinking about whether building forms can be used strategically to reduce urban heat, another emerging preoccupation. It's a pretty complicated math equation, one that is slightly different with each location. "We do try to identify where flexibility can exist, but this is a challenge." And public attitudes are changing, a little, which helps, Spaans adds. "It used to be that the sun is always good, shadow is always bad and cold. It's be- coming more nuanced." £ ( the informer ) 18 BCBUSINESS.CA NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 "It used to be that the sun is always good, shadow is always bad and cold. It's becoming more nuanced."