BCBusiness

JULY/AUGUST 2017 BCBUSINESS 41 jurisdiction as a very, very mature homebuilding industry." The federal and provincial governments are quick to promote the technoloy and resource sectors, but you're unlikely to hear a politi- cian talking up the development business. For Gillespie, it's a missed opportunity. "People only think of it as almost a necessary evil of densi•ca- tion and housing a•ordability and all this other noise," he complains. Even those who look kindly upon his industry see it as a domestic concern rather than an exporter of the Vancouver expe- rience, Gillespie adds. "I think it's something to be promoted, because if you have a successful export business, then support it." L arry Beasley stepped down as the City of Vancouver's co-director of planning on a Friday in August 2006. The following Monday he was on a plane to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, which had approached him about consulting. "There's hundreds of stories of people who found their own opportunity to market this di•erent way of building cities," says Beasley, founding principal of Beasley & Associates Inc., a Vancouver- based urban planning consultancy, and distin- guished practice professor at UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning. "As I work now all over the world and see what the state of modern city building is, I realize, 'Wow, we do have a lot of answers that work in other places.' And a lot of people in this town were smart enough to realize that." After Expo 86, Beasley and his colleagues at City Hall, along with the local development and design communities, saw that Vancouver had to do something di•erent, he says. The resource sector was on the decline, and Expo had shown that the world cared about the city by attracting many more visitors than expected. The plan, according to Beasley: "Reinvent Vancouver as a place that would draw people because of the quality of the place." Although there were disagreements, every- one learned as they worked together, says Beasley, whose •rm's current and past work spans Canada, the U.S., Europe, China, the Middle East and Australia. Thanks to housing demand created by immigration, new ideas came to life quickly, on big sites that could model a new kind of development. "What that created was a lot of experts, and they were experts who were right in line with what a lot of people around the world were coming to see as a bet- ter way of building cities," says Beasley, singling "You go talk to real estate lenders at American banks and Canadian banks, and the Canadian bank lend- ers would run circles around them" — Ian Gillespie Westbank SHOWTIME Bing Thom Architects' Binhai Performing Arts Centre in Tianjin, China, and (below) Xiqu Centre opera house in Hong Kong GOING UP Concert Properties' Motion residential development in downtown Toronto CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BING THOM ARCHITECTS, CONCERT PROPERTIES, WESTERN KOWLOON CULTURAL DISTRICT AUTHORITY

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