Sebastian Moffatt
Biography
Sebastian Moffatt owns and manages The Sheltair Group, an integrated planning, design and engineering firm located in Vancouver.
Sebastian has been working as a building scientist and environmental planner since 1980, and is known for his big picture thinking, his ability to communicate, and his grasp of technical details in many disciplines including resource management, building science, urban planning and economics.
Over the past five years he has worked on sustainable infrastructure plans for cities in North America and Asia. He recently authored a book for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities: Closing the Loop: A Guide to Green Infrastructure for Canadian Municipalities. He is currently completing a doctoral thesis on the sustainable integration of buildings and infrastructure.
Sebastian has been extensively involved in preparing Canada's policy on greenhouse gas emission reductions in the building sector, and for promoting community-based energy systems. He currently represents Canada on the International Energy Agency Annex 31: Energy-Related Environmental Impacts of Buildings, and has recently authored the Annex 31 final summary report.
Sebastian has developed adaptive management frameworks for companies, communities and developers, to help align plans and policies with the principles of sustainability. In this capacity he has been extensively involved as a lead consultant to The Resort Municipality of Whistler, The Fraser Valley Regional District, the BC Buildings Corporation, and the Burnaby Mountain Community Corporation.
Mr. Moffatt is one of the two project leaders for the citiesPLUS project for Greater Vancouver. He will be involved in the conceptual development of the project structure, content, and process and representing Canada at key meetings and events related to the International Sustainable Urban Systems Design Competition in 2002 and 2003.
Michael Harcourt Interview With Linda Clark Nine To Noon Wednesday 27 April 2005
Newztel News: Rnz "Nine To Noon" Presenter (Linda Clark): Every city in the world is grappling with the problem of growth. What do you do with all those extra people? Where do you fit them? And what happens to a city that's squeezed full of people, would you still want to live there? These are all planning issues. The New Zealand Planning Institute is holding a major conference this week. Its keynote speaker is a Canadian expert and the former Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt. He joins me now, welcome to the programme.
Mike Harcourt (Former Premier Of British Columbia And Expert On City Planning): Hi Linda, it's good to be here.
Presenter: This is a problem for any city isn't it, because more people of course make a city vibrant, they create jobs and opportunities but hand in hand with that goes traffic congestion and housing shortages and all those other problems?
Harcourt: Yeah, it is a problem and how do you deal with that and you can adopt the Houston model which is let the market decide and let her rip and you end up with sprawl and freeways and cars predominating, or you can manage the growth and that's kind of where we're at right now. The third option that we're looking at in Canada is what's called a sustainable city and there's lots of evidence and great evidence that cities that are sustainable are also the more competitive cities in attracting the higher order of knowledge-based capital, entrepreneurship and the skilled creative class that goes with that.
Presenter: What's sustainable? What is a sustainable city?
Harcourt: Good point. It's in a nutshell, a sustainable city is one with a prosperous economy, with a healthy environment where you can breathe the air and eat the food and drink the water without being poisoned, and protect biodiversity, in other words, environmentally healthy. Third, that doesn't have huge social instability and crime and gaps between the rich and the poor and lots of disadvantaged people in groups. And four, and we've added this as an element of a committee I'm chairing for our prime minister on the national role in making our cities and communities sustainable, is culture and the over-riding importance of innovation and creativity, so we're defining culture differently. So how do you weave all four of those together and move from the non-sustainable present situation in just about all cities, to being sustainable and therefore more competitive.
Presenter: Yeah, I mean you're raising very big issues. City planners from where a lot of lay people sit seem to just worry about you know, which direction the traffic flows and where there should be traffic lights and whether you have a shopping mall here or just down the road.
Harcourt: Well, I think planners are being challenged very dramatically which is why it's such a great theme and I think it's gutsy for the New Zealand Planning Institute to decide to look at pushing the boundaries, because planners are being pushed around, frankly. They're having to change their roles and not just deal with land use and with building design and zoning and traffic, they're having to look at all the elements of sustainability.
Presenter: Well, part of the problem in New Zealand at least, there's a sense of grievance in most of the cities in New Zealand that planning in fact isn't driven from the grass roots up at all. Even the planners don't have much to do with the planning, it's the developers who drive the design of our cities and the sprawl of our cities.
Harcourt: I don't think it's the developers, I think it's an unfair charge. I mean developers are there to do what they're supposed to do in business which is to deliver a product to the market which can sell and can make a profit. I think the real challenge is that people don't realise that cities are not preordained and they're not inevitable but it's all about choice and you can choose to have the status quo we have now which is what you're describing, or we can choose a future you want and how do we move towards a more sustainable city from a sprawl model which has predominated over the last 50 years. And I had to grapple with this when I was the mayor in Vancouver in the 1980s before I got demoted to being Premier as I half jokingly say, in our Federal system, and Vancouver was going through some huge changes in our population. We have... like Auckland does, we have quite a difficult geography surrounded by the sea and mountains and the US border to the south, and very, very rich agricultural land in a valley called the Fraser Valley, through which runs this huge river called the Fraser River which is the greatest salmon-spawning river in the world, so it's a very tough geography to which we're adding 35 to 40 thousand people a year. Half are other Canadians who want to move to Vancouver, it's a very attractive, interesting, exciting city, and a lot of immigrants mostly from the Asia-Pacific, to the point now where 50 percent of the kids in our school system in Vancouver have English as a second language.
Presenter: I mean all of that sounds very like Auckland actually. I mean Auckland in recent years gets about 30,000 to 40,000 new people coming to it every year, and I mean the geography you describe, that's perfect for planning isn't it, or lack of planning, you just keep building till you hit the water?
Harcourt: Well, we've hit it and we've hit the mountain ranges and we have had actually quite a good approach over the last 30 years called growth management where we have by a provincial statute, designated the agricultural lands around the city as green zones that cannot be built on, or the flood plain because it's where the Fraser River has flooded, and so the growth is restricted on 70 percent of the geography that makes up greater Vancouver.
Presenter: So then what happens, people go up or they just squeeze in tighter?
Harcourt: Well, you go up and you... what we've done is to combine land use and transportation together and the regional district has quite extraordinary tools at its disposal. It would similar to the Auckland Regional Council. The Regional District which is a federation of 22 municipalities that make up Greater Vancouver, has a land use and planning authority and is the provider of the basic utilities, sewer ,water, waste management, has a transportation agency so they can combine land use and transportation and the idea is to concentrate the growth in high-density town centres, about seven of them, Vancouver City being the major one downtown, and then have... build communities that are complete communities, where you can live, work, play in that town centre, or move between the regional town centres with alternatives to the car. In other words we're building on a rail-based... quite interesting conventional rail system but it's an automated system called ALRT and fast buses and linking the rapid transit rail system to the bus system. So we're grappling with all the same problems that Auckland is grappling with, of traffic congestion and high housing prices and integrating people from the multi-cultural community and new immigrants into the city and dealing with drugs and crime.
Presenter: And how do you convince people to fund the public transport system because that seems to be one of the biggest headaches for Auckland and has been for a generation, is that everyone knows you need better public transport systems but who's going to pay for it? No-one wants their rates to go up now.
Harcourt: Well, they're paying for it now and I noticed that Linda, when I was driving around yesterday. The traffic congestion costs people money. In Greater Vancouver it costs $1.3billion a year, that's the cost of congestion, so the real issue for people, and you've got to lay it out in frank terms, is do you want to pay for congestion, sitting in gridlock, belching air pollution out into the air shed, or do you want to invest in good alternatives to the car, not replace but alternatives to the car for commuter traffic in particular, and get mobility. So it's going to cost you to have gridlock, it's going to cost you to get mobility and a decent transportation system. And I think the real problem and it's probably similar here, is that most cities in Canada rely to a very large extent on a property tax which really wasn't designed to pay for these big expensive transportation systems.
Presenter: Yeah, which in our terms is rates, we call them rates. That's what you're talking about essentially.
Harcourt: That's right, rates, so what we have been doing as... when I was Mayor and when I was Premier and now that I'm chairing the committee for our Prime Minister on sustainable cities and communities, to look at the national role in making our cities sustainable and therefore more competitive is...we have to increase the income areas based on the growth taxes that a country has – income tax, your value added tax, we call it GST, the goods and services tax in Canada – and provide through a combination of funding mechanisms between the national government, provinces and cities for that kind of transportation system and link it to your land use plans. So we're just going through what our Prime Minister Martin calls the new deal for cities and communities where the national government, over the next 10 years, is going to be investing up to $50billion Canadian into cities and communities on an understanding that it's not just going to fund sprawl, you're not just going to put sewer and water pipes and roads on into farmers' fields, it's going to re-use existing urban land to higher densities and link your transportation plans to those higher densities.
Presenter: Higher density living though is often associated with other problems like crime, like... people don't want necessarily to live cheek by jowl.
Harcourt: Well, that's really a question of design and I think we've done a pretty good job in Vancouver of providing high-density housing that people are thundering into our downtown to live in. As a matter of fact we had quite a famous Hong Kong Chinese businessman, a billionaire, Lee Kai Ching [phon], come to Vancouver in the late 1980s or 1990s and buy a huge chunk of land from our provincial government to develop a development called Concorde Pacific which has sold out before there's a shovel in the ground. Any new building sells immediately and we have added about 50 to 60 thousand people into our downtown which, prior to about 1975... from 1930s to 1975 the zoning didn't permit housing to be built in our downtown. Well, we've got a very unique challenge now in Vancouver where people want to live in the downtown, they love the inner city living and the excitement and the bustle and the attractive island that downtown Vancouver is... it's an isthmus... and so our problem is, we're chasing out the poor now which is unlike a lot of American cities where, with the inner city ghettoes, the middle-class and the rich have fled to the suburbs. So we have quite a unique situation and it's been done by conscious choice, Linda. We decided to have an alive, 24 hour downtown.
Presenter: So what happens to the poor?
Harcourt: Well, then you have to provide social housing, non-profit co-operative housing; deal with some of the related issues around drugs and crime and people with mental illness who are homeless and on the street, so you have to have a balance of housing where 80 percent of the housing built is dealt with by the private market quite adequately but there's a role for government and the non-profit co-operative sector in providing non-profit and co-operative housing for low income and middle income people.
Presenter: You've talked... you've mentioned a couple of times this thing about competitiveness, the competitiveness of cities. Cities do compete now for citizens, for high-earning, creative citizens?
Harcourt: Well, and not only that but for the knowledge based economy around biotech, information technology, attracting scholars and researchers to your universities and think tanks, skilled medical researchers and practitioners to hospitals that serve the regions around them. It's becoming a very major issue and we're going to have a conference in Canada in October that I'm going to be chairing on behalf of our prime minister with the OECD to look at the link between cities being sustainable and competitive, and there's some very interesting research done by people like the American, Richard Florida on his book The Creative Class where he shows for example in the United States it's cities like Boston, Austin, San Francisco are thriving because they're attractive to the creative class: the innovators, the thinkers, the bohemians, the artists, and cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, St Louis, are languishing because they're not attractive to the creative class. So there's more and more evidence emerging that to be a successful city which, from my advantage point of looking at Auckland over the last few days and last being here 40 years ago as a young university student travelling around the Pacific Ocean, Auckland has all of that potential. If they focus on being sustainable, if your citizens focus on the sustainability agenda, I think Auckland can be very competitive in the world economy.
Presenter: Nice talking to you. I've been talking to Michael Harcourt, he's a Canadian expert in planning and the former Premier of British Columbia. He's in New Zealand for this conference on planning organised by the New Zealand Planning Institute.
Ends
What's New
Urban Development Strategy 2009 Demographic Update Report [PDF 132KB]
Greater Christchurch residents are a step closer to the future they asked for in the Urban Development Strategy (UDS) as Environment Canterbury makes changes to the Regional Policy Statement.
For more information go to www.ecan.govt.nz/RPS.
Bringing alive a 35-year vision: UDS exhibition, Our City O-Tautahi, cnr Worcester Boulevard and Oxford Terrace, 22 September-21 November 2009.
Smart travel choices key to a sustainable future by Bill Wasley.
The Greater Christchurch Travel Demand Management Strategy was accepted by the UDS Implementation Committee in June 2009. The strategy looks at ways people can change travel behaviour to make more sustainable choices.
