The differences between European and Canadian cultures manifest themselves in the built form of our cities. Canadian cities have compact, dense central business districts (CBDs) full of soaring residential and office towers and suburbs that spread out from the centre for kilometres with not enough density to support proper transit, collaborative commercial spaces, or cultural attractions. European cities on the other hand seem to sit somewhere between what a Canadian would consider a “downtown” and a “suburb”, with ubiquitous medium-rise medium density developments and traditional architecture resulting in a uniquely European type of urban sprawl, but always linked together with outstanding public transportation infrastructure. None of these built forms are perfect, but by mixing things up in novel ways, we can provide housing that meets everyone’s needs and build communities that work for different people in different ways. This is especially important as technology continues to evolve and change how we humans interact and build community with one another.
MediaPark
Fun fact: did you know that the Canadian architect who designed some of Canada’s most distinctive public spaces was invited by Germany to build a “MediaPark” in Cologne? These are some of his works that every Canadian will instantly recognize.
The architect Eberhard Zeidler accepted Germany’s invitation, and construction of Media Park in Cologne ran from 1990 to 2004, centred around the 43 floor “KölnTurm”. Cologne is now a premier European destination for tech workers in my industry and attracts international talent to this vibrant tech hub
MediaPark is currently home to 250 media and communication companies employing 5,000 people. It is also home to many cultural institutions, parks and a small lake.
It is questionable whether Cologne would be the tech hub it is today without the decades of deliberate attention paid to recreating a Canadian influenced urban collaboration space specifically for one slice of the knowledge economy.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zUkXrgQzPPeFzu56
Canada Square
It seems that everywhere Canadians go in Europe, we find abandoned industrial areas, build towering neighbourhoods on them and fill them with tech and finance startups.
In 1995 Canadians built a tower called “One Canada Square” in an abandoned wasteland close to London called “the Isle of Dogs”
30 years later, this is what Canada Square and it’s surrounding community looks like.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/A4s63iAfJkG4tV2L6
Expo 86, Expo 98
Spoiler alert. Canadians were not involved in Expo 98 or the resulting redevelopment of Parque das Nações, but it is interesting when compared with Vancouver’s Expo 86 and the redevelopment of False Creek North. I think it has been established that Canadians have a knack for redeveloping post-industrial ruins with toxic soils (known as brownfield redevelopments) into vibrant high density transit-oriented mixed-use neighbourhoods that are both functional and comfortable, it is our default way of building new housing. I can think of at least 5 gargantuan projects of this sort underway in Toronto right now that would shock the average European with their scale and ambition. But the Canadians did not invent this skill. We borrowed it from immigrants ourselves. This is a global development pattern.
In 1986, Canada hosted Expo 86 on the industrial wasteland that was Vancouver’s False creek waterfront. Then, with the looming handover of Hong Kong to Mainland Chinese rule in 1997, Canada opened it’s doors to millions of Hong Kong immigrants looking to get a second passport as a safety net. This permanently changed the demographics of Vancouver overnight from majority European to majority Asian decent.
A decade later, Parque das Nações repeated the same pattern, by using a world expo as an excuse to convert an abandoned and toxic riverside mudflat into a vibrant master planned community with offices, residential towers, parks and cultural facilities, called Parque das Nações. Although Vancouver and Lisbon applied nearly identical transformations to their urban structures, there was one notable difference: Vancouver called in foreign expertise to challenge us to do things differently.
Throughout the 1990s, Hong Kong developer Li Ka-shing’s (李嘉誠) Concord Pacific Project was given free reign to build bold urban forms that Vancouverites couldn’t have dreamed of without his influence. This process was extremely controversial and created a lot of conflict at the time, but I have to say that in retrospect, working through this conflict was transformative for both myself and the city as a whole.
The end result is objectively stunning.
So what’s wrong with Parque das Nações? Nothing. But by only using European and Portuguese development models, there was a lost opportunity to solve some of Portugal’s larger problems. By avoiding the healthy conflict that Vancouver subjected itself too, Portugal lost an opportunity to bring in fresh ideas. This leaves the project suffering from the same issues that we see elsewhere in Lisbon: The construction costs are too high leading to locals being priced out of the market. The buildings are not tall enough to bring down construction costs. It uses the same building materials that Lisbon always uses, leading to mould and poor insulation we see elsewhere. Most importantly, Lisbon never really addressed the deficiencies in condo building governance models that subject all new construction to premature aging due to lack of a proper maintenance framework. 30 years later, Vancouver’s developments still look new and vibrant, but parts of Parque das Nações are already looking run down despite being much newer and being constructed with more expensive materials. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Parque das Nações is a massive success, but it could have been done better. It could easily be at least twice as tall, house twice as many people, and be twice as affordable, and have aged much better if they used international construction methodologies and more creative and collaborative ownership and governance structures.
When I look around Lisbon at all of it’s industrial ruins, I see so much opportunity to build a sorely needed soaring high density glass and steel central business district (CBD) so that Lisbon can truly become the tech hub it aspires to. But in order to do this correctly, I believe Lisbon needs to open itself up to Asian (or Canadian) developers and give them free reign over a trial site, and be comfortable with the conflict and controversy that this will inevitably cause.
Canada fails when it doesn’t learn from Europe
Canada looses opportunities to import better processes as well. Unfortunately, it’s a trend these days. As much as I love Canada’s ability to spin up massive new communities overnight that just work, I am equally horrified at Canada’s inability to build any type of reasonable public transit infrastructure. Here is just one example.
Although we have regional rail systems that extend hundreds of kilometres beyond the last metro stop, Europeans would be shocked to learn that most of these trains are pulled by underpowered diesel locomotives. Most of the system is single tracked, meaning that trains only roll in one direction at a time: 4 trains into downtown in the morning and 4 trains back to the suburbs at night.
Worst of all, the suburban stations are not town centres, or near any commercial space or housing, they are just a raw train track laid down next to a massive parking lot in the middle of nowhere. Even when we rebuild then in 2025, we do not vary from this model, we just build more parking!
Knowing that Europe excels at building regional transit, the Ontario government hired Deutsche Bahn (DB) to come in and teach Canadians how to electrify track with overhead lines, double track everything, ensure grade separation, and install new signalling and control structures so that we can move from a “4 trains inbound in the morning, 4 trains outbound in the evening” model to a “a train in both directions every 10-15 minutes all day” model. Basically, we asked Germany to build us a S-Bahn. This would have been the most transformative project for the region and a catalyst for massive growth and improvement in quality of life for over 12 million people in southern Ontario.
What did Canada do? It continued to respond to every recommendation from DB with “that’s not how we do things here in North America” until DB pulled out of the project in disgust. We will never get bidirectional, all day, 15 minute electrified service on most of our system. We will forever be stuck in the transportation dark ages. If you’d like to know more about this, Reece Martin writes extensively about it here: https://nextmetro.substack.com/p/toronto-a-huge-setback-for-the-greatest
The same story goes for high speed rail in Canada, but I will omit it for brevity. Everyone knows that North America cannot build high speed rail (HSR). As much as Europe’s nostalgia-driven housing development model drags down quality of life and real incomes for Europeans, North America’s transportation infrastructure nightmare is a slow moving disaster for it’s residents. Europe, we need your help.
Why do Canadians and Europeans sometimes stubbornly refuse to learn from each other? I don’t know, but I do think that openness to immigration and openness to creative problem solving go hand in hand.
Conclusion
As a Canadian immigrant to Europe, I hope I can make my own mark here, if not on the same scale as Eberhard Zeidler, to at least positively affect change and help foster a spirit of resilience and dynamism in Europe at such a crucial time. Canadian know-how, when applied in a European context, can create amazing results, both culturally and economically.
It is my sincerest wish that Portugal remain open, not only to Canadian immigrants and Canadian money, but to Canadian culture as well. If Canadian immigrants were to suppress what makes us special in an attempt to “integrate” and conform to local norms to appease the more extreme xenophobic voices in contemporary Portuguese society, I think it will be a huge loss to Portugal. For example, Canadians can be extremely impatient with byzantine bureaucracy and ossified local customs that frustrate everyone and stunt growth for the entire continent, but is this impatience this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps this impatience can lead to constructive conflict and affect change in a positive way.
It is precisely our cultural differences that add dynamism and resilience to our new country, even if it creates some healthy conflict at first. In the end, it is not a single person like Eberhard Zeidler or Li Ka-shing that affects change on such a dramatic scale, they are just figureheads. Change requires the collaboration of a large and diverse group of stakeholders, the more diverse the better. Us immigrants have a unique and fresh perspective and are well positioned to help drive these transformative processes. To the Portuguese voter frustrated with this latest wave of immigration, I have one message: “Let’s work through this initial awkward stage together and magic will happen for us both.”