London's new look offers lessons for Vancouver

British architect Paul Davis doesn't shy from building social housing side-by-side with tony shops and galleries

TREVOR BODDY
tboddy@globeandmail.com
March 21, 2008

LONDON -- Imagine 30 units of social housing plopped down amidst the art galleries, exclusive shoe shops and high-end restaurants of South Granville. Incongruous?

How about these ideas: subsidized rental apartments literally on top of Robson Street's flashy strip of Asian tourist-attracting designer boutiques; seniors, students and artists living close enough to its Hollywood C-list-attracting Cal-Italian restaurants to wake up to the smell of garlic.

British architect Paul Davis has just built juxtapositions as radical as these for one of the toniest zones in all London.

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