I used to think Vancouver’s bridges were just… nice. The Burrard Bridge has bike lanes and wide sidewalks. The Cambie Bridge gets more foot traffic on a weekday than most people would guess.
Coming from São Paulo, where the marginais — our highways that run along the rivers — are loud, hostile, dirty, dangerous, and the kind of thing you’d never cross on foot unless you had no other option, Vancouver’s bridges always struck me as another example of a city that designs for humans first. So I sat down to search more about it, and then I learned.
I learned about the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, and realized I had the whole story backwards.
I should start by explaining this: I’m not from here. I didn’t grow up listening to this story and discussion at my family’s Sunday lunch, and, unfortunately, there is no plaque on the viaducts that tells you their story. So I had no idea what those bridges had to take — or almost take — from this city so they could exist. The Vancouver viaducts aren’t an example of thoughtful, pedestrian-first design. They’re a leftover. A fragment. The one piece that got built of a much bigger freeway system, a system that would have erased entire neighborhoods. It almost did erase several. It only fully erased one. And the only reason the rest still stands today, as neighborhoods instead of pavement, is because a community fought, and won.
The Freeway That Was Supposed to Cut Through Everything
In 1967, the City of Vancouver had a plan — a big one. An eight-lane elevated freeway was proposed as part of a larger scheme known as Project 200, intended to link downtown Vancouver to the Trans-Canada Highway. The problem? The proposal would run between Union and Prior Streets, wiping out most of Chinatown, much of Strathcona, parts of the West End, and lining English Bay with an “ocean parkway,” which would have reshaped Vancouver into a car-first American city.
As crazy as it sounds, this idea fit perfectly into the planning philosophy of that era: “urban renewal,” a tear-it-down-and-rebuild approach that treated dense, working-class, immigrant neighborhoods as waste space to be cleared rather than communities to be preserved. Parts of Strathcona had already been demolished by the early 60s to make space for public housing, under that same logic.
If you’re familiar with the idea of “geography of nowhere,” you can imagine what Vancouver would look and feel like if this project had gone through — an eight-lane freeway slicing straight into downtown, surrounded by parking garages and office towers, the kind of place engineered around cars until it loses whatever made it specific to anywhere at all, that same placeless quality found in plenty of North American downtowns gutted for traffic. But don’t get stuck on that thought, because the reality would have been worse than that. Vancouver wouldn’t just have lost its personality and identity — it would have lost Chinatown, Strathcona, and Hogan’s Alley. Real communities, with real people.
As a Brazilian, I can’t help but think of Brasília here.
Brasília was inaugurated in 1960, on the exact same era’s planning ideology: wide car-oriented axes, traffic separated from pedestrians, superblocks instead of streets, all in the name of a modern and efficient city. In theory, Lúcio Costa’s plan sounds a lot like what Vancouver is known for today: a city meant to be, in his own words, “both monumental and people-friendly.” In practice, Brasília is still known for a car-dependent layout that’s hostile to anyone on foot. The real difference is this: in Vancouver, the freeway would have wiped out real, pre-existing neighborhoods, full of people who fought back and said no. Brasília had no one to do that — it was built from scratch on empty land, before anyone lived there to fight back.
The Neighborhood That Said No
In Vancouver, we owe the stopping of the freeway’s construction to the organized resistance of the people who were about to lose their homes.
In 1968, Mary Lee Chan and Bessie Lee co-founded the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association to fight the urban renewal plans, including the freeway. As a result, Peter Oberlander (yes, Cornelia’s partner, from the Gentle Brutalism post) resigned his post as chair of the city’s Town Planning Commission, in protest. Darlene Marzari, a city planner who was given the job of convincing Chinatown residents the relocation plan was acceptable, ended up doing the opposite. “My job was to relocate hundreds of Chinese families, to convince them the plan was okay. Instead, I helped convince them to organize against us.” Queen!
Well, that worked. By 1972, the freeway plan had collapsed. The cancellation of the freeway project, following sustained citizen protest, was probably the single most significant civic decision Vancouver made in the second half of the twentieth century.
And you won’t ever see a single plaque about it on any of the bridges that survived to tell the story.
What Got Built Anyway: How the Vancouver Viaducts Survived
So here’s the part that’s easy to miss if you don’t know the whole story: the viaducts we have today aren’t a separate, unrelated structure. They’re the one piece of that cancelled freeway that had already been built by the time the rest of the project died.
The Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts are the only completed parts of the city’s proposed downtown freeway. Before construction stopped, it had already erased Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s only Black neighborhood, to make room for the viaducts at the edge of Chinatown.
So next time you’re underneath them, or driving across, remember that those structures aren’t proof that Vancouver always builds for pedestrians and citizens.
Still Standing, Still in Limbo
More than fifty years later, the Vancouver viaducts are still there, and still a live political question. In 2015, Vancouver’s city council voted 5–4 to demolish them as part of the Northeast False Creek Plan, which calls for replacing the elevated roadways with a street-level road network, parks, and new housing. Traffic studies cited at the time found the viaducts were being used at less than half their designed capacity.
Almost a decade later, the structures are still standing. The demolition has been repeatedly delayed by cost and financing questions — current estimates for removal and replacement infrastructure have climbed well past the original budget, and the city has spent recent years patching the aging, seismically vulnerable structures rather than tearing them down. As of the most recent city updates, demolition isn’t expected to begin before 2027 at the earliest, and the project’s funding model is still being worked out.
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story
If the viaducts ever do come down, the plan attached to that demolition includes something that feels like it’s trying to answer for its sins from 1972: a brand new Hogan’s Alley.
Much of the new housing in the Northeast False Creek Plan is set to be located within a new Hogan’s Alley block, at the eastern end of where the viaducts now stand, in recognition of the African Canadian community displaced to build them in the first place. When council approved the plan, the city’s mayor at the time called it an important step toward cultural reconciliation and redress for a part of Vancouver that had been bulldozed under the direction of previous city councils.
I know, this is a strange kind of architectural story to find on a blog — not about a building that was designed nicely, but about a structure that only exists because a worse plan got stopped halfway, thanks to the resistance of the community, and a city that, now, quietly, slowly, and with no fixed timeline, is trying to undo the harm it caused.
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