It’s one of the last warm sunny days of September and I’m visiting Victoria’s Tourist District. Created through the James Bay Neighborhood Plan (1993), the City expanded it to include the Belleville Park Tourist (BPT) zone in 2001. Its purpose is to “encourage the improvement of the quality and character of tourist amenities in this area.” Consequently, this area is supposed to permit only transient accommodation and its associated accessory uses (travel agents, hairdressers, restaurants). Sales of goods and transactions related to recreational and pleasure uses are allowed, provided they are directed strictly to transients (hotel guests).

 

After coming across the “Tourist District” moniker recently, I wondered: are cities and their residents better served by differences or duplications? That is, should we encourage zoning that restricts districts to a single use, or should we encourage cross-use within districts and pay attention to how they perform?

 

On a sunny weekend with tourist crowds milling about the harbour, you’ll also find locals using the area: they’re performing or hawking wares on the Causeway, or heading to work at the many hotels and restaurants. This is all exactly in accordance with what the zoning allows (entertainment and sales directed at transients/hotel guests). The zoning regulates the built environment toward a single use (tourism), and controls activity within the district toward that use. In other words, within the Tourist District, the zoning demands continuous duplication of use. Differences, which would entail cross-use or mixtures, are regulated away.

 

Now head over to Belleville Street on a gray November weekday, and the deleterious effects of forbidding mixed or cross-use become more apparent. Gone are the tourists, and the buskers, hawkers, tour guides, and extra staff. The district goes into a kind of dormancy. But a dormant district is underused, and fallow periods permit a false complacency around issues that arose during the active season. Cities must use their spaces well.

 

What brings under-used districts back to life is cross-use. City districts, as Jane Jacobs noted, need to generate diversity, and if they are to be healthy, they need to attract “mixtures of users” to them. In Tourist Districts, it’s not uncommon for locals to feel out-of-place. Diversity and cross-use – both in physical form and in performance—on the other hand, mean that everyone belongs and can feel included.

 

Districts thrive when they are used for many purposes instead of being restrictively zoned to single-uses. This is starting to happen on the Tourist District fringes. On Humboldt and Fairfield Streets, where new residential construction mingles with existing hotel towers, we can observe the emergence of activity that extends into seasons beyond the tourist summer. Residential use brings in other forms of commerce including a weekly pocket market, for instance.

 

Overly restrictive zoning means you won’t have, in Jacob’s words, “different people, bent on different purposes, appearing at different times, but using the same streets.” You instead create situations where only one built form gets approved—in this case, hotels or other tourist-related enterprises. By eliminating other uses, you’re effectively restricting to just a singe category the way the built form itself is allowed to perform. In other words, you’re limiting the ability of the district to perform over time.

 

Our Tourist District was probably conceived both to protect the industry and to provide a “buffer” for James Bay’s residential areas to the south. Additionally, James Bay has a second single-use district, the Legislative Precinct. Its residential area occupies an unusual position, as it’s actually “buffered” on all sides against effective cross-use by strong single-use districts or barriers.

 

It strikes me that these buffers (single-use districts and natural barriers) are in a deadly embrace with James Bay’s residential district. Consider Jacobs on neighbourhood centers: “Centres of use grow up in lively diverse districts… . But centers cannot carry the load of district identification by themselves; differing commercial and cultural facilities, and different-looking scenes, must crop up all through. Within this fabric, physical barriers, such as huge traffic arteries, too large parks, big institutional groupings, are functionally destructive because they block cross-use.”

 

James Bay’s heart is encircled to the east by Beacon Hill Park (large enough to discourage cross-use) and the west by Marine/Industrial areas (Ogden Point, the Department of Defense lands), with ocean/shoreline to the south, all restricting cross-use. To its north, the Legislative Precinct and the Tourist District exert enormous pressure: they sever residential areas from healthy cross-use because they themselves are so rigorously zoned to single-use.

 

The neighbourhood is surrounded by all the obstructions on Jabobs’ list, minus the huge traffic artery. Yet even this barrier could still emerge if Dallas Road morphs into a ring road for the area, which would effectively strangulate the center. It would be better for the neighbourhood if trolleys or a fixed-link public transit route actually criss-crossed through the area, rather than going around it. That would bring cross-use into the center, and cross-use is what James Bay needs more than buffers.

 

Because the surrounding districts are single-use they effectively limit cross-uses within the residential district. This raises the question: should the neighbourhood continue to reinforce the barricades (strengthen surrounding single-uses), or should it figure out ways to increase porous cross-use within all districts? Which strategy would promote better district performance, expressed through diversity and health?