February 14, 2018 - Ian Gillespie is the founder of Westbank, Canada’s leading luxury real estate development company. During the unveiling of the Oakridge Redevelopment project in Vancouver, Gillespie talked to Trend Hunter about the role of innovation in building more livable, sustainable cities and about the importance of promoting the arts as part of our built environments. 

__*Trend Hunter (TH): How do you identify trends? How do you come about thinking what’s going to be important in the future?*__

Ian Gillespie (IG): It has to start by education. For me it is about reading. I am a voracious reader and I don’t know too many people that have thought things out and are inquisitive who aren’t readers. I think for me that’s probably where it starts. It is also important to find willing collaborators who are also inquisitive and are unwilling to stop learning. And about having a voracious appetite to be on the forefront rather than the backfront. 

__*TH: Westbank is a real estate development company that has turned into a cultural company. Can you talk a little bit more about that?*__

IG: A big part of it is my personal journey. There are 1,600 people working at Westbank, but to me it’s a very personal thing. I started it 25 years ago trying to figure out how I was going to pay the rent that week, and then 25 years later you got this! After working on 50 and more projects I asked myself: so, now what’s next? How can we make a more profound impact on the communities that we practice in? After playing an active role in the built environment, energy and transportation infrastructures, then it came down to culture. We started with public art, and then it evolved into a love of live music, fashion and couture, and now dance. To my knowledge, I am the only developer, if not in the world then most certainly in North-America, that has a full-time team that does nothing but look at art projects. And I put a great deal of personal time and we put a great deal of resources into that. To me, these projects are jewels that Canada has that we can help support. It’s about investing in young entrepreneurs who I think have a lot to offer. To me, that’s a natural evolution of our business.

__*TH: Westbank is constantly partnering up with artists of all fields. How do you think that these interactions foster innovation within the community?*__

IG: If you look at the work that we’re doing with Rodney Graham and "The Spinning Chandelier" at Vancouver House (Westbank’s new development to be launched in 2019), for example, that will become one of those moments in Vancouver that makes Vancouver Vancouver, just like the 9 o’clock gun. It’s one of those handful of things that makes our city more human, more interesting, a little bit cheeky and gives it a sense of humour. Every artist that I’ve worked with has been incredibly smart and has added something to my life. I’m very attracted to IQ and I have yet to work with a world class artist that didn’t have a world class IQ. And I think that’s one of the things that they bring, they bring an intelligence that makes a city smarter.

__*TH: Tell us about how you approached innovation in the Oakridge Redevelopment?*__

IG: There are a few macro-trends that we identified to work on. I think the future of mobility would probably be the first one that we really have to think through because the last thing we want to do is spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars building parking stalls that ten years from now are going to be sitting there empty. And if we are going to do them, what are we going to convert that space into when there isn’t a need for a car? How do you design a structure that has that built-in flexibility? We thought about the 40 million people a year coming to visit us at Oakridge and about how they will be getting there. We had to reflect on the ways people are commuting as well as on the future of the autonomous vehicle. The single family vehicle is a luxury that society has paid a fairly high price for, and I think that someday mobility is going to be flipped on its head and I’m really excited about it.

I think another trend is district energy, and more globally, figuring out how we reduce our GHGs in our built environment. Roughly a third of the GHGs that are produced are from the built environment, so we had to ask: how can we do better? Starting with Tellus Garden, we built a project that is 90 off the energy grid. That stimulated me to buy our Vancouver’s District Energy System, Central Heat, and now it’s called Creative Energy. We’re proposing to do a fuel switch, which would reduce emissions by 80,000 tonnes, the equivalent of removing 14,000 vehicles from the road and making a major dent in the city’s GHG emissions. I think there’s reason to be optimistic about that and I say that knowing that this is the crisis of our generation.

I think another trend is this idea of urbanization. We’re becoming more urban, a quarter of Canada now lives in Vancouver or Toronto; in 2040 a third of Canada will live in Vancouver or Toronto, and forty percent of our GNP will come from Vancouver and Toronto. We’re densifying existing cities; it’s not like we’re building a new city in the middle of nowhere. Oakridge is a perfect example of repurposing 30 acres of mostly surface parking lot to 10 acres of park with thousands of trees and thousands of people living there utilizing district energy and supporting transit. You have to think about the evolution of it all, we’re a young city. Vancouver is a hundred and thirty years old. 

__*TH: Yes. This is my first time in Vancouver, and I was actually noticing that the streets here are very wide because they weren’t made for pedestrians, they were made for cars. To me that’s a weird concept, I’m not used to newer cities, mostly because whenever you’re walking down an older city you get a sense that the infrastructure was not meant to be like it is today.*__

IG: And now we’ve got to fix it. And that’s exciting, because it’s going to get better and it’s going to get more livable, and there’s so much to be optimistic about from that perspective. We just need to do it thoughtfully, and we need to do it now. As Canadians, a criticism that we hear quite often but deservedly so, is that we shoot too low. I think we could afford to be a little bit more audacious.

View the full interview online at [Trend Hunter](https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/westbankiangillespieinterview).

Ian Gillespie, Founder of Real Estate Development and Culture Company Westbank

Building The Future - Ian Gillespie and a Culture Company

February 14, 2018 - Through an ambitious partnership, Canadian developers Westbank and QuadReal have set out to reimagine one of the strongest regional shopping centres in North America with the goal of transforming Oakridge into a major cultural hub. The innovative endeavour proposes the metamorphosis of an area predominantly known for its shopping into a major 4.5 million square foot hub of retail, residential, office, parks and civic space.

This urban redevelopment project is groundbreaking in the way it addresses the most pressing issues in sustainable urban living. By adopting a district energy system, Oakridge will produce 70% fewer GHGs than comparable projects. An onsite water savings program as well as an array of self-powered transportation choices will make of Oakridge a global example of energy efficiency. In addition, the hub will encompass a 10-acre city park, complete with 1,400 trees, opportunities for urban farming alongside paths for running and cycling.

Oakridge will be the home for 6,000 residents and the workplace of 3,000 creative economy workers who will enjoy a market with over 100,000 square feet of curated culinary space and one of Vancouver’s largest community centres. Moreover, the total public art program budget for Oakridge has been set to surpass $7 M, elevating this cultural centre to elite artistic status as envisioned by Ian Gillespie, the founder of Westbank, a culture-focused real estate powerhouse. 

The design for this futuristic project is being spearheaded by Henriquez Partners Architects, a renowned Vancouver firm, while the Japanese firm, Wonderwall, will be responsible for the interior retail design. Construction will commence fall 2018, the estimated completion date is late 2025.

View the full article online at [Trend Hunter](https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/westbankoakridgehubvancouver).

Vancouver’s Oakridge Hub is Set For a Trailblazing Redesign

City Living Reimagined

As Vancouver, currently one of the world’s least affordable cities for housing, seems caught between its utopian promise and increasingly dystopian present, a brave new project looms on the horizon. The redevelopment of Oakridge shopping centre as imagined by architect Gregory Henriquez, reads like the set from Dune meets Ville Radieuse.

A launch at the Audain Art Museum on Whistler mountain this week, took place in the midst of the annual ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centres) conference, appropriately entitled ‘The Future is Now: Embracing Change’. The ambitious project driven by Westbank and QuadReal Property Group, builds on a more modest proposal by Ivanhoe (with Stantec Architects), which was acquired by QuadReal in 2017, and promises to blow up the traditional idea of the shopping mall and turn it into a mini-city.

Billed as a new municipal centre, the project will take the transformation of the once sleepy Cambie Corridor, connecting Vancouver’s airport to its city centre, to the next level. The area has already seen its traditional single family bungalow typology rapidly subsumed by lucrative land assembly deals and multi-family housing, with small footprint midcentury houses on large lots selling for as much as $11 million. The proposed mini-city of the future will offer a mix of oblong towers and curvelinear low and mid-rises, carpeted in greenery and seemingly extruded organically from the landscape, that will house 6,000 residents in 2,600 homes.

In addition the project will provide nearly 500,000 sq ft of workspace for 3,000 creative economy workers and 1,000,000 sq ft of retail space. There will also be a performing arts academy, live music venue, a public art programme, a library and community centre with day care. External space will include an outdoor, pedestrian only ‘high street’ thoroughfare, and a ten-acre park. The entire complex, promise the developers, will be powered by a district energy system. ‘It’s a place you may never have to leave’, enthuses Henriquez.

This optimistic civic vision appears to offer an oasis of urbanism in a surrounding desert of suburban style housing. Carved out of the existing 28.3 acre land parcel that was once a green, forested area, Henriquez plans to re-insert the original topography (the site is one of Vancouver’s highest elevations) by creating parkland, green roofs and terracing - including an intriguing plan for elevated winding pathways that recalls a Vancouver version of the High Line. This will lend the formerly flattened parking-lot oriented mall a sense of high tech hilltown.

Westbank CEO Ian Gillespie points to the development as a futuristic carless community linked to rapid transit, and before long, to driver-less vehicles. And Wonderwall’s Tokyo based Masamichi Katayama – praising Vancouver’s ‘connection to nature’ – plans interiors that will open up the traditional closed-off mall to the surrounding future greenery, bringing the outside in quite literally with plans for indoor plantings. A brochure vows that, ‘the emphasis will be on catalysing a relationship with the consumer that transcends the store.’

It’s all quite a heady vision, and with completion several years away, in 2025, still one of broad strokes, not fine grain. One can only hope that Henriquez’s intention of reconnecting the shopping centre to the city, via new retail street walls to define the perimeter of the site, will bear urbanist fruit. Stay tuned.

Read the full article online at [Wallpaper.com](https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/Oakridge-henriquez-partners-vancouver#HAIY01IITk8Vrw5H.99).

Westbank and QuadReal Property Group team up with Henriquez Partners to transform Vancouver’s Oakridge shopping centre into a city of the future

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City Living Reimagined