Municipal councils in the Capital Regional District generally allow developers to get away with extremely bad designs. From what I can tell, they’re happy to meddle in issues like building height and number of parking spaces, but they throw their hands up and let developers run wild when it comes to actual urban planning.

A particularly ugly example is Tuscany Village in Saanich. In exchange for allowing the horrible shopping centre, Council were promised a number of affordable housing units. Then once things were underway, the developer decided that they would not in fact be including affordable housing. Council had neglected to make the promise binding.

Almost all of those Council members got reelected in 2008, despite basically admitting in public campaign apprearances that they were not competent to do the job. Now it appears they’ve done it again with Uptown Centre. I’ve only looked at the ugly walls of Uptown driving by in a car, but Bernard of Victoria Vision has been blogging its many design flaws:

• Urban design
• A review of Wal-Mart
• Traffic planning

BC Transit is planning to run mass transit right through this development, essentially approving what can only be classified suburban blight.