Metrotown, Burnaby
Metrotown is a town centre serving the southwest quadrant of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. It is one of the city's four officially designated town centres, as well as one of Metro Vancouver's regional town centres.
As officially defined by the City of Burnaby, the town centre is bounded on the west by Boundary Road (taking in Central Park), on the south by Imperial Street, on the east by Royal Oak Avenue, and on the north by a series of local streets (Thurston, Bond, Grange and Dover streets), giving an area of 2.97 km2 (730 acres).Kingsway forms the central commercial spine for the neighbourhood, and is paralleled to the south by the SkyTrain tracks running alongside Central Boulevard. The area is served by the SkyTrain's Patterson and Metrotown stations, while Royal Oak Station sits just beyond the southeastern limits of the district. The area is characterised by its many high rise commercial and residential buildings which form an impressive skyline
Urban researcher and economist R. W. Archer credited the Baltimore Regional Planning Council (BRPC) for coining the term "metrotown" in 1962. The BRPC envisioned metrotowns as "cohesive urban developments... deployed radially and in a series of rings around the City of Baltimore", each accommodating 100,000 to 200,000 people and at greater densities than what was then common in suburban areas.
Archer adapted the term in his two-part article From New Towns to Metrotowns and Regional Cities, which appeared in the July 1969 issue of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, to refer to "a unit for planned metropolitan development" consisting of a wide variety of land uses and offering "a large measure of local employment and city-type services", but still "significantly interdependent with the rest of the metropolis". He further suggested that building a connected series of metrotowns was the most cost-effective manner for establishing new urban settlements, and saw developments around like Vällingby and Högdalen as examples of this type of built form.
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