From Downtown to Town Centre: Selling the urban ideal in Burnaby, BC

This project seeks to determine if an urban ideal is being harnessed to sell high-density residential developments in Burnaby, BC. Through a review of contemporary academic literature on the ideas of urban resurgence and normative theories on urban development the project draws together several elements that together make up the urban ideal. The researcher examined advertisements, websites, brochures and articles. Using a methodology of discourse analysis the text and images contained in these documents was compared to the ideals identified in the literature review to determine which elements of the urban ideal were utilized to draw buyers to these high-density residential developments. The analysis shows that the discourse does indeed advance the notion that these projects and neighbourhoods embody elements of the urban ideal, but there is also a subtext of the suburban setting that allows one to infer that they are representing both the urban and suburban ideals.