This dissertation explores how models of the house reflect the physical and imaginative structure of the contemporary city, using case studies of master-planned neighbourhoods in False Creek, Vancouver.

To put these more recent, experimental housing models in context, I first look at the historic model of the single family house, which was embedded in Vancouver’s earliest practices of land division and property development. The city’s first master plan in 1929, which aimed to rationalize Vancouver as a modern city, also assumed the single family house as its basic unit. I then look at how False Creek’s housing models this historic urban structure. South False Creek (1976- 1986), an enclave of row-houses in picturesque gardens, was conceived as an organic, adaptable community–and as a critique of modernist urbanism. Concord Pacific Place (1990-2000), with its slender point towers and vast parks, introduced planned neighbourhoods of an unprecedented scale, involving transnational resources and multiple stakeholders.

This study questions a common assumption, in contemporary urban theory, that the house no longer carries the meanings of the built environment. Many critics focus on the flows of capital, materials, people and information that seemingly dissolve the city. They shift the locus of the “post-urban” environment to: “voids” in the urban body that are ripe for transformation; infrastructures that extend its territory; or globalized, corporate nodes that represent its de-territorialization. The house, embedded-in-place and slow to change, appears ill-fitted to this theoretical framework.

My research refutes the de-coupling of a supposedly static house from a transforming urban-scape, and revaluates earlier models of a highly contiguous house:city relationship. My case studies show how, in Vancouver, housing is instrumental to defining the “contemporary” city. South False Creek aimed to create an image of a benevolent city, rooted in local, communitarian values, by blending a residential vernacular with avant-garde urban principles. In Concord Pacific Place, a housing type was introduced to literally transform a tract of the downtown, but also to place Vancouver on an “international stage,” and connect it to strategic networks of investment and migration. Ultimately, I argue that the house remains a sensitive register of contemporary urbanism.