North Vancouver active design study

Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and SFU assessed the impact of the City of North Vancouver’s Active Design Guidelines, identifying key lessons for supporting social connection in multi-unit housing.

Multi-unit housing can be designed to support resident health and wellbeing. (Madeleine Hebert / Happy Cities)

Social connections between neighbours are the building blocks for happier, more trusting, resilient, and supportive communities—and can even bring financial savings.

Recognizing the many benefits of healthy homes, City of North Vancouver adopted Active Design Guidelines in 2015. The guidelines offer developers extra floor area to include design features that promote social connection and physical activity in multi-unit housing. Since 2015, the Guidelines have informed the design of at least 14 buildings in the city.

North Vancouver engaged Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective in 2023 to assess the impact its active design policy, along with partners at Simon Fraser University. Multi-unit housing is the dominant housing form in the City of North Vancouver, and has a key role to play in supporting City Council’s ambition to become “the healthiest small city in the world.”

This research included building design audits and engagement with residents, developers, architects, and City staff in North Vancouver to assess two key components:

The impact and implementation of the Active Design Guidelines
The connections between multi-unit housing design, resident wellbeing, and social connectedness in the City of North Vancouver

Taken together, the findings aim to inform policy decisions around active and social multi-unit housing design in the City of North Vancouver, contributing to a healthier, more resilient future. The final report presents a summary of this research, offering key learnings for municipalities that are looking to implement similar design policies to support social wellbeing in their communities.

Download the study

This study is part of the Building Social Connections project, a collaboration with six local governments in Metro Vancouver to co-create policies for social wellbeing in multi-unit housing.

What is active design?

Active design seeks to encourage physical activity and social interaction through the built environment, recognizing that both are essential elements to support overall wellbeing and a healthy lifestyle. New York City was one of the first municipalities in North America to adopt an active design approach for multi-unit housing. One research study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai finds that at a Bronx building with active design features, residents reported increased stair use and greater feelings of safety and health after just one year of living there. The City of North Vancouver adopted Active Design Guidelines in 2015, an incentive-based policy that seeks to encourage active design by offering density bonuses for multi-unit housing development applications that comply. The short document includes six different design categories (indicated in the diagram below).

Isometric architectural diagram with labeled parts like stairs, gardens, and recreation areas — The six shared spaces incentivized through the Active Design Guidelines: primary stair, secondary stairs, outdoor circulation, indoor amenity, outdoor recreation, and community gardens. (City of North Vancouver Active Design Guidelines)

Successes from the Active Design Guidelines

A key goal of this research was to assess the impact and implementation of the City of North Vancouver’s Active Design Guidelines. Overall, developers, architects, and City staff shared largely positive experiences of working with the Guidelines. This research identified several key successes of the Guidelines, including:

The Guidelines have resulted in innovative, built examples of active design features in new developments, with particularly successful building active lobbies, primary stairs, and rooftop amenities.
Architects appreciated the flexibility in design approaches, such as the ability to include social circulation and to design creative connections between amenity spaces.
Developers appreciated the ability to receive floor area exclusions for shared amenities and social, active circulation spaces.
Residents who live in active design buildings in North Vancouver shared positive experiences around spending time in and connecting with neighbours in their building’s shared spaces.