UniverCity As A Complete Community: Identifying Success, Challenges And Opportunities For Increasing All-Day Use Of Local Assets

With an increasing emphasis placed on sustainable development policies and practices, ‘complete communities’ are frequently selected as the prescribed model of planning. Through a case study analysis of UniverCity on Burnaby Mountain, a designated complete community, this research investigates how an existing development aligns with policy definitions, and identifies various implementation gaps. By conducting primary research on the UniverCity residents and the surrounding community, and analyzing respondents in the context of local planning goals, this research applies a bottom-up approach, a perspective currently absent in existing literature. This paper examines the activities and attitudes of the wider community including local businesses, and students, faculty, and staff, who attend the Simon Fraser University campus adjacent to UniverCity on Burnaby Mountain. The study findings show that despite these labels and planning policy definitions, the completeness of a community can vary based on local context.